From my upcoming book "Bachelor Pad Economics" (slated for early December)
The result of such a disparity between what you are capable of and what the real world has to offer is a working environment that not only will spectacularly fail to meet your lofty expectations of challenge and reward, but crush your hopes and dreams of the future. After nearly two decades of schooling it will take you months just to land an interview, sometimes years to find a job. After flirting with the likelihood you’ll have to go on welfare, you will have a bit of “luck” and maybe land a job. You will desperately take it just so you can make ends meet, but you will soon find out it is tedious, mundane, and nothing like what your employer said it would be. You will think you’re just “unlucky,” that not all employers are like that, and it’s just a matter of finding another employer. But you will soon find out, job after job, that all employers are indeed “like that.”
In the meantime consider getting an early jump on Christmas shopping as you spread Cappy Cap Cheer (TM) by purchasing any one of my books.
10 comments:
damn...you really depressed me ther AarClar
Indeed, Captain. It's like one of those fruit machines in the casino; you keep throwing in money, you invest and invest, but you nothing of note ever comes out of it. Same thing with modern education, especially higher education (tm). You invest your precious time, your youth, lots of energy, and lots of money. And what do you get in return? That is, if you manage to navigate the creativity-stifling
academic environment, the institutionalized misandry, the nepotism, and the favoritism? Thats right, you get a 'chance' at employment. Just like you get a chance at winning the jackpot when going to the casino and spending your money there. Don't expect it, though. They dangle the carrot in front of you, but few people will be allowed to catch it.
My first job was as a commercial insurance underwriter for a large insurer. It took me almost a year after graduating to find that job.
It was the best (only) option. It was a "good" job with a "good" company, yet the reality of the position set in immediately after a long training program. This reality was diametrically opposed to most of what we learned in training.
This was not to be a thoughtful, analytical process where we had time to make important decisions and feel rewarded. This was going to be a shitshow of the highest order and we were going to be paper pushers handling dozens of cases simultaneously, the impetus being to push them off our desk ASAP.
It was just like Office Space: a cube farm, multiple managers who trumpeted business buzzwords (they loved to say "think strategically"), and a constantly growing workload that kept most from getting anything done.
After 6 months, I was beyond burned out and was given a verbal warning, where one of my managers reminded me how I was making "good" money for my age, had "good" benefits, and yada yada yada. He asked me what was going on with me as a "concerned" manager, but I knew he was just looking for extra rope to throw over the beam. I walked away after several more similar months.
It took me 4 more years at different corporate shitholes to realize most of these places were the same. They plug you into their system and it usually doesn't match their description in the interview, and then after a while, like an insane girlfriend after 3 months of dating, they flip on you, demanding more and you spend 90% of your time wondering what you should do about it.
If you're lucky, you reach the breaking point like myself and figure out that you can live outside of this world and do just fine and even thrive. I am finding my own way right now and it feels nice to not have to be in a cube by 8:00am to meet unwritten expectations.
I know there are some generalizations here but this is just my experience and I can relate to this post, Cap.
How about a post/series on quantitative easing, how it will never end, how the $ funnels back to the stock market, what will happen in Yellen pulls the plug, etc
Hope you have an editor and a spell checker this time?
Sorry, I enjoy your work but paying money for a book and it has typos all over the place makes me not want to read it.
I get that the message is all that really counts but it reeks of not caring how the final product comes out. If you don't care enough to pay a freelancer a hundred bucks to correct your spelling then I don't care enough to buy it.
Hey Cap, how do you reconcile that with the very positive outcome of combining well-educated men with vocational trades? Granted, I'm biased, as I'd rather stick my hand in a blender than work on land, but there's a lot of positive buzz coming out of groups like Mike Rowe WORKS and stuff like that.
Also, FWIW, my friends who went to trade school all make at least 100K a year working as independent contractors in the northeast. I realize that YMMV in any situation, but I'm starting to get college grads as entry-level deckhands on my boat, and they'll all be officers in a few years if they keep their heads down and learn how to work.
Do you think you have a blind spot for non-white collar work? I don't see you mention it too often.
All of you Barbies make me larff.
At least the doll knew that math is hard, you lot don't seem to understand that work is hard.
That's why it's not called 'dickin' around and drinking beer'.
I got to say that if you're one like me and you really love math and science, engineering jobs are fairly easy to get and have a lot of potential for fun and challenging intellectual work. The successful companies don't have time
4/What happened to the post on the uselessness of HR from yesterday?
Love the title of your new book. It should be a good read, as long as your audience recognizes it is not a "one size fits all" solution to their problems.
My son will be graduating next year with one of those "worthless" degrees studying the likes of Aristotle and Plato. He will only have the ability to think, write and speak clearly, which is about all one can hope to get out of a college education.
What will he do next? He doesn't want to go to Wall Street or some large company like GE, even if jobs were available there. So it appears that he and a classmate will be starting a business, in effect creating their own jobs.
What is the downside? Chances are they will fail, but that failure will give them better experience than if they had gone the conventional route.
If this is a more proactive course than sitting back and enjoying the decline, so be it.
Post a Comment