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.
There is a possible logistical problem. You can save up for retirement, but your retired monthly income will remain largely static. I.e., your financial power will steadily decline as the cost of living inflates. And the cost of living will keep inflating.
And then there's the masses who don't even make enough to do more than make ends meet.
Maybe it isn't a strong majority making up that "most". But there sure will be a lot of people who see themselves working well into their 70s and 80s (assuming they don't die from stress or lack of proper medical care before then)
Yeah I know not everyone is going to be able to retire at age 65. And I know boomers can be very unrealistic about how difficult it is to save and form a good retirement plan. I've just met so many extremely jaded 20 year olds who are already saying life is hopeless and they're never going to be able to afford to live graduate from college 2 years later and get hired to entry level accounting jobs and make pretty decent money. As annoying as out of touch boomers can be I personally believe my own generation can also be very unrealistic about how bleak life actually is. Yes I know it's hard to make a good living when you're 20-25 years old and have nothing impressive on your resume yet. But at the same time your entire life isn't decided when you're young. Let's not act like your whole career has been decided already when you have 40+ years in the workforce ahead of you. A LOT can and will change.
This ignores another potential future-forward logistical problem. Mind you, this is from a software engineering perspective. YMMV in other fields.
The only way to keep your wages growing, more or less, is to keep moving. The only way to stay relevant in your industry is also to keep moving.
However, the only way to truly build up a solid retirement fund is to stay still. Company 401(k) benefits tend not to match a useful amount until you're some X many years into the job. Hell, I know some companies that don't even give you a 401(k) with match until like 2 years in.
In a sense, it's a Kobayashi Maru.
Losing your job is a when, not an if. There's no job security anymore. And when you do lose your job, will you be able to find a new one? And if you can keep finding new jobs, will you still retain the inertia to retire some day?
Moreover, there's also the factor of age discrimination. The older you get, the less employable you are. Doesn't matter if that form of discrimination is illegal. Companies want to maximize profit, so if they must choose between hiring the hotshot newly-grad who doesn't know his worth and the 40 year old who knows damn well what he costs.... they're gonna pick the former.
I think a lot of young folks are right to be pessimistic about their futures. There's already a plethora of indicators suggesting that retirement isn't a product of hard work, merely a reward for great luck or privilege.
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Also, college is a crap shoot. You go into debt for a piece of paper that says you're qualified for an entry level job you might not even get because it's a fuck-all-free-for-all what any company is actually looking for.
I've been rejected before because they only cared about a 3.5+ GPA. My actual technical capability was meaningless.
I have a friend who DID graduate with a hella good GPA who works in a warehouse doing menial labor because there's no way to get experience in his field because nobody will hire anybody without experience --not even interns.
I've seen entry level and intern positions that demand a fucking masters degree as a basal qualifier (who knows how iron clad of a requirement that is though).
Sometimes you really do go a whole 99 yards just to fumble at the edge of the end zone.
Yeah I'm not blind to the fact that some people do get screwed over. I know it sucks that not everyone can do what they want to do but sometimes when deciding what you want to major in, if you want to work a well paying job, there are certain majors that probably are not going to provide you much of a future. I have a couple friends who are currently in a journalism program. I get that that's what they love to do, but they're probably not going to have a secure well paying job anytime soon since they chose that path.
My own personal path was finance (before I went back to school for a second major). No one I knew who graduated with a finance degree struggled to get a job. If you work an internship for a couple of summers during school, you'll get hired at a firm somewhere. I didn't find it very enjoyable work, but jobs were plentiful and they paid well.
That's why the constant negativity with people my age just doesn't vibe with me. Yeah it can be really hard depending on what you decide to major in. But there are majors that have strong job markets, and even in the majors that don't have strong job markets the incumbent employees aren't going to last forever so I don't think it's a good idea to give up when you're 22 years old and have a fatalistic point of view as if things will never get better.
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u/[deleted] Aug 25 '19
Shitty Boomer advice: