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Comment by goodside | Hacker News Reader

While we're providing isolated, non-representative examples: I graduated in 2009 from a crappy Podunk school whose average SAT was 980 (on the old 1600 scale). It only costs about two grand a semester. I majored in CS. I had an internship at a credit union, then a job in insurance lined up before graduating, and then two years later I was hired by OkCupid. I have sent out exactly three resumes in my life, and never been rejected. I don't have any extraordinary accomplishments that I'm omitting.

As far as I can see, the economy is fine. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.

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I really wish someone could explain this to me. My local observations are the same as parent. I have no unemployed, graduated friends, in fact, I have still-in-school but employed friends. They're all making great salaries and living in fun cities like San Fran, New York, and Boston.

I practically have a job offer at a firm in New Tork and I'm a year from graduating and I've a decent shot at graduate programs too.

I must be doing something fundamentally different, or there's some systemic bias in my favor. I am lower middle class, white, male, nerd, not particularly socially apt, average university, ~100k loans, American, CS and physics maajor, living in the northeast.

> I really wish someone could explain this to me.

I'll try, although I don't have any special insights, I don't think it's mysterious. From goodside's comment: "I majored in CS." From yours: "CS and physics maajor". I probably don't have to tell you that there's tremendous demand for so-called STEM majors. I don't know about your friends' majors, but these are really both "isolated, non-representative examples".

I think there are plenty of people going through what this 29-yo is going through, and part of that might be because they have degrees in things like English, Art history, Philosophy, etc, and have little or no concrete idea of how to apply this degree in the real world. Part of it is also because there is little support for developing skills outside your narrow major in many colleges and universities, and there's this drift between what many students expect from school (prepare to get a job) and what the schools deliver, which is more abstract. Plus many new grads don't know much more about how to go about finding a job than just pumping out resumes, because that's what they're told to do by (some) "career centers" and counselors on campus.

>I think there are plenty of people going through what this 29-yo is going through, and part of that might be because they have degrees in things like English, Art history, Philosophy

This. I have friends who majored in the humanities and are now working retail and restaurants. I feel bad for my friend with an English degree stuck working at Barnes and Noble but I also understand the flipside, which is if you're a Philosophy major right out of college with few or no internships, what precisely _are_ you qualified for?

I know I won the lottery with a CS degree in this economy (god how I hate that phrase) but of what real world use is a philosophy degree?

I don't know for sure what real world use a Philosophy degree provides, but I'm pretty sure there are a couple of people working where I am now who majored in Philosophy, and there are definitely a few english majors. They are working as product managers, programmers, and operations/sys admin roles.

My point was that, if you're going to indulge yourself by spending 4 years studying something like Philosophy or english, be realistic and realize that there are few places out there ready to hand you a cushy job "in your field" just because you have the degree.

We've (relatively privileged Americans) gotten ourselves into a bit of trouble by telling kids that they can grow up to be whatever they want and that they should follow their dreams, along with sending most of the off to universities without a clue as to what they will study there or do when they finish.

FWIW I have almost no idea what I'm talking about. I haven't seen studies about who among my cohort of "millenials" has been affected most by long term unemployment, etc, is it really the newly minted philosophy majors? Or are these stories just gobbled up by the press and the sense that there are hordes of humanities grads working as waiters and waitresses somewhat of a myth? Likely the real story is something in the middle and more complicated.

I think this guys hits it on the mark a bit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3991574

Still, I pursued my degree with a future career in mind. I don't get the English majors. "I like books" doesn't ring of career prospects.

I chose to major in CS partly because of great job prospects. Had that not been the case I might have been a Physics and Philosophy major. My friends probably are an unusual sample of CS and Physics majors. However, they made choices which put them into this position. There might be some systemic privilege on their part, but they also helped themselves.

Your last paragraph resonates with me. I cannot truly believe that there's a huge glut of people with not very practical majors. How could we let this happen? Where were those folks parents, teachers, and friends? Why didn't they point out that success is slim? If they did, why did this glut of individuals stubbornly pursue their desires?

What I'm trying to not say is that this individual sounds a bit silver-spooned. If I couldn't get a job in my chosen field, I'd move on. Pop "Fortunate Son" in the tape player and head to wherever the jobs are. There's apparently an oil boom in North Dakota. There's always need for English teachers around the world. That sounds like an adventure.

I don't want to come across as incompassionate. Society ought to direct people towards success and help them when they're down, but I can't help but feel this guy is hurting himself. We don't have all the data, I hope he's an outlier.

How could we let this happen?

When I was at school, all the teachers told us, it doesn't matter what degree you do because you are "learning to learn" and employers don't care anyway, just that you have one.

Even 17-year-old me could see that this was obviously complete nonsense, but not everyone's such a cynic by that age...

I'm a 26 year old liberal arts grad. Only about half of my friends have started a career. Many went for secon degrees.

It really is a common phenomenon.

I'm not surprised there's a glut considering I've still run across people who've asked me what a computer programmer even does.

Most people I come across believe it means that I fix computers.

I do fix computers (broken 8-bit machines from eBay) but that's for fun, not profit ;-)

"I have friends who majored in the humanities and are now working retail and restaurants."

The problem is that this isn't just the case in a bad economy, it's the case always. People that major in the humanities generally don't have a lot of job prospects..they never did.

I think in many ways it's easier for people like me who have non-vocational degrees. I have a theater degree and I knew I'd have to build a career in a non-traditional way. I was never under the delusion that the thing that I enjoyed studying was going to pay my bills.

My "career" started in a Dell call center (although I had many service industry and manual labor jobs before it) and through various vertical and lateral moves has led me to be a senior software developer.

My degree in theater has been extremely useful and a strong selling point in pretty much every job I've applied for. I can talk about my acting classes as being useful when talking to customers. I can talk about classes in design and construction that show a proven track record in taking abstract ideas and translating them into full products.

There's zero use for a vocational degree in a global economy. There's only value in having an education.

Most "office workers" have humanities degrees. I remember hearing that a degree in English was a useful default-major because "it's useful everywhere."

This isn't the case anymore, for a variety of reasons, but it certainly used to be true that graduating from college with a degree in anything gave you an advantage in the job market.

politics, speechwriter or civil service fast track if you can get on it (better have a first)

As someone with both a CS and a Philosophy degree I can tell you that my ability to write effectively and communicate well in general seemed to make a massive difference in likability compared to some of my CS peers.

You have to remember that Philosophy is not just Aristotle-Nietzsche-Kant-Mill. There's entire other worlds contained within the subject. I think a Philosophy degree, especially if the philosophy studied involved lots of formal logic and methods of reasoning (game theoretic decision making, fallacies, philosophy of language, other subjects that approach cognitive science) would have immense value in any field.

I think such a degree would be valuable in sales, marketing, journalism, editing, etc. Pretty much any job where clear-minded communication and analytic skills are more important than mere training.

In fact, if you accept the caveat that you will get out of many degrees what (work) you put into them, I can't think of a better general degree to get than a Philosophy degree.

Actually, a philosophy degree prepares you pretty well for a career in programming.

You might not be learning syntaxes and compiler internals and what not, but there is a very heavy emphasis on logic and the nature thereof in philosophy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic#Logic_and_computation

I don't know how you could say the CS degree was winning the lottery. Everyone and their grandmother knew that a CS degree would result in high earning after graduation as far back as the late 90's. In fact many CS departments had the problem of too many unqualified students looking to get rich, most of whom failed out the first year.

Similarly the idea that a humanities degree would not lead to a wealthy lifestyle is not new either. The phase "starving artist" is not new at all. And US News and World Report and been publishing average starting salaries by degree for years.

I can tell you that even in the 80's the writing was in the wall that CS was going to be a great field - even though nobody knew exactly what it would be like.

>not particularly socially apt

I'd put money on your being a lot more socially apt (in the areas important for this stuff) than you think you are, as compared to the rest of the population.

"socially apt" is just another word for "common sense" or "not being a self-hindering idiot" in a lot of circumstances. It doesn't have to mean being a slick sunglasses-at-night bastard.

CS field in America is about as easy as it gets, in terms of finding a job. Demand is absurdly high. That's not the case for every field. That's not even true for CS, as soon as you get out of the country.

The column is about someone in (apparently) Canada, who doesn't seem like he's in tech.

Even in CS in the US it varies a lot by specialty and region. I know some sysadmins in the Midwest who've been having trouble finding work lately. It seems that even if you can do other things, having an N-year CV of doing Unix sysadmin work (and an age >M, for some N,M) puts you into a ghetto which doesn't currently have a lot of jobs. Especially true if you don't have a degree. CS has a reputation of caring less about degrees than many other fields, but the combination of a sysadmin CV and no degree seems to raise the odds that you'll get typecast as "computer janitor".

EC2, Google Apps for business come immediately to mind :)

Agreed, which was part of my motivation for entering the field. Also, a reason why I've avoided the sorts of relationships which will tie me to one geographic area.

On the subject of solutions, has our society been incredibly dishonest with this person? Why didn't his parents, teachers, or friends tip him off to the frustrating future of the field he is in? Is this a systemic problem, or is he an outlier? Where have we failed him?

I wish I had more data on this guy and people like him.

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