The Entitlement Culture

You worked hard, you did your homework on time, got straight A's, and graduated from college with honors. What do you deserve? What are you entitled to? Many students graduating this past spring think they are entitled to a job that pays them at least as well as their peers from a couple of years previously are being paid; they think they are entitled to flex time, to email and surf the web whenever they are at work; to call in sick with a hangover whenever the weekend stretches an extra night or two. They worked hard during college and believe that they should be entitled to a pay off for all that hard work. Some even take it one ridiculous step further (and are then rewarded by some idiots )

Unfortunately the truth of the matter is that the the hard work has just begun. It doesn't get easier once college is over, I've found real life is actually a whole lot harder than 4 years at what our european peers like to derogatively call "Country Clubs." In real life, no one gives you an A for doing something well, in fact half the time your not even sure if you did it well or not. That environment is difficult for some people (especially those graduating in down economic times) to deal with.

I can empathize with the shock of coming into the real world because I know the feeling - My wife and I both graduated in 2002 during the fallout from the dot-com bust. Neither of us had a job lined up after college because we arrogantly thought we had earned some time off and there would be plenty of jobs for two eager and engaged young professionals when we decided it was time to look. We couldn't have been more wrong. By the time we got around to it in the fall of 2002, the job landscape for both developers and graphic designers was pretty much destroyed.

Coming out of school we effectively got hit over the with the "You Suck" stick enough that we took a step back and realized: college doesn't really mean crap in the real world. In good times, the name of the college on your diploma is enough to get an interview. In bad times, it might not even do that.

So what did we do? I worked for myself doing home IT (read: removing porn-related spyware from people's computers) and small business IT consulting (read: plugging in Ethernet cables, and, yup, still removing porn from the boss's computer) for a couple of years before starting to land development gigs off of web job boards and finally landing with a couple of larger jobs with clients that stuck. Martha stuck to her guns and temped for 6 months before finding someone who actually needed and wanted a junior graphic designer. Many design job postings at the time were getting 50-100 responses, with experienced out-of-work designers willing to take pay cuts to get a job.

Over the next couple of years, we slowly progressed upwards - I used to the freedom of working for myself to try to immerse myself as much as possible into web development - I figured the knowledge was very useful but temporary until I could get back to "real development" - and get up to speed on as many of technologies out there as possible. Eventually I progressed onto larger and more complicated systems while Martha steadily advanced in her trade and changed jobs a couple of times.

Two and half years ago Martha and I joined forces to create Cykod and we haven't looked back. We kicked and scratched our way up from small websites to larger sites with more and more features and are now moving to the next stage, from Web Consultants to Internet Startup, managing to stay small and independent. We just signed the lease on our first office space. To be completely honest, we're pretty happy with our situation, at the same time understanding that we're just one small notch up from the bottom on the life scale and still have a long we to go to be successful in the long term.

We also recognize that the past 7 years really don't mean jack for guarenteeing what's going to happen now. We're not entitled to any success just because we dug ourselves out of the first hole that we got ourselves into and we're more than likely going to fall right into the next one. That hard work we've done over the past couple of years doesn't mean we're going to end up with the next Facebook or Twitter. I'm am now optimistic that we're going to make it, but I understand that success is going to come as a struggle and I'm definitely not entitled to it just for showing up every day to that 8 o'clock class back in junior year.

I hate it when people look retrospectively back over hard times and say they wouldn't trade those difficult times for anything - so I won't lie and do that - I would have loved to have been successful right off the bat, but I will say that going through a little bit of hardship has made Martha and me a little less arrogant, and little more willing to consider other viewpoints and much more appreciative when good things come our way.