NYT profiles an example of 24-year-old entitlement FAIL

How is this guy supposed to answer the door once opportunity knocks if he is out doing some menial 40 K a year job?

 

The kid turns down the $40K job as a claims adjuster, but considers bartending a better option? While living on his parents' dime in a $2,000 a month apartment?
What a douche.
I have no problem moving back in with the parents after college while searching for a job. I did it, and I suspect a lot of people do it. But after a couple months, it's time for junior to grow a pair. It took me about two months after graduation (in admittedly better times) to find a job. After one month I was beating the bushes for a waiter job or something to make ends meet.
If I'd been offered $40K a year as a claims adjuster I'd have jumped on it. Hell, I might still jump on a $40K job to pick up runny dog vomit if the hours are good.

 

Karma's a bitch, and this kid's going to have an even harder time finding a job when the HR people at the kinds of companies he wants to work at do a basic Google search and this article turns up.

 

Only made it about a third of the way through. What drivel.

We're dealing with a mindset where the parental units camped out all night to make sure Beauregard or Buffy got into the "right" preschool, always got participation ribbons, then either sued or petitioned the school board to get the coach fired when he/she didn't make varsity. Kid probably never had to take out the trash cans, clean up after the dog, ect. Or most important, deal with losing, or, not getting everything you want.

My first day on my first real job in this racket, at a weekly, they had me writing caps for slow pitch. Also set the bowling agate. When I became a news editor at a small daily, one of the tasks each week was to make sure we had a photo of the Pet of the Week. I got so accustomed to getting the garbage shifts and doing the scut work that, when I moved into management, I had to learn how to assign it!

There's still a certain nobility in starting at the bottom, dammit. Got a feeling this kid's gonna find that out the hard way.

 

If the kid had gone to Cornell, none of this would have happened.

 

Somehow made it through the story. The premise of how sucky things are for workers nowadays is right on, with all the good jobs going overseas, but using this kid and his family are exactly the wrong example.

I've never made $40K in my life, and if I was offered that job right now in my area, I'd take it in an instant.

 

All due respect, but who does he think they're calling?

Plumbers, electricians, mechanics. All of whom earn their living doing the things specified when someone calls.

It's like the argument about sending jobs overseas. Lots of those jobs disappeared thanks to automation. It doesn't take forty men to make a ton of steel now - it takes 4. Things change, and the industrial jobs that built the middle class in the 1950s are long gone.

Other jobs left when the world opened up to trade. Does he really want to be the one making 75 cents an hour stitching sneakers in Guangzhou? Or does he want to be on the other end of that exchange, working in an information economy?

 

And taking it one step further - if people STOPPED making calls to get shit fixed, well, then electricians, plumbers and mechanics would become as obsolete as steel workers.

 

Honestly? You do? Honestly?

 

The first paragraph, I can agree with. Technology has changed.

The second paragraph, I don't agree. We should be cracking down on these companies that pay their workers 75 cents an hour overseas instead of paying the $7.50 an hour over here.

And for those who think the price of the sneakers would go up, yeah, they would, to a point. But do you honestly think they'll charge $1,500 for the current $150 pair of sneakers, as opposed, to say, $200? And at least, the jobs would be in the U.S., as opposed to some third-world country where the workers get screwed over so that Oregon's football team can have Xboxes in their lockers.

 

Most of the American manufacturers that fled America did so at the insistence of their American stockholders.

 

This, I can agree with as well.

The last 30 years have been a nightmare for the U.S. worker.