From the New York Times, August 10:
Growing up near
Silicon Valley, Manasi Mishra remembers seeing tech executives on social
media urging students to study computer programming.
“The
rhetoric was, if you just learned to code, work hard and get a computer
science degree, you can get six figures for your starting salary,” Ms.
Mishra, now 21, recalls hearing as she grew up in San Ramon, Calif.
Those
golden industry promises helped spur Ms. Mishra to code her first
website in elementary school, take advanced computing in high school and
major in computer science in college. But after a year of hunting for
tech jobs and internships, Ms. Mishra graduated from Purdue University
in May without an offer.
“I just graduated with a computer science degree, and the only company
that has called me for an interview is Chipotle,” Ms. Mishra said in a
get-ready-with-me TikTok video this summer that has since racked up more
than 147,000 views.
Since the early 2010s, a parade of billionaires , tech executives and even U.S. presidents has urged young people to learn coding, arguing that the tech skills would help bolster
students’ job prospects as well as the economy. Tech companies promised
computer science graduates high salaries and all manner of perks.
“Typically
their starting salary is more than $100,000,” plus $15,000 hiring
bonuses and stock grants worth $50,000, Brad Smith, a top Microsoft
executive, said in 2012 as he kicked off a company campaign to get more
high schools to teach computing.
The
financial incentives, plus the chance to work on popular apps, quickly
fed a boom in computer science education, the study of computer
programming and processes like algorithms. Last year, the number of
undergraduates majoring in the field topped 170,000
in the United States — more than double the number in 2014, according
to the Computing Research Association, a nonprofit that gathers data
annually from about 200 universities.
But now, the spread of A.I. programming tools, which can quickly generate thousands of lines of computer code — combined with layoffs at companies like Amazon , Intel , Meta and Microsoft
— is dimming prospects in a field that tech leaders promoted for years
as a golden career ticket. The turnabout is derailing the employment
dreams of many new computing grads and sending them scrambling for other
work.
Among college
graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering
majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent
and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank
of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among
recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent.
“I’m
very concerned,” said Jeff Forbes, a former program director for
computer science education and workforce development at the National
Science Foundation. “Computer science students who graduated three or
four years ago would have been fighting off offers from top firms — and
now that same student would be struggling to get a job from anyone.”
In response to questions from The New York Times ,
more than 150 college students and recent graduates — from state
schools including the universities of Maryland, Texas and Washington, as
well as private universities like Cornell and Stanford — shared their
experiences. Some said they had applied to hundreds, and in several
cases thousands, of tech jobs at companies, nonprofits and government
agencies.
The process can be arduous,
with tech companies asking candidates to complete online coding
assessments and, for those who do well, live coding tests and
interviews. But many computing graduates said their monthslong job
quests often ended in intense disappointment or worse: companies
ghosting them.
Some faulted the tech
industry, saying they felt “gaslit” about their career prospects. Others
described their job search experiences as “bleak,” “disheartening” or
“soul-crushing.”....
Art history eh? Gather round kids. Here's an eight-figure per annum career path for you. From the intro to September 2013's "Duveen: The Greatest Salesman Ever ":Wildenstein: The Art World's Most Powerful Dealer Family ".High-end art is one of the most manipulated markets in the world " that I'll link to again as tomorrow's weekend read.
"Europe has a great deal of art, and America has a great deal of money."
On that "Great deal of money", his buy-side clients included J.P.
Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, William Randolph Hearst, Henry Huntington, Jules Bache , Andrew Mellon and John D. Rockefeller.Duveen Brothers Resources
PROFILES
THE
DAYS OF DUVEEN
I ~
ITINERARY
S. N. Behrman
When Joseph Duveen, the most spectacular art dealer of all
time, travelled from one to another of his three galleries,
in Paris, New York, and London, his business, including a
certain amount of his stock in trade, travelled with him.
His business was highly personal, and during his absence his
establishments dozed. They jumped to attention only upon the
kinetic arrival of the Master. Early in life, Duveen—who
became Lord Duveen of Millbank before he died in 1939, at
the age of sixty-nine—noticed that Europe had plenty of art
and America had plenty of money, and his entire astonishing
career was the product of that simple observation. Beginning
in 1886, when he was seventeen, he was perpetually
journeying between Europe, where he stocked up, and America,
where he sold. In later years, his annual itinerary was
relatively fixed: At the end of May, he would leave New York
for London, where he spent June and July; then he would go
to Paris for a week or two; from there he would go to Vittel,
a health resort in the Vosges Mountains, where he took a
three-week cure; from Vittel he would return to Paris for
another fortnight; after that, he would go back to London;
sometime in September, he would set sail for New York, where
he stayed through the winter and early spring.
Occasionally, Duveen departed from his routine to help out a
valuable customer. If, say, he was in Paris and Andrew
Mellon or Jules Bache was coming there, he would
considerately remain a bit longer than usual, to assist
Mellon or Bache with his education in art. Although,
according to some authorities, especially those in his
native England, Duveen's knowledge of art was conspicuously
exceeded by his enthusiasm for it, he was regarded by most
of his wealthy American clients as little less than
omniscient. "To the Caliph I may be dirt, but to dirt I am
the Caliph!" says Hajj the beggar in Edward Knoblock's
"Kismet." Hajj's estimate of his social position
approximated Duveen's standing as a scholar.
To his major
pupils, Duveen extended extracurricular courtesies. He
permitted Bache to store supplies of his favorite cigars in
the vaults of the Duveen establishments in London and Paris.
One day, as Bache was leaving his hotel in Paris for his
boat train, he realized that he didn't have enough cigars to
last him for the Atlantic crossing. He made a quick detour
to Duveen's to replenish. Duveen was not in Paris, and Bache
was greeted by Bertram Boggis, then Duveen's chief assistant
and today one of the heads of the firm of Duveen Brothers.
While Bache was waiting for the cigars to appear, Boggis
showed him a Van Dyck and told him Duveen had earmarked it
for him. Bache was so entranced with the picture that he
bought it on the spot and almost forgot about the cigars; he
finally went off to the train with both. There was no charge
for storing the cigars, but the Van Dyck cost him two
hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.
Probably never before had a merchant brought to such
exquisite perfection the large-minded art of casting bread
upon the waters. There was almost nothing Duveen wouldn't do
for his important clients. Immensely rich Americans, shy and
suspicious of casual contacts because of their wealth, often
didn't know where to go or what to do with themselves when
they were abroad. Duveen provided entr é e
to the great country homes of the nobility; the
coincidence that their noble owners often had ancestral
portraits to sell did not deter Duveen. He also wangled
hotel accommodations and passage on sold-out ships. He got
his clients houses, or he provided architects to build them
houses, and then saw to it that the architects planned the
interiors with wall space that demanded plenty of pictures.
He even selected brides or bridegrooms for some of his
clients, and presided over the weddings with avuncular
benevolence. These selections had to meet the same refined
standard that governed his choice of houses for his
clients—a potential receptivity to expensive art....MUCH MORE
We'll
have the second of the six articles next week, in the meantime here's
one of the pictures that passed through Duveen's hands, Gainsborough's Blue Boy
Which was followed by
*****
One of the p aintings that passed through Duveen's hands, The Small Cowper Madonna by Raphael which had come down through the Earls of Cowper until Duveen bought it and then sold it to Peter Widerner.
This was a fairly typical example of Duveen's observation that "Europeans have a lot of art and American's have a lot of money".
Widener ranks as the 27th richest
American of all time while the Cowper clan held the Earldom for seven
generations before it went extinct in 1905. Duveen sold the painting for
a guesstimated $700,000 which was the highest price ever paid of a work
of art (until he sold the Gainsborough in part I of the series)
If interested see also:
