I bet you think this article is about trading in some fashion.

You're wrong - it's about our so-called "new generation":

The daily routine seldom varied. Mr. Nicholson, 24, a graduate of Colgate University, winner of a dean’s award for academic excellence, spent his mornings searching corporate Web sites for suitable job openings. When he found one, he mailed off a résumé and cover letter — four or five a week, week after week.

A bit late, no?  Graduate eh?  Don't you usually look for a job before you graduate?  Well, yes.  You'd think that someone with a degree would, after a large number of trials, change his strategy somewhat. 

Over the last five months, only one job materialized. After several interviews, the Hanover Insurance Group in nearby Worcester offered to hire him as an associate claims adjuster, at $40,000 a year. But even before the formal offer, Mr. Nicholson had decided not to take the job.

Oh.

Rather than waste early years in dead-end work, he reasoned, he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder.

Waste, eh?  Waste?

How is earning a living - you know, something you're supposed to do somewhere around your 18th birthday, "waste"?

Is it nice that one's parents will fund your mealy-mouthed existence into what appears to be perpetuity?  Well, yes.  But do you have a right to expect such a thing?  Well, no.

And while $40,000 might seem "beneath" a college grad, it is nearly double what my first "real" (that is, W-2) job earned - as a programmer.  That offer was $18,000, and I took it.

Why? 

I was hungry.

It's funny how that happens. When one examines the billfold and finds nothing in there but a couple of $20s, and that really is all you got, $18,000 a year (admitted, this was in the late 80s) doesn't sound so bad.  After all, it's a job, and if you can find an apartment for $500 a month or so (which I was able to) then you can make it work. 

Luxury, no.  "Easy street", no.  An honest living?  Yep.  Food on the table, even if not steak-and-lobster?  Yep.  Power to run your lights, fuel to heat your apartment?  Yep.  Enough to buy a jalopy that will get you to and from work?  Absolutely. 

“The conversation I’m going to have with my parents now that I’ve turned down this job is more of a concern to me than turning down the job,” he said.

Good thing he's not my kid.  24 eh?  Turned down a $40,000/year job and is continuing to sponge?  See door?  See door hit you in ass.

“I don’t think I fully understood the severity of the situation I had graduated into,” he said, speaking in effect for an age group — the so-called millennials, 18 to 29 — whose unemployment rate of nearly 14 percent approaches the levels of that group in the Great Depression. And then he veered into the optimism that, polls show, is persistently, perhaps perversely, characteristic of millennials today. “I am absolutely certain that my job hunt will eventually pay off,” he said.

This kid is voluntarily unemployed.  He was offered a decent-paying job that will keep him in a warm place to sleep with food on the table.  He turned it down.

So far, Scott Nicholson is a stranger to the triumphal stories that his father and grandfather tell of their working lives. They said it was connections more than perseverance that got them started — the father in 1976 when a friend who had just opened a factory hired him

Ah.  That kid (said father at the time) wasn't too damn proud to take a factory job.  He recognized that one puts food and clothing before pride.  In this case, educated or not, it meant going to work in a factory and earning a living.  You start somewhere, and that "somewhere" is often being paid less than you think you should get doing something you think is worth more than you were offered.

Guess what?  The employer probably thinks he's overpaying to some degree too. 

Such is the reality of work.  You must return more to your employer than you cost, or you will soon be unemployed.  You therefore must believe that you could be paid more than you are being paid - that you're being shorted in some fashion.  Likewise, your employer must believe he overpaid, even if just a bit.

The "mutually screwed" feeling means that you both made decent choices in the employment decision.   It's just how business works, whether you wish to admit it or not.  It has to be thus, because if you make "equal or more" than you're truly worth then your employer will eventually fail and you'll have no job at all.  That excess is why your employer is able to keep employing you - it's called profit, and is the reason he's in business!

From these accidental starts, careers unfolded and lasted. David Nicholson, now the general manager of a company that makes tools, is still in manufacturing. William Nicholson spent the next 48 years, until his retirement, as a stock broker. “Scott has got to find somebody who knows someone,” the grandfather said, “someone who can get him to the head of the line.”

No.  Scott needs to get on the damn train and then start working himself to the head of the line.

My personal experience:

• Took that $18,000 a year job banging code in a little shop outside of Chicago.
  
  
• Quit it when I deduced that the company was very likely to fail a bit over a year later, having spent my off-hours during that year banging my own code in a completely unrelated field, and thus having something to sell into the marketplace.
  
  
• Banged said code and started installing computers as part of a small business (formed with another gent - one of my friends.)  That was the "genesis" of MCSNet.
  
  
• That, as business later waned with the business cycle, opened a door to a job with a Fortune 50 company.
  
  
• That opened a door to an opportunity with a spin-off that was about to IPO.  Said job was possibly the brass ring, but not too long into it I deduced (correctly) that this business was going to fail too (despite the protests of the Haaarrrrvaaardddd MBA jackass who was very sure the business model was sound.  Remember me in your office Jim, telling you VideOcart was going to boom - more than a year before it did?)
  
  
• And THAT, ultimately, set in motion the events that led MCSNet, the remnants of which were up there a few steps, to turn into the opportunity in the Internet space that ultimately provided me my "nut" which, properly managed, led me to be able to "formally retire" before my 40th birthday.

Through all of this I kept working at things I thought were important at night and on weekends.  One of them was AKCS-WWW, which was a third-generation re-write of a software package originally written before Job #1 up above - on the TRS-80 family of computers.  The original re-write was done to put up an online forum for diving, primarily because I thought the existing ones sucked - specifically, their management personally sucked rotten eggs through a garden hose.

Did I think that would provide some "road to riches"?  No.  But guess what?  In 2007 that code base turned into Tickerforum - yet another opportunity that I paired with The Market Ticker to again express entrepreneurial spirit.

Along the way there were other pieces of code that got banged.  A database application for FSBO home, car and boat sellers, an expansion of the spam filtering software that I pioneered with MCSNet and others.  None turned into anything commercially significant, but all were significant investments of time and effort.  Failures, if you will - just like, if you wish to be formal about it, MCSNet's first incantation - after all, it was voluntarily shut down originally but was on the path to a business dirtnap.

From failure comes learning and from learning, with hard work, comes success.

I still bang code late into the night.  I've always got some sort of iron in the fire somewhere.  It's part of who I am.

Scott Nicholson also has connections, of course, but no one in his network of family and friends has been able to steer him into marketing or finance or management training or any career-oriented opening at a big corporation, his goal. The jobs are simply not there.

Yeah well I wanted to be a director or officer when I started out too - or something that would make the big bucks.  Reality is a bitch and you're not entitled to jack and crap in this world.  Get off your ass Scott.  You have a job offer, take it.  Figure out what you're good at and do it off-hours for you.  Build on the base and keep your eye open for the brass ring - but not from the parents basement in your diapers, er, boxers - from your own place with your own pride.

The outlook this time is not so clear. Starved for jobs at adequate pay, the millennials tend to seek refuge in college and in the military and to put off marriage and child-bearing. Those who are working often stay with the jobs they have rather than jump to better paying but less secure ones, as young people seeking advancement normally do. And they are increasingly willing to forgo raises, or to settle for small ones.

What's "adequate pay"?  $40,000 isn't?  Like hell.  Oh wait - "adequate" has been redefined to include $100/month cellphone bills, $30,000 cars every couple of years (with the $2,000+ annual insurance bills - after all, you're a "youthful driver") and a goddamn silver spoon in your mouth upon which is perched your morning Starbucks (at $5/day that's over $1,000 a year if you drink one every workday - coffee that made in a pot at home would run you $100 for the same year.)

Oh yeah, and let's not forget the $100,000+ in student loans you have to pay back because you were suckered into taking those so you'd have an "education" - one that you now realize does not provide you an immediate ticket to a $100,000+ annual salary.

Many hard-pressed millennials are falling back on their parents, as Scott Nicholson has. While he has no college debt (his grandparents paid all his tuition and board) many others do, and that helps force them back home.

Oh, the education was a handout too.  Great.

The Nicholsons, whose combined annual income is north of $175,000, have lavished attention on their three sons. Currently that attention is directed mainly at sustaining the self-confidence of their middle son.

Self-confidence comes from having your own checkbook and facing the cold, scary world alone.  Coming home to your own apartment - one that you have to fund with your own earnings.  Cooking the food in your own fridge - that you bought with your own funds.  Getting off your ass in the morning and dragging your butt into your car to get to work, even though you really don't feel like doing it - and doing your damndest in that job, simply because you can't afford to be fired - if you get fired you'll be under a freeway overpass in a couple of months.

THAT is that builds self-confidence.  Doing it.  Making it work.  Having it be hard. 

“I’m sitting with the manager, and he asked me how I had gotten interested in insurance. I mentioned Dave’s job in reinsurance, and the manager’s response was, ‘Oh, that is about 15 steps above the position you are interviewing for,’ ” Scott said, his eyes widening and his voice emotional.

Aw poor baby!

I recall quite vividly my interview for that $18,000 a year job.  The owner of the company, Russ, was a fat bastard.  Looked the part of the proverbial fatcat business owner with a cigar in his mouth - minus the cigar, as he preferred the thinner form of cancer-in-a-wrapper.  He and his "#1", named Sean (who was one of those silver-spoon jackasses, not much older than I, with a high-footing edmucation and a Porsche to match), grilled me for over an hour. 

At one point in the interview Russ asked me what my goal was.  I told him, bluntly and to his face: "To have your job."

He chuckled.  I'm sure he thought I was just another wet-behind-the-ears kid that would bang some code for him like any good slave and then go my way when I burned out and got tired of being abused.  Heh, we all make the best deal we can at the time, right?

Ten years later I had better than his job - boss of a little niche company in a dogshit strip business center in Schaumberg. 

I called home the corner office of the 26th Floor of 2 Prudential Plaza in Chicago, with the title "CEO" on the door - a company that I ultimately negotiated the sale of to Winstar Communications in 1998.

My advice to people in Scott's situation? 

Get off your ass and quit bitching.  More specifically, quit acting like a whiny petulant child in the mainstream press; your "interview" has now poisoned the well for all intelligent potential employers within a radius of 500 miles.

Yeah, you'll have to work.  You'll probably fail - I did more than once.  You'll suffer setbacks, you'll wonder about the stability of your job and how in the hell you're going to make rent if your job goes bye-bye - or worse, your employer does, dumping the entire complement on the street at once, all trying to fill the local burger joint job.  Been there done that - there was a time when all of Russ' employees - myself included - would take our Friday lunch-hour to run to his bank and cash our paychecks, lest some of them bounce!  (Of course this sort of surprise now comes to you courtesy of $500 in bounced transaction charges thanks to "direct deposit"!)

Don't go home and drink a beer.  Go home and think instead.  Do.  Find something you're good at and start prying at the corners of the world.  Find a lever, a niche, a manhole cover that's not bolted down and pry, pry, pry.  Pad your resume with successes, no matter how small, but more importantly, build your capabilities.  Do, not talk.

From adversity comes opportunity.  But opportunity doesn't mean you get it for free.  It means you have a shot at the ring, but you still must take the leap and grab.  You must do, and you must accept that you may fail - perhaps multiple times.  So what?

But for God's sake stop the damn whining and leaching.

And get rid of the $100 cellphone bill.  You can't afford it.