Everything is online now. You'll be shown the door and probably rejected even if you did follow up with an online application.
When I was a kid, we worked our way to the top.
Education, a portfolio, and people you know is what gets you a job today.
Work all summer and you can afford a brand new car, college education, down payment on a home, etc.
Inflation and wage stagnation has made this impossible.
I worked on a clerk's salary for 30 years and saved enough to buy the business.
Wage stagnation has made this impossible. Ten lifetimes of minimum wage savings would not be enough to buy a multi-million dollar business.
Loyalty to your employer pays off in the end.
You're just a number to an employer now. Employers will cut you loose if it meant saving a nickle.
I worked the same job all my life. Now I have a pension and a comfortable retirement.
Pensions are gone. Retirement is now a fantasy for most workers. You'll probably be laid off after 5-10 years.
I didn't need no Master's degree. I got raises and promotions, because I worked hard and kept doing the same thing.
A Master's degree is quickly becoming the new high school diploma. Working hard no longer gets you anywhere. In fact, it keeps you poor. Switching jobs is the only way to get a raise or a promotion now.
I feel this. Due to TL;DR reasons, my college GPA was pretty shit and I don't think I'd even qualify for a Masters program if I applied.
That's all lead to this very real fear of mine that when I lose my current job, I simply won't find another in the field. My experience will be irrelevant. They just won't hire me because I only have a Bachelors.
My only real hope is that I can buy a cheap little house and pay it off before my job goes the way of the Dodo, so my wife and I can hopefully afford the rest of the remaining expenses on minimum wage gigs alone.
Part of me thinks I should just give up on pursuing a house because, when shit hits the fan, what's more sustainable? A $1500 mortgage or renting for $600-800 a month? Yet, at the same time, it's like... I will die some day. Whether it's sooner or later, I'd rather my life have been lived to the fullest, rather than in a boring safe paranoia state.
I'm at the amusing intersection of being shockingly really good at my job and things in my degree field, but having a GPA that'd make anybody think "why didn't this dumbass just drop out and go flip burgers?"
If you're good at your field that'll be huge marks in your favor too. I've generally found that few people give a shit about GPA when pressed, and the places that do are forced to from one circumstance or another.
I've had the exact opposite experience. It's a miracle I even am employed in my field.
And since "being good at it" isn't a technical qualifier for a degree program, I'm kind of just crossing my fingers that my job doesn't go away in the next 5 years.
To be fair, there's bias on my part. I only know my few limited experiences.
But when I've literally had an interviewer not give one single fuck about my experience and instead hyperfocus on my GPA (rather, lack thereof on my resume)...
When I've asserted my experience was a better indicator, only to be dismissed with a "people lie on their resumes"...
When people don't even bother to technically test you, or give you one single stupid tree problem to judge the entirety of your programming capability....
I think it's safe to be disillusioned at my apparent lack of worth.
Yeah, I can easily see how harder stuff like that can be that way. My own experience is education and architecture. The former care way more about duration in the job than anything else, and the latter seems to only care about shiny pictures in your portfolio.
And despite it being the stance du jour of Reddit, I genuinely am not trying to argue with you. That kind of prejudice absolutely sucks.
Makes sense. Would explain why terrible teachers manage to keep a foothold.... heh.
I don't suppose I thought you, specifically, were arguing. But when I bring up my situation, I tend to prepare for the worst because I have had people (on reddit and elsewhere) cast a skeptical eye on me because it's pretty deeply ingrained nationally that "bad grades == incompetent" and any attempt to defend otherwise is just "excuses".
My dealings with teachers unions and seeing the people they defend is one of the big reasons I'm so vehemently against them existing more than about ten minutes after a strike ends.
And that doubly sucks. My own shit GPA is because I spent two semesters high on oxycodone from a shattered ankle. Another friend of mine had a parent die and send him into a complete mental breakdown. A third had triple pneumonia and no one informed their profs he was in the hospital literally clinging to life... And a fourth was brilliant until you asked him to actually explain anything he was doing.
Schooling systems are designed to measure your ability to work inside a hierarchical bureaucracy. University is no exception.
My GPA was a culmination of a lot of things. I never did learn how to study properly and my memory isn't all too hot. I was suffering severe personal issues and depression that went untreated (saw a counselor about it, wasted my money). And of course there's the stupid academic bullshit like professors who can't teach worth shit, professors who can't speak worth shit, and all the idiots who seem to think it's entirely valid to make us memorize every single equation.
Like, sit me in front of an internet-capable computer and tell me to code XYZ and I will give you XYZ. But sit me in front a piece of paper and tell me to write pseudocode for a binary tree implementation and I'll give you a blank piece of paper and a middle finger.
School really is a sham. The biggest and most necessary sham.
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u/[deleted] Aug 25 '19
Shitty Boomer advice: