I wonder if there is a way to profitably exploit this?
Presumably bad news in the hiring market for new graduates is good news for YC: when the alternative to YC is picking up the phone and having Google and Microsoft getting into a bidding war over you, startups look insane, when the alternative is being a "parasite single" (wonderfully evocative Japanese English coinage for "lives with Mom and Dad"), having your ramen paid for for a few months must look pretty attractive. Granted, the vast majority of people capable of starting startups are probably much more employable than the average college graduate or the average inner-city dropout.
Is there anything the rest of us can do? "10% discount on lifetime wages if you hire during a recession" seems like it would matter if I were hiring, but I'm not. Does anybody have any other clever ideas?
I've got one: I can't offer anybody full-time employment but if somebody could vastly decrease the friction of employment I'd love to have employment available as a service. Something like what the India/Philippines virtual assistant companies perform, except with a more consistent level of quality.
Working for it wouldn't be the most fulfilling existence in the world, but it would pay for rent, food, and loan payments while folks look for more permanent opportunities, and the virtualized nature of it would make it more conducive to that than e.g. trying to get a job in food services. Plus, unlike your local On The Border, I'm not going to ask "So Joe, are you going to be available in 3 months or will you be going back to school?" because I have no particular need for Joe to be personally available in 3 months -- I don't have to train Joe, so it doesn't matter to me if I'm working with a new Joe come fall.
Currently I do a wee bit of this via freelancing, but freelancing requires friction from me -- I need to find freelancers, supervise them, pay them, find replacements when they flake out, file tax documents for them, etc etc. That's a whole lot of grunt work for something which is supposed to save me from doing the grunt work. I want the API to grunt work.
Presumably bad news in the hiring market for new graduates is good news for YC: when the alternative to YC is picking up the phone and having Google and Microsoft getting into a bidding war over you, startups look insane, when the alternative is being a "parasite single" (wonderfully evocative Japanese English coinage for "lives with Mom and Dad"), having your ramen paid for for a few months must look pretty attractive. Granted, the vast majority of people capable of starting startups are probably much more employable than the average college graduate or the average inner-city dropout.
Is there anything the rest of us can do? "10% discount on lifetime wages if you hire during a recession" seems like it would matter if I were hiring, but I'm not. Does anybody have any other clever ideas?
I've got one: I can't offer anybody full-time employment but if somebody could vastly decrease the friction of employment I'd love to have employment available as a service. Something like what the India/Philippines virtual assistant companies perform, except with a more consistent level of quality.
Working for it wouldn't be the most fulfilling existence in the world, but it would pay for rent, food, and loan payments while folks look for more permanent opportunities, and the virtualized nature of it would make it more conducive to that than e.g. trying to get a job in food services. Plus, unlike your local On The Border, I'm not going to ask "So Joe, are you going to be available in 3 months or will you be going back to school?" because I have no particular need for Joe to be personally available in 3 months -- I don't have to train Joe, so it doesn't matter to me if I'm working with a new Joe come fall.
Currently I do a wee bit of this via freelancing, but freelancing requires friction from me -- I need to find freelancers, supervise them, pay them, find replacements when they flake out, file tax documents for them, etc etc. That's a whole lot of grunt work for something which is supposed to save me from doing the grunt work. I want the API to grunt work.