Sans Fig Leaf

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"Unrealistic Expectations"

1 August, 2002

So we had this booming economy. And parts of it were booming so much, that demand for certain skilled workers significantly exceeded demand. But a lot of venture capitalists were duped (or hoping to get their money back before the illusion was unveiled) into pumping billions of dollars into a lot of hare-brained businesses with laughable business plans, so thousands of young, barely skilled workers were hired for jobs they weren't qualified for and paid horrifically inflated salaries to do it.

Then the bubble burst and all those workers (and a lot of experienced ones) were left high and dry.

The economy is regrouping. Companies are repositioning. There's a big labor force out there ready to jump in the saddle and lead us out of the recession. Right?

Well, actually, a lot of them aren't.

Remember that bit about "jobs they weren't qualified for at horrifically inflated salaries?" There were a lot of them. I've met more than a few. Like a 20-year-old kid who doesn't know a Pica bar* from a candy bar and thinks that PMS* is something to do with women's hormones, but he was hired as a "Designer" by one of those dot-bombs, and paid $50,000 a year to design web pages, so now he won't look at any job that doesn't pay close to that and include the word "Designer" in the title.

Never mind that the "portfolio" pieces he showed me, some newsletters he designed, had so many poor design choices in them -- hard-to-read font chosen for body text, leading so tight lines of text run into each other, margins so narrow you can't tell columns apart, ad nauseum -- that I wouldn't hire him for an entry-level production artist job. He doesn't understand that in the real world, less than three years experience is the same as no experience. He's holding out for a designing job, and he expects to earn that high salary.

So he's scraping by on unemployment (which barely covers his rent, high-speed internet access, and utilities). I could spend some time quibbling about what he's choosing to spend his limited resources on. But the truth is that, from a big picture economic sense, it makes little difference what he spends his unemployment check on (for example, if he decided to move in with his parents to save on the rent, that just means there's one more empty apartment not generating money for some landlord).

The real tragedy is that he isn't even applying for jobs he might be qualified for. He's just sitting there, chatting on-line with friends, waiting for that high-paying design job to come pounding on his door.

I don't know how long he will sit there.

I fear that after he does get a job in keeping with his skills at an appropriate salary, that he will turn bitter. That he will wind up resenting everyone in general and no one in particular because he deserves better than "this." It's not his fault. He was sucked into the fantasy. He was chewed up and spat out by forces set in motion by people who have never even heard of him.

Even if they had, they're too busy (admiring their golden parachutes and positioning themselves for their next executive position) to worry about him.

So I'm left to worry about him and many others I know like him who have yet to realize that their expectations are unrealistic. Many of whom will, when the do realize it, lower their expectations so far that they will forget how to dream.

We can recover from natural disasters and man-made catastrophes; we can recover from personal setbacks; we can survive economic downturns, but if we lose are ability to dream, there may be nothing worth surviving for.

*A Pica bar is a ruler that measures in picas and points - units of measure used in printing. PMS is the Pantone Matching System, the standard ink mixing system used by off set printers everywhere. Both are basic things you learn before getting into any entry-level design job. Web designers got away without learning those things. Unfortunately, they usually also got away without learning other basics of design and layout.