Please tell me when it was ever easy. Rumors of the job market being easy in the past are vastly overstated. Before the Internet, before entry to IT was as easy as it later became, I graduated high school as valedictorian and took the highest paying job I could find based on my skills: factory labor in a box factory. I got married a year after high school, we had a son, and THEN I started junior college. Before I got my associate degree in IT 3.5 years later, we had two more children. I worked the factory job for 5.5 years. When laid off, I worked in convenience stores, chem labs, other factories, whatever I could find (and finding short-term work was not easy--sometimes spent weeks finding a job, only to be called back to the factory.) In my last semester, I worked an unpaid internship in a bank IT department while still working the factory job at night. The bank hired me. I have worked on the same software, following it from owner to owner, ever since. I have done extremely well. But I was in no way prosperous until I hit my mid-30's. We lived in apartments for years, then a mobile home, and finally a house when I was 31. So from age 19 through about 35, you might say it was a struggle. It's not that I don't sympathize with 20-somethings who think they have it rough, but I would like to tell you that for most people, getting along is NOT easy and NOT guaranteed. This whole business of getting the right degree and then networking your way to fun and glory--if you can pull it off, cool. If not, perhaps you ought to start grinding at whatever you can, save up some money, and keep grinding for the chance you want. Oh, and get off my lawn (kidding--I know I sound like that guy.) Good luck, but more than that I wish you the benefits of every second of your own efforts--eventually.
I feel like there's this huge disconnect and I'm not sure who to believe. Some people say it wasn't easy back in the day and that the younger generation are simply too entitled. The younger generation would then say that even the lowliest jobs don't exist.
Imagine if you were laid off and no convenience stores, chem labs, or whatever you could find simply didn't exist. Instead of weeks to get back to you, it took months, and the factory never called you back. Then, someone from an older generation started with the same rhetoric you're on now.
I'm not saying that's the case, but just as you want 20-somethings to have some perspective, accept the possibility that it could just be worse now even compared to the struggles you had.
The disconnect is probably because the OP, and many other 20-somethings, look for some macroeconomic cause for their plight. Some people think too much in terms of generations, demographics, better or worse economic stats, etc. I, on the other hand, tend to focus on my own behavior on my own behalf. My reply did not describe the wider economic conditions in which I grew up, because I thought my own choices (early marriage and kids, delayed college, etc.) were more important than any set of economic indicators you can name. I dug a very deep hole for myself. I learned to look very hard at my own decisions.
I won't go into exhaustive detail, but if you wanted to compare economic conditions, consider this:
1) My first job (paperboy at age 12) was during the Nixon years. Price and waged controls, going off the gold standard, etc. Didn't affect me--I was working locally, delivering the freaking paper, not existing in some statistical milieu.
2) My next job (dishwasher, age 15) was during Ford years. Whip Inflation Now buttons, anyone? Irrelevant--I had my head in a sink.
3) My next job (cashier, age 18) was during Carter years. Insane levels of inflation, stagflation, and a president lecturing us that we were all in a national malaise. Screw you, Carter, I was working and finishing high school, regardless of wider economic conditions.
4) Next job (factory, age 19-24) was during Carter and then Reagan years. End of stagflation, let the Stockman budget battles begin. Irrelevant--I was working my butt off, multiple jobs if I had time, and going to school.
5) Next jobs (IT, age 25-now) I have worked through all the ups and downs of the economy, including the current supposedly impossible economy. I am competing against the 20-somethings and the offshore developers. I don't think it's easy for anyone (myself included) and I don't take my current hourly contract for granted. Yes, hourly contract. I am one manager's decision away from not having a paycheck. I could either a) panic or b) make sure I deliver value, all the time. And of course hope for the best:-)
So the perspective I suggest is one of perhaps being aware of larger economic conditions as a point of interest, but not telling yourself that the unemployment rate, the dearth of new jobs, the shift to overseas labor, etc. is going to control your destiny. YOU control it. Nothing but crappy jobs out there? Fine, take two, they're small. What's that, I'm an insensitive clod and there are not even any crappy jobs to be had? Oh, then I assume you have broadened your search out to 50 miles, then 100, then 150. And I don't mean emailing resumes. Nothing like showing up in person to demonstrate seriousness. Oh, and now new jobs? Well, why not go take an existing job from some sad sack who is just marking time? Every company has them. Don't ask for openings--make openings.
As long as this is, it is incomplete. I'm sure a determined complainer could pick holes in it easily, and trump me with some difficulty that I haven't included. But that's the difference in perspective. I accept difficulties as part of life, and set out to survive at the very least, prosper if possible, and triumph (even if in only small ways, and only in my mind where I keep score in a game no one else knows we are playing).
