Really depends on the type of degree he got and the major.
I don’t regret my major (music education), even though I’m not using it in my current career. If I had to do it over again though, I think I could have been a good electrician.
It’s really not easy to predict what is going to be needed in the future. I’m trying to tell my kids to be mindful of how industries are progressing and to keep options open as well as trying to building skills needed such as reading comprehension.
So basically, you’re teaching them to dance like a monkey for the billionaires. We need a general strike so we can be not at the bottom of developed countries for quality of life.
Will strikes accomplish anything if your work isn’t valuable in the first place?
We figured out scarcity 12,000 years ago.
You can tell because we had time to start writing shit down.
Everything since then has been the people with mental issues hoarding the resources causing problems instead of sharing like normal humans.
In other words, yeah, a job is way more likely to be a useless joke than actually contributing to humanity.
But you’re supposed to pretend so they can buy another yacht.
Now if we could just develop something that allows us to get clean food, water, and shelter without relying on an external system run by these sociopaths…
If there’re no jobs in your field then definitely study a trade instead
I mean…when I was 23 I worked shit jobs for a while too until I found an industry I liked. Now I have a good job. But it takes years, they don’t just hand it to you when you graduate undergrad.
It would be nice if the lower end jobs paid better, that’s the bigger issue. Pay people fair wages.
I’m in my mid-30s. When I was 23 I had a master degree and got offered 2 positions that I hadn’t even applied to - both starting positions with good pay in my chosen field. When my boss was 23 he got offered a professor position at a good uni because he happened to share an office with the guy they were hoping to hire, so they hired him as well (?!). In my parents life time, neither applied to a job and got rejected.
Times have changed drastically, even from just 10 years ago.
Yeah, the Boomers give the typical Boomer advice of “just walk in and give the manager a firm handshake” … because for them, in their time, that actually worked.
To be fair, being able to make a good impression to the boss will help you even today. It won’t guarantee a job, but you can make sure your resume at least gets seen by a human.
So it’s possible for both things to be true.
You (and me) had it hard when 23 and harder compared to the boomers (I had to do shitty unpaid internships to get ahead (on top of work not in my industry to support myself) which was a huge gamble looking back). But 10-15 years have passed and it’s even harder now and I couldn’t recommend that pathway to younger people — cause if they’d do an internship, they won’t get recruited 95% of the time. The gamble ain’t worth it.
What would you recommend now? I’m essentially a copy of OP, down to being 23. I think it must be 23-syndrome
I’m tenured in academia—I can only really talk about life here and funding models vary between countries.
I’d only advise people to do anything like an internship (but preferably you do it as part of your degree) with someone who has or is likely to get funding for a PhD student.
So to try and generalise this, my advice would be talk to people who are considered sound within the industry and get advice about what opportunities exist.
Accurate. I didn’t begin building an actual career that paid well until mid-30s. Before that it was “unskilled” (term used loosely) labor and service.
I have 2 bachelors. Had to do the second because first’s field wasnt hiring by the time i finished. Second now gets automated by AI.
Basically got hit by 2 historic recessions by the time i finished each.
I’d strongly emphasize doing trade/care as of now. You hear the troubles the tech ppl have getting hired? I bet 90% of office jobs get automated with having cheap developers + AI.
Robots which go to ppls homes and repair plumbing or electricity is still 50-200 years away.
I give it ~15 years but true
Yeah, same as self driving trucks. Been 15 years away for 15 years now.
Everyone join trades just in time for trades markets to be packed. Looks like a race to the bottom tbh. They’ll pay us as little as they can.
I know someone who is in trades, unfortunately it’s not all roses there, either. Only so many electricians are needed. They seem happy to get work when they can get it, but it isn’t always a stable income.
Mechanic work is still alright. Yeah, the field is saturated, but the pool is like 80% drunks/unreliable. If you’re even mildly responsible and know your way around wrenches and cutting and hacking on steel, you’ll go far. That said, you don’t have far to go. Everyone old either died or quit and the last one is your boss.
Once you’re in a shop, getting paid, bonding with the crew and settling in, it’s extremely stable. I’m a forklift mechanic at <redacted>, but any experience with any form of truck or carts carries from job to job. The pay is ‘meh’ but it’s enough to live on, buy drugs and a hobby or two. No home or retirement for us, though unless you own a shop.
so… own a shop?
Those types of mechanics know everybody or have a group of clients already,… and they can afford property. Who can afford property? They can, apparently. You could do mobile mechanic work and/or do roadside assistance for insurance companies, but there’s hoops to that too.
There’s tons of work. Sure, the whole world’s gone to shit,… but as a mechanic, that’s good news. You can’t lie to automobiles, they break good economy or bad, and being blunt with rich fucks who think everything is easy to get and cheap is always a treat.
HVAC is booming right now. That’s about the only bright side of the planet getting hotter.
Not when that job requires you to be either out in the heat or inside in a boiling hot attic. Maybe sometimes you’re in a climate controlled environment but mostly you’re working in a hot environment trying to get the HVAC working again.
Oh yeah, it makes the jobs suck much worse. But the pay is still nice. Or at least that’s what I tell myself whenever I find myself working in a location where the dewpoint is getting concerningly close to body temp.
You know, that was kind of a shitty thing for me to say. It’s mean-spirited and unnecessary. I apologize.
If it was then I didn’t interpret it that way at all. It’s all good. The job does frequently suck and anyone doing it solely for the money is going to be miserable.
Nobody likes you when your 23…
If you have to pay to go to grad school that’s the school’s way of saying you don’t belong there.
Fucking sick and tired of hearing Americans removed and moan. Yeah, your shitty circumstances are because of your garbage country, do something about it.
You seem confrontational
Thanks for noticing!
Does their shitty instance really censor the word bitch?
What a silly place you come from.
Yeah how dare we protect women, lol.
Yeah, because thats going to make all the difference.
Who said it would make all the difference?
You seem to think it will.
No I don’t.
So why are you arguing with me then?
Bro, I live in the UK and we have the exact same problem
And I’m sick of that too. Rise up
If you want to be lifted up, I always go back to Ursula Le Guin. Read, there are answers.
I don’t think fiction holds the answers, lol.
I’m going to post this fyi just in case because it’s related.
Do not use job posting websites to find jobs.
They just steal your information plus full of scams.
Here is how you find actual job openings.
Go to individual company websites and navigate to their “careers” or “join our team” page.
Yes it’s more work as you have to make a list of companies that have the kind of work you are looking for and then manually go to each of their websites.
But you are wasting your time using job hosting sites like monster or any of those other ones.
The posts are made by bots and scammers.
And less and less legitimate companies use them for that same reason as well.
If you need ideas for companies , I suggest opening up Google maps and looking around for companies near you and then spread out.
Yup. I have cobcluded that indeed.com is a sham
There might be a kernel of truth to what you’re saying
Indeeeed
What’s wrong with trade-schools?
For real, trade school did me better than most of my peers, but people definitely have some stigma around it for some reason.
Because colleges pushed the “without a degree, you’ll be flipping burgers and living in your mom’s basement”. When the reality is, trades make bank.
Right now in Poland people with a degree struggle to get by working shit government and corpo jobs while people after trade schools buy summer homes and drive new cars. In Spain were I live they don’t make as much money but they sure as hell don’t have to worry about work. I’m trying to find someone to do some reforms and people simply ignore you. They have so much work they simply don’t care if you will hire them or not. And a lot of those jobs a not back-breaking. AC technicians have shitload of work now and will only have more.
O yea, HVAC in the states is big but with the planet continuing to become an oven, the EU is just getting started with HVAC, ton of money to be had there.
Even in places where HVAC is big like Spain you can’t get a technician to look at it during summer. In smaller towns everything is difficult. Young people don’t want to do those jobs and older guys have so much work you have to chase them to get anything done. My family had to wait over a year for painter.
Holy shit really? That’s crazy. I live in a rural area and still can get an HVAC guy out in about a day usually it’s same day. We even have after hours guys. Don’t let that make it sound like it’s a flooded trade here, as that’s completely wrong, most of these guys are literally busy 24/7/365 but that sounds like an untapped industry.
I do understand that a lot of the new generation has been sold desk jobs making 6 figures though, at least here…and not enough people want to take the outdoors and labor intensive style jobs anymore. Welders are a good one around my area, you’d think we’d be crawling in them, but nope they’re a trade that has a lot of openings, as the older generation(boomers) are retired, then Gen x is hitting retirement and there is even less millennials that picked up the trade and even less Gen z…times gonna get rough soon.
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Nothing in particular but, for me, I spent 8 years learning to do a thing and now I won’t even be given an initial interview. It’s the “what the fuck was the point?” of it all.
> still living with parents
> wasting days jacking off
Man, I just can’t 😓
Man I am in precisely the same spot. Where did we go wrong bro
So he both can’t and can get a job?
A decent paying job
1.) Go find a temp agency, apply to get some job, any job, in a fabrication shop or machine shop.
2.) Show up every day mostly sober, even if you’re sweeping the floor or running a grinder.
3.) Take an interest in thr equipment. Learn about it. Learn how to use calipers and a tape measure.
4.) Eventually they will train you on a machine. Maybe a mill, maybe a lathe, maybe a plasma cutter or brake or laser. Learn how to run it, learn how to run some of the other machines.
5.) Keep learning and never want for a job again.
Better plan:
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Slowly take the parts of each individual machine
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find a secret lair to bring said parts
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build a suit
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fly over the corporate and political leaders, and shit on them.
I think that may be less feasible though. We’ll go with your idea, for now.
If you’re going to build some kind of suit, you’d want the machines in the metal shop to be intact.
Oh. Goddammit.
I’ll just use the grinder then. For now.
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Good plan.
Most annoying is that it is actually quite simple to bulk-learn the basics of all that shit in a 1 week structured course, but you have to play politics instead, before they let you be useful.
