105afterford

I have worked in candidate evaluations for a top finance company as well as some smaller companies and non-profits.

On references

On listing them: My recommendation to the OP and others is to not list or send your references on your resume unless it is specifically asked for upfront, and despite you suggesting that all employers ask for them, I disagree... Most companies, if they ask for references, will do so only after an initial interview. The benefit of this is that you can inform your references ahead of time that you are interviewing with a specific company for a specific position. As someone who has been a reference for several friends and colleagues,... (read more)

Don't think its a great example of "people wanting to die" as others have said below and gone into detail. I'm choosing to add to the conversation because I think there is a great takeaway from this and that is people value life for different reasons. They can crudely be defined as "simple-minded" or more appropriately "traditional" and represent a very large percent of the population. Those of you who grew up in rural areas like myself are likely very familiar with the archetype described by the OP. I think a great question from this is...

Should we be encouraging people to seek out a life with more questions, more complexity, and more... (read more)

My suggestion would be for your brother to pursue education in an area that is important, yet less familiar to him. Depending on what he chooses can help dictate the where he lives and how he could fund it.

Ex. I recently took 5 months in between jobs that were largely managerial and qualitative in nature to participate in a full-time code school program. Besides the practical use of learning to code, the greatest benefit to me was in the way it pushed me to be more structured with my thinking and explicit in my instructions to others. As your brother is a CS/Math major, I would think something along the lines of... (read more)