All Schools are Created Equally

[sakky]

<p>

You can look where the jobs are. You can look where the jobs will be.
You can make your own job. You don’t have to do anything. You can even
go back to school.

</p>

<p>Sure, technically, you don’t have to do anything in life. If you just want to be a homeless bum, you could do that too. </p>

<p>

You could move to California and look for a job and then find something
that opens up in Omaha or Florida or Idaho. Then you get to move again.
Or you could stay where you are and look and find that job in Omaha,
Florida or Idaho and then move.

</p>

<p>Jobs are easier to find if you are physically around. It’s easier to find work in California if you’re already in California, and the same is true of Omaha, Florida, or Idaho. </p>

<p>

You can look but there is no requirement that you live there to look.

</p>

<p>See above. </p>

<p>

That’s their fault. They don’t look for them in undergrad.</p>

<p>At my son’s school, the department and the professors push this. They
send out stacks of emails on internships, department jobs, jobs at
local employers looking for engineering students. The career center
sends emails on career preparation, networking, preparing your resume
and getting it into databases. The professors themselves are
networking resources as they personally receive requests for employees
from former students. It’s up to the students to respond. I look at
many of the questions on the internships forum and just have to wonder

• these kids are smart and bright but they come here to ask about
  internships and jobs - why aren’t they starting at their career
  center?</p>

<p>I receive queries from time to time from Boston College students
looking for work through the Alumni Network. It generally doesn’t work
out because my industry generally doesn’t line up well with BC grads
(my MS was elsewhere). I still admire the students that use the
network though - they are taking advantage of the resources freely
available to them.

</p>

<p>All of that is a nonsequitur, for at the end of the day, the problem remains that those college kids don’t have strong networks. Maybe it is their fault. Maybe they should have tried harder. But the fact is, they didn’t. What should they do now - kill themselves? Invoke a time machine? They have to move on with their careers by doing the best they can. </p>

<p>

I don’t work in an HQ building. Just a satellite. It’s a fairly big
satellite but it is still a satellite.

</p>

<p>But it’s still an office, right?</p>

<p>I thought you said that the rise of communications technologies means that offices are losing their importance over time. </p>

<p>

I live fairly close to work so it doesn’t really matter. If the weather
is bad, I just work from home. So does everyone else. When gasoline went
to four bucks, people worked more from home (lots of SUVs, Minivans and
Trucks in our parking lot).

</p>

<p>I suspect that most Americans would dread the day when their jobs could be performed on a completely remote basis, for who’s to say that those jobs won’t all be offshored? </p>

<p>

I see. So now you conced that there isn’t only one locale and that
they can form in other areas.

</p>

<p>I have always said that multiple locales exist - for example, from the very beginning I identified Boston as an alternate locale to Silicon Valley. </p>

<p>

But you don’t even need a locale. You can certainly start your own
I guess.

</p>

<p>You can do anything you want, but it’s obviously easier to be where the infrastructure is already in place, whether that infrastructure is physical or social. </p>

<p>

Or work in a place where there isn’t one or where one is
only starting.

</p>

<p>Therein lies the risk - what if you fail? After all, most startups fail. If you’re in an established startup locale, join a startup and it fails, oh well, you can probably just join another . But if you’re in a locale where only one startup is around, and it fails, that presents a problem. </p>

<p>

She bought low. Very low. There’s also an inheritance to be had. One
more reason to live near the inlaws. Buying at the bottom of the
market is different than buying after the market has had a huge run
and pulled back where it tries to find a bottom. If you had bought
that egg company at $2/share a few years ago, you’d find yourself with
at least a 1,000% gain today. The person buying it today would have to
worry about a potential drop. The time to buy is after a long basing
period before everyone else figures out that a stock is a buy. That’s
for investors. Traders can do whatever they want to if it works.

</p>

<p>I think your sister is just lucky - not everybody has the good fortune of buying a house when it’s cheap. </p>

<p>

The auto industry is an interesting example of labor moving to other
locales because of costs. Detroit has been shrinking while foreign
automakers have been moving into other parts of the country to produce
automobiles. Unions are a factor too as is safety. I would think that
a lot of Toyota workers wouldn’t want to work in Detroit for fear of
retribution from workers at domestic carmakers. We have BMW and
Mercedes with plants in the Southeast too.

</p>

<p>Yet what I find interesting is that the US auto companies are not moving to the South. Granted, maybe you could argue that the manufacturing facilities can’t do so for union reasons. But why not the headquarters? After all, while Detroit/Flint/Auburn Hills is relatively cheap, it surely isn’t as cheap as Mississippi. So why don’t the Big 3 just relocate their entire headquarters? </p>

<p>Similarly, while we see Japanese and European auto firms building manufacturing facilities to the US South, they have yet to move their headquarters to the US South. Why not? Japan is one of the most expensive nations on Earth. </p>

<p>

We’re fortunately seeing more interest away from IB jobs from students
in the CC forums. One of my sisters did work for many, many years in
M&A in San Francisco. The company closed because they can’t generate
enough business. They did great for quite some time. I guess that’s
creative destruction.

</p>

<p>Yet that doesn’t take away from the fact that the IB jobs that remain are to be predominantly found in places like New York. </p>

<p>

Have a look at the internships, careers and employment forum.</p>

<p>It’s interesting that your suggesting to move to a locale to look for
a job is rarely suggested when there are questions about how to find a
job or internship…

</p>

<p>I suspect that the presumption is that most college kids are probably looking for jobs close to where they already are. </p>

<p>

I can rely on telework technologies. Many other professions can too.
There are lots of professions that can’t. At least not yet.</p>

<p>One thing that I do notice on Hulu is that there are more and more
animated shows coming online. I personally do not like to watch these
shows but I’m an older person. These types of shows seem quite popular
with younger viewers and maybe that’s where the future is. If networks
could replace expensive actors, they would. Our technology is nowhere
near that but we get closer on a regular basis.

</p>

<p>We cannot control the future, we can only deal with the present, and as long as telework remains suboptimal for certain industries, propinquity will remain important. </p>

<p>

It depends on where you are. Nursing and community policing aren’t
going virtual anytime soon. There are lots of jobs where it does
work. If there weren’t, then India and China wouldn’t be such a
threat.

</p>

<p>Exactly - I dread the day when my job can truly be performed on a completely remote basis. </p>

<p>

A brilliant person can save you massive amounts of time and labor.
The person with the right knowledge and skills can do the work in
one week that could take someone else one, two or five years to do.
If you want to get your project done on time, you hire that guy and
deal with the social issues later on.

</p>

<p>Actually, you have to deal with the social issues immediately. A brilliant guy who nevertheless generates strife within the team can set you back for months, and perhaps kill the project entirely if for example, he incites key employees to quit or even resort to violence in an explosion of frustration. I’ve seen that happen myself. As a team leader, you can’t have that. </p>

<p>

Hiring the brilliant jerk is orthogonal to the way in which he is
hired.

</p>

<p>Actually, he wouldn’t be hired at all, nor should he be, if team performance is being optimized.</p>

<p>Now, granted, perhaps one could devise a system in which he would not need to interact within a team framework. But, again, you would need to know what the bounds of his social idiosyncracies are, and you could only know that through social capital.</p>