General The author argues that in the new economy, it's people, not skills or majors, that have lost value.

[tom_mai78101]

A lawyer. A computer scientist. A military analyst. A teacher.

What do these people have in common? They are trained professionals who cannot find full-time jobs. Since 2008, they have been tenuously employed - working one-year contracts, consulting on the side, hustling to survive. They spent thousands on undergraduate and graduate training to avoid that hustle. They eschewed dreams - journalism, art, entertainment - for safer bets, only to discover that the safest bet is that your job will be contingent and disposable.

Unemployed college graduates are told that their predicament is their own fault. They should have chosen a more "practical" major, like science or engineering, and stayed away from the fickle and loathsome humanities. The reality is that, in the "jobless recovery", nearly every sector of the economy has been decimated. Companies have turned permanent jobs into contingency labour, and entry-level positions into unpaid internships.

Changing your major will not change a broken economy.

Read more here.

 

[FireCat]

Hmm A lawyer/ teacher. . They lost their Value?

 

[tom_mai78101]

Hmm A lawyer/ teacher. . They lost their Value?

Yes. Thanks to overpopulation.

 

[KaerfNomekop]

Humans in general have lost value, honestly.

 

[Accname]

No, there is just people now who are less valuable then others. Europeans for example are superior people.

 

[Zerocaliber]

There is an extreme bias in this article that oozes out of every word the writer pours on the page. This is all one giant pathos argument and she barely dipped into any sort of facts to back up her claims, especially those horrible school administrators who greedily do not pay their professors above poverty wages!

I am extremely skeptical of what she has to say and she seems to forget that this is an economic recession and you can't expect to have an easy time finding jobs when situations such as this happen. It doesn't help that soon businesses are going to have to add on the cost of healthcare for many of their employees that weren't already being covered, so they just won't hire.

 

[Slapshot136]

certainly people lose value over time if they don't work or learn new things, because tomorrow's world has different needs than today's world - but arguing that the economy has lost value? you can measure that pretty directly with the rGDP.. and while it may have dipped/flatlined, it hasn't lost value either

skills/majors that are too specific will quickly lose their value - the important part of learning is learning how to learn and deal with new situations, not the actual skills themselves

 

[FireCat]

Maybe, Maybe Not Tom

Humans in general have lost value, honestly.

Yeah! And when robots are making almost everything.. It will get worse!

 

[Varine]

Hmm A lawyer/ teacher. . They lost their Value?

Lawyers never had a value, they make up for it by charging you excessively and then losing. Teachers are what people become when they figure out they aren't very good at their chosen subject.

No, there is just people now who are less valuable then others. Europeans for example are superior people.

You mean the Germans. Germans are better people. Blanket terms like that are dangerous; you don't want to give people the wrong idea about the Polish.

 

[Accname]

Damn those polish!
Dont even know how to fight back.

 

[Slapshot136]

Lawyers never had a value, they make up for it by charging you excessively and then losing.

yep - too many lawsuits in the media have become bad publicity for them.. noone wants to hire/work with the person who argues over rectangles with rounded corners and charges $1000 per hour for that

Teachers are what people become when they figure out they aren't very good at their chosen subject.

again true - most teachers don't actually like teaching or working with kids, but they don't have anything more than a basic/introductory understanding of their subject - ask them anything that's not in the textbook and they suddenly get this blank look on their face and after a 1 minute pause with their jaw dropped and saying "ummm....." they will say "don't worry, that won't be on the test"
the computer scientists - writing code isn't hard.. there are billions of people in Asia who can do it for cheap - what the smart programmers of 10 years ago did was learn to design and architect programs, and those guys are now making the big $$ by directing those coders in Asia - coders whos only progress in the last 10 years was going from 50 WPM to 60 WPM aren't useful to keep anymore not sure about the military analyst, but I would imagine a good analyst can get a job in just about any field, implying they were missing something - perhaps sethcross or someone can chime in on that

 

[Accname]

programmers and computer scientists are not the same thing.
Computer scientists study theoretical computer science. Its about complexity theory, graph theory, and many more.
At my university coding is not that important when studying computer science. Sure, you need to code for some of the courses, but its less then 1/3 I would say. And almost nobody there will actually teach you how to code (except for 1 java course in the first semester) you have to teach that yourself.
Nobody at the university has ever told me anything about C++ but I had to finish a practical project using C++ regardless.

 

[Slapshot136]

programmers and computer scientists are not the same thing.
Computer scientists study theoretical computer science. Its about complexity theory, graph theory, and many more.

I find that the job titles usually don't match the actual work too much.. but generally a computer science degree will land you a job as a "developer" or "programmer"

the first "programmer" had the job title of "theoretical physicist"
either way, you see my point - most of it isn't learning how to write code, which is what it was 10 years ago - so those who haven't learned anything but how to write code will quickly find themselves out of a job

 

[Accname]

I dont know. I think people who know how to write code have a better chance then actual computer scientists.
Big companies need programmers who can maintain their data centers and protect them from security threats.
I think they are far more interested in software developement and coding rather then theoretical works of science in the area of computer science. Companies dont pay you to develope a new algorithm which solves an NP-complete problem in linear time. They pay you to develope a new algorithm which solves an NP-complete problem in an acceptable time. Whether its polynomial or linear doesnt matter to them as long as it works.