My nightmare as a twenty-something with a fanstastic diploma and no job prospects (needs experience to get a job, don’t have references because unearthed a fraud during internship, fraud that almost ruined my family) is getting more detailed and deeper. It’s the systemic, sustainable, sensical version of ‘Entry job; needs two year experience’.
I still think that a large group is not mentioned in most of those reference, certainly OP, are the surprisingly large hordes of people who can’t seem to find jobs in San Francisco. Including coders, including very talented ones. No idea what’s at stake: the list of claimed discriminated groups are long, and constitute a pavement of all candidates (as pointed in the article).
Here is a problem in need of a solution, but I can’t seem to make sense of what either are.
I was once in your situation as well - MS math degree from a top level program (4 year PhD student before leaving in an unexpected manner) who also had problems finding a job & applied to any entry level career track job I could (PR, programming, data scientist, statistician, business analyst, intelligence analyst, HR, secretary, sales, etc.). I got fed up after 2 years of searching (minus 7 months spent in initial active duty training in the military before becoming a drilling reservist) and taught myself how to program. I hit up the local meetup events pretty hard simultaneously, and a recruiter helped me get an entry level position - it was entry level pay, but I quickly proved myself from there and with only 16 months of experience, am about to start making $100k+ doing web development.
Hang in there, it gets better - I've experienced some pretty terrible things as well, and I made it out ok.
Oh, it’s gotten better, and then crappy, and then better… To give you a time frame, he first time it got crappy for me, that was because Building 7 collapsed. That made me the first Truthist, I guess.
I do code, that’s not the problem; I do have experience too… Loads of it. It doesn’t seem to get better then. As the article point out: being old seem to suck too, everything does.
Sigh.
In a way I see it as ideas vs. implementations. A gross generalization and oversimplification, perhaps doesn't reflect to reality at all, but maybe the thought prevails among certain groups of people in SV.
The reality is simply that young, inexperienced people are cheap and are willing to cut corners because they don't understand the dangers. And then a year or 2 later the next MtGox programming blunder story appears.
My sense is that there are quite a few people, both young and old, who find it hard to break into the 'valley scene'. I've felt that too at times, in spite of my (roughly speaking) successful career. The culture is insular and judgmental in a way that can be very intimidating. However, it should be noted that this is equally true in other areas, especially in what might be called "glamour" fields, such as film, music, fashion, writing, art, etc. In every one of these arenas, there is a clique mentality, where judgement can be swift and capricious, and being "in" is almost a binary value, based on a seemingly subconscious pattern-matching process that can at times feel like the result of a hive mind.
I guess the news flash here is that SV startup life is now officially glamorous. Pretty soon we'll have a raft of reality TV shows dogging our every move, and providing income to those of us who have fallen from the grace of the techno A-list.
It's already started.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/04/reality-tv-gets-startup-obs...
I've come to the solution that it's all a load of rubbish. Build a network, become a face within your little niche and make sure your knowledge / experience is always moving upwards.
Too many youngsters think that getting a 1st == instant £60,000+ a year job. Too many older people think working 20 years doing the same thing again and again == instant £60,000+ a year job.
Neither is true, a career takes time to build, pruning your network and stacking the cards in your favour.
We are talking about the Valley that is the birth place of Tesla and AirBnB, I wouldn't rate those ones as useless, or solving problems that doesn't matter.
The solution, surprisingly, is to just don't.
