10. In their time together, the father planted a powerful work ethic in his son. All work, Steve Jobs learned, was to be marked with excellence. When father and son painted a fence together, for example, the boy learned that the unexposed side was to be treated with the same thoroughness as the visible side.

11. "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.

10. The grandfather's injunction startled the grandson. But as the weeks pass, Scott Nicholson, handsome as a Marine officer in a recruiting poster, has gradually realized that his career will not roll out in the Greater Boston area - or anywhere in America —with the easy inevitability that his father and grandfather recall, and that Scott thought would be his lot, too, when he fmished college in 2008.

9. " I view what is happening to Scott with dismay," said the grandfather, who has concluded, in part from reading The Economist, that Europe has surpassed America in offering opportunity for an ambitious young man. "We hate to think that Scott will have to leave , " the grandfather said," but he will. "

8. Complicating the generational divide, Scott's grandfather, William S. Nicholson, a World War II veteran and a retired stock broker, has watched what he described as America's once mighty economic engine losing its pre-eminence in a global economy. The grandfather has encouraged his unemployed grandson to go abroad - to " Go West, " so to speak.

7. "You maneuvered and you did not worry what the maneuvering would lead to , " the father said. "You knew it would lead to something good. "

6. He was braced for the conversation with his father in particular. While Scott Nicholson viewed the Hanover job as likely to stunt his career , David Nicholson, 57, accustomed to better times and easier mobility, viewed it as an opportunity. Once in the door, the father has insisted to his son, opportunities will present themselves - as they did in the father's rise over 35 years to general manager of a manufacturing company.

5. "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.

4. 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.

3. 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.

2. 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 resume and cover letter - four or five a week, week after week.