The current title is wrong (The idea that “Education leads to job” is not true anymore).
The real one on the page is : Hard-Core Career Advice For A 13-Year-Old
EDIT: ^ The title was updated
The author says: And remember, there are zero formal education requirements for what I do.
While this is true for the author, it is obviously wrong for any job in Engineering, Finance, Medical, Lawyer, ...
So the idea that "Education leads to a job" is and will always remain true for these sort of jobs. What can change is How to obtain that education: Through the traditional college system or a different one.
OT: Somehow this "tell the school what your parents doing" reminds me of a professor. He told me, when he was young, he worked as a developer at Siemens and could come to work late. So he always brought his daughter to school. Soon there was much buzz in the neighborhood about him being an unemployed deadbeat.
Part of education leading to a job requires you to actively seek education in a field that's hiring. The amount of young people I hear proclaiming how screwed they got by the system because they went to college and couldn't find a job (then you find out their major was art history) makes my head spin.
If you're going to school and majoring in something without a career path, don't whine there aren't businesses lining up at your door with 6-figure salaries just dying to hire you.
I think the issue is that's just the accepted path. Get good grades in high school, so you can get into a good college. Get good grades in college to get a good job. At 18 most people don't have a clue what they are supposed to be doing.
College is an easy choice—especially the stigma around those that don't go to college. There's also that ridiculous fact about how much college-educated people earn over their lifetime. What that doesn't take into account is the entire world changed after 2007.
It's not just that there's a stigma surrounding not going to college (which I think is exaggerated). It's that college, despite all of these problems and the obviously large amount of people getting screwed, is still the most sound investment a person can make in themselves.
People have always, and will always, complain about terrible jobs. That doesn't mean they made a stupid mistake which had an obviously better path. It just means they have a bad job.
Also in college you make contacts in the domain of your subject, which is hugely important.
For example I got my current job through one of my ex-lecturers.
Exactly. One of my former best friends did exactly this: graduated with a bachelor's in 2008, took one look at the job market and decided to get a master's degree. In Library Science. At a private university. In NYC.
She graduated in 2011 and is still continuously whining about how she can't find a job in her field (which is dying) and no one is hiring (in the areas she wants to live in) and she doesn't understand why people aren't lining up to hire her (despite the case she did zero interning or networking while in graduate school) see in case you didn't notice she got a Master's degree (and has zero soft or social skills) clearly that means she should just have a job handed to her!
Education is a good jumping off point for a lot of people and for a lot of jobs. However at some point education stops being an additive process and starts being really self-serving. Additive education is like going to school to be a doctor- you learn and you learn and you learn and you learn and at the end of it you have learned enough in a controlled environment to go off and be a doctor on your own. Self serving education is like getting a PhD in Medieval Literature- the only thing you can do with that degree is either go off and teach Medieval Literature to other students or maybe, MAYBE get a job as a historian in Medieval Literature.
Maybe it doesn't get expressed to college students enough, but internships/co-ops/volunteering are extremely important. It's the difference between getting an awesome job soon after school and 5+ years after school. A few people I know have basically refused to get internships (as in they thought about applying to one, shrugged, and gave up). Meanwhile, I knew a girl who went to an extremely small, private, liberal arts college in a small town in the middle of no where and majored in "Sports Management". Meanwhile, she volunteered for the local ice rink's summer hockey camp and got a part time job working with a university's hockey team. She did two summer internships with different lower level professional hockey teams. Her first job out of school - assisting with an NHL team's youth hockey program. There is almost no way she would have gotten that job without her other experience.
So how about requiring all (US) federal financial aid be given in the form of a fixed-percentage federal salary deduction for the first decade after graduation? The school has to defer the aided portion of tuition, getting paid AFTER making their student valuable to the market. If the student isn't very valuable in that first decade (when the school's contribution is maximum), the school doesn't recover much money.
I imagine schools would howl about how they have no possible way of knowing what might make their students more valuable in the future while at the same time becoming noticeably less likely to steer their lower-income students into a Marxist Film major and more toward something in healthcare, accounting, or engineering (if qualified) or maybe a 2-yr tech or trade specialty if engineering is too much of a stretch.
> "actively seek education in a field that's hiring"
not exactly. One of the key points in this article is that certain "meta-skills" are as important, or moreso, than field-specific skills. You don't need a degree or formal education for most fields (outside of medicine, law, and engineering.) You can make a pretty decent living doing all sorts of things, if you can solve other peoples' problems, get stuff done, and handle pressure.
You probably don't learn those things majoring in art history. But you might learn those things working as a janitor while you're paying your way through an art history degree.
To be fair, a lot of people at 18 (including me) were really sold on the idea that "nobody cares what you majored in, just that you have a degree."
My freshman year, I couldn't decide if I should major in something that 'made sense' or if I should dive into film. I decided to talk to the school guidance counselors. They encouraged me to get into film, spouted off statistics ("85% of people don't hold jobs in their major!"), and encouraged me to follow that passion.
Well, I didn't realize at the time that, yeah, maybe 85% of the population didn't get their job because of their degree, but it's because the jobs they got were service-industry.
It's definitely my fault for trusting them with that kind of decision, but I believed they were authorities on the subject. Anyway, I'm back to programming now, so I guess I'm part of the 85%.
Then maybe we should stop pushing the myth of "do what you love." There's nothing wrong with doing a job that you hate, going home, and using your acquired money to do what you love in your free time. The kids aren't creating this idea out of nowhere; this is handed down as the modern American dream from a generation that lived in an era of enormous lateral socioeconomic movement.
We should probably stop looking down on people who do this (by choice or by necessity) and just embrace the fact that much of HN's readership is extraordinarily lucky that their job is their passion. Maybe if we taught that it's okay to have a job you dislike so long as it affords the things you do like, people would stop complaining that they didn't pull a winning lottery ticket like they were "supposed" to do.
"Then maybe we should stop pushing the myth of "do what you love." There's nothing wrong with doing a job that you hate,"
We should stop pushing the myth, yes, but we should not fall into the opposite extreme. The situation is in reality quite complicated and there are far more choices than "do what you love and be bankrupt" and "do what you hate and make money", and, for once, the complication works out in your favor.
Job seekers: Make a list of your interests and talents. If you don't have a list, either think harder, or start trying some new things, stat. Order them vaguely by how much you like them. Now, go down the list, look out in the world, and ask what kind of living you can expect to make with that skill/talent/interest. Be realistic; for example, some musicians may make millions upon millions, but the median outcome is fairly poor. And be realistic about your level of talent/interest/dedication.
Most people really ought to be able to find something that is both at least sort of interesting and at least sort of economically viable. After all, in the US, even "median" income is a pretty good outcome, especially if you don't hate your job.
I practice what I preach. Technically, in a perfectly-aligned-for-jerf world, computer programmer is my second choice of job. My first-place job would be a music composer, preferably for games. (That's not just because "games are cool", but I actually like the idea of trying to create soundtracks that match up with the desired moods, and especially at the time games had much more interesting soundtracks than movies.) However, a sober and realistic examination of my skills, interests, and talents, matched up with my assessment of a rather high likelihood of total failure as a musician, along with the incredibly small number of slots available even under the best of circumstances, led me to discard that option, no matter how passionate about it I was. Everything in the 15 years since I graduated with my computer science degree has only reinforced my belief that I would have been a miserable economic failure as a composer. (It isn't necessarily "lack of talent", but that my talents led in a not-very-lucrative direction.)
I did that a long time ago... I had to decide between becoming a professional musician, or going back to school to become a software engineer. I looked at the relative outcomes, and here I am.
In the basement studio I can afford to have because I make a good living, I have a framed dollar on the wall. I call it "The last dollar I made as a musician".
I think my case toes the line. I graduated in '09 with a BS in Applied Economics, most of my work was statistics/stata oriented. I had planned on going to law school. Well the floor fell out from under everything the summer before I graduated. What was I to do? No one wanted to hire me, all my work through college was in sysadmin/computer repair work. I was just a generalist and going for more school (MBA or law) didn't guarantee work, just more debt.
It took me two years of rambling around and finally I went back towards what I was always good with, computers. Flash forward 6 years later and I'm a developer who is making a comfortable living. I'm glad I have my degree in econ, I love the field, but I do feel like there is window of us who did get screwed as we made choices on the current economy, not the future economy 4 years later.
This is the direction that interests me most and what I will want to be doing in my 30s. Still have a ways to go as I started in the frontend and now I'm doing mostly full stack work.
"STEM" is so all-encompassing as to make a lot of generalizations about it useless, one of which being that we have a "STEM shortage". Yes, we have a shortage of some fields that fall under the STEM umbrella. Not so for other fields. It's not a useful statement to make.
The math field is being cannibalized by tech and finance, and the only sciences doing at all well are those with direct applications to healthcare or war materiel.
So if you throw the existing 'M' in with the 'T', and replace it with an 'H' for Healthcare, then fold the remaining part of the 'S' into 'M' for Military, we might have a "METH shortage".
I'm looking at some engineering jobs site now and there are almost 6,000 job postings for chemical engineers. Could you elaborate on what problems you've encountered trying to get a job in the field? I ask in seriousness - just trying to understand what exactly is going on out there. Like, what are potential employers saying to you? Like, is it a specialization thing?
Chemical engineering is a booming field (although maybe a bit less with oil prices down lately, I've been out of the loop for a couple years). Chemistry isn't.
Yeah, I get that, but it seems that the economy is looking to fill "chemistry" jobs in general, and it's hard to believe that there could be such a dearth of chemical engineers while at the same time a glut of chemists. So, what's going on here?
What's going on is that companies don't want to pay an inexperienced chemist to learn on the job; they want to hire an experienced chemical engineer for a discount.
This is happening all over the sciences. Drug companies routinely have jobs open (while they're laying off senior research staff elsewhere...), but good luck getting one of those jobs as a new PhD grad. It's almost as hard -- perhaps harder -- to get a "scientist" position at a drug company as it is to get a faculty position in academia. Think about that.
In my early years at college, I took the necessary classes to support a double major in Computer Science and Chemistry. Then I took a look at the available jobs. I dropped the Chemistry down to a minor, and went for another minor in Cognitive Science.
It was either that, or bump the Chemistry over to Chemical Engineering, and that seemed like too much extra work on top of CompSci.
One of the factors that will contribute to the collapse of higher education in the US is the disconnect between the degrees granted and the available jobs that require that specific degree. The universities are offering a gross disservice by blithely allowing students into a degree program before sitting their naive asses down in front of someone who will tell them in great detail how difficult it will be for them to actually get a job in their chosen field.
If they're fine with working retail and food service, fine, let the students in. If they want to pay off their loans, perhaps suggest a related but more remunerative field of study. Instead of Chemistry, why not try Chemical Engineering? Instead of Library Science, perhaps Computer Science with an emphasis on databases? Instead of Art History, maybe look into conservation and restoration, or perhaps try the business school for help managing galleries and museums? Otherwise, they're doing no better than offering expensive classes in buggy-whip manufacture. That field can now support maybe one whole person, who would probably also need to be Amish. A university does not need to teach that one guy. He can apprentice himself to the previous buggy-whip maker.
It's hard to blame high school kids for this failure, though. I don't know what's changed in the last 25 years, but when I was in high school, this was not a topic of discussion. There was an expectation that you would go to college, that you were to choose from a list of majors, and whatever you chose, someone apparently would be waiting for you to walk out of your graduation ceremony to offer you a job in that field.
I knew many people in college that seemed to still have this idea in their senior year. They had given absolutely no thought to the employment process and how the degree in their chosen major was going to help or hinder.
Even though it should have been very obvious to me that I should do something with computers, in high school I decided I wanted to be a physicist because it "sounded fun". It took me 2 years of college to realize I was terrible at it, and there were absolutely zero career prospects on the other end of that degree. It seemed I was destined to make coffee for a PHd for the rest of my life for maybe $20k a year. Then one day I was writing some code after school like I'd done every day of my life, and the lightbulb turned on and I felt pretty stupid about it. Luckily 2 years into a physics major is a good time to switch to comp sci.
But who is handing out the correct advice to young people today? Is it getting to them? Are they processing it?
> you would go to college, that you were to choose from a list of majors, and whatever you chose, someone apparently would be waiting for you to walk out of your graduation ceremony to offer you a job in that field.
Is this actually true, though? This kind of makes it sound like everyone who went to college in the 70s and 80s was on easy street, but I don't know if that's reality or nostalgia.
Definitely not true, but it felt to me like that's the impression most of us had. Though, getting out of college in the mid to late 90s was a pretty great time for job prospects. Once it sank in that your Marine Biology degree wasn't going to get you a 6 figure job swimming with dolphins, there were plenty of fast growing companies eager to suck up any warm bodies.
This may just be my graduating class, at my school, but when I graduated, there were 5 people (out of 34-ish) that weren't employed as they graduated.
Every other person had interned/worked, and had a full-time position.
But this was engineering, and I think I was lucky to go to school with a bunch of really bright people, because I learned a lot from them. I have no doubt it's different in other areas.
It is an ill-made system where colleges charge 100k of dollars without having to disclose or be responsible for dooming lots of people to debt and make a killing on it.
And most of the people that make the decision to go to college do it before being old enough to vote, drink, and a bunch of other things that as a society they are deemed to be unfit to do.
Of course people should be more aware of this,but instead of blaming people,finding ways to improve the system helps everyone. I strongly think colleges should have a legal requirement to disclose employment data to anyone picking any major.
Maybe it's just that work as a matter of life or death is slowly becoming unsustainable. With the Great Wage Decoupling, there aren't tremendously many jobs that provide a decent living out there. Maybe it's time to implement basic income in the developed world.
I think liberal arts could prepare people well for various jobs. Writing well could be very useful in today's social media landscape, for example.
So I think it is not the choice of major, but the associated expectations. They would still require some creative thinking to create their jobs.
What I saw several times, for example, was people studying to become journalists. This was a couple of years ago when I was still a student myself. When I asked them about their goals, they mentioned writing for some popular newspaper.
It boggled my mind that they would be studying journalism and not have their own blog and be unaware of the developments in media...
I'll counter that with an anecdote. My wife's previous employer, a boutique consulting firm in DC, hires liberal arts majors almost exclusively. Very smart young adults... Dean's list, multiple languages (rare in the US), etc. And at pretty good salaries ($70k+ if I'm remembering correctly).
Contrast that with a string of recent CS graduates I've interviewed this year. 80% or more have been woefully unprepared for work in the field. I'm not sure what they're being taught, but it certainly isn't anything remotely like computer science in the business world.
Point being, if you're a mediocre student, your job prospects aren't that great, regardless of major. And if you're actually smart, the jobs are out there.
A few have been unable to discuss basic CS concepts to the point they should get refunds from their colleges. These were mostly smaller liberal arts schools.
Most are unable to work through basic design problems on the whiteboard (not programming and don't require couplex algorithms). I'm not looking for perfect answers - I just want them to talk through their thought process and ask intelligent questions.
Some number of these people only go to university because they are told they need a degree to get a good job. (The fact that they need the right degree to get a good job is strangely elided.)
What we need is more trade schools, without the stigma that they are somehow a lesser choice than a university. Rather than being judged on how many prestigious scholars and elite businessmen graduated, their main criteria is typically job placement after graduation. That's good news; it aligns their interest to properly prepare you to have a professional career after graduation.
So, as I look round the business I work in, I see people who work in sales, marketing, quality assurance, analyst relations, product management, HR, middle management, procurement... I think most of them graduated from colleges. I doubt most of them majored in a subject that narrowed down their career choice to these roles, though. Some may even have art history degrees.
Just because 'developer' as a job seems to be a good match for people who graduated from computer science or software engineering programs (and honestly, in some cases I'd dispute whether that's the case, too) doesn't mean every job should have a four year degree program that feeds directly into it, or that if your four year degree doesn't slot you directly into a workplace role it has no value.
It's not about whether your degree is a perfect fit for the job. Your degree is simply getting your foot in the door. Some people find another path to getting their foot in the door (IE: knowing someone who already works there). But if you don't have that luxury, a degree in an appropriate field is your next best chance.
"One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee."
I think you could've chosen a better example. Wittgenstein was smart, but he never did anything focused precisely because of his lack of discipline. He just poured all his thoughts on paper for others to figure out.
Every book on and by famous/rich/successful people I've ever read touches on the subject on discipline and it can all be summed up with this: motivation, curiosity and drive fade away - in the end, only discipline is left to get you through the hardest mile.
I second this... if there is anything I regret in life it is my contemptuous attitude toward discipline through my younger years, which has lead to lots of bad habits in adult years.
I'd be willing to bet that when all those failed startup people spend a good 5-10 years thinking some more about their failures, the number 1 reason won't be "product-market fit", it'll be a lack of discipline in one or more areas (development, spending, sales).
Discipline is the muscle that needs to be worked so that when shit gets heavy, you don't just drop it.
Really it's about developing the behavioral pathways in your brain, your second nature if you will. For me, when something hard comes up, I automatically try to find a way around it or some way to accomplish the goal without dealing with the hard thing.
This is great for my creative problem solving skills since I'm able to automatically think outside the box and find workarounds to hard problems that can't feasibly be worked through.
However, when there is no workaround, actually convincing myself to do the hard work is extremely tough... my brain keeps automatically pausing and trying to find an easier way around and in those pauses I find it very easy to be distracted and a reason to put off the hard work just a little longer.
So yeah, sticking to a studying schedule would be a good way to exercise that discipline.
By discipline, I mean the willpower to go on when all motivators have failed but the logic still says that the current path is correct.
When you know that a task needs to be done, yet your body and your brain tell you to leave it for later, that they're too tired, that it's not worth it, etc.
When you know a task needs to be done to achieve the goal yet most of your colleagues and even part your own brain tells you to stop because... reasons, excuses.
I don't know how else to explain it, you just don't stop until the goal is reached, and long before that, motivation, excitement, curiosity, drive, and whatever else emotional factors people have will most likely have stopped...
That same page shows that displaying self-discipline/delayed gratification as a child depends on whether people who have authority over you act in a reliably honest way.
Often when the Marshmallow study is being quoted, they leave out half of the story. Which is that the kids who managed to not eat the Marshmallow didn't do it via iron discipline. They managed it by distracting themselves with other things (for example reciting poems or whatever). So maybe it was more about imagination than self discipline.
Or you could say it was about self discipline, but self discipline is not what we traditionally think it is.
This is terrible advice. Self education, entrepreneurship, etc, does not come easily to everyone. For most people, getting an education and starting a career is a safe, stable path.
So, drop out of school, become an author, podcaster, and an accredited investor.
Nothing inherently wrong with any of those professions, except very few people are successful at them. Not to mention the prerequisite of a high net worth to become an accredited investor.
But maybe this is actually advice for a single 13 year old with a sizeable security net.
Was about to say something similar. I think this is a terrible article mixed with some modern day and applicable wisdom. But given that it is on Techcrunch....oh well.
I think this guy got a payday by working on a fund with Jim Cramer, who probably made all the money by way of insider trading.
The moral of the story is ride the right coattails, don't be afraid to do some sketchy shit, and then if you luck out and get some money, then spend a bunch of time giving fairly dumb advice that has nothing to with your own success.
Don't we actually need doctors, lawyers, researchers, critics, engineers? I realise he wasn't saying that everyone should become an entrepreneur like he is, but it's worth saying that grades are important.
Agreed, this is advice that's steeped in Silicon Valley culture. Not everyone has the same resources, nor does everyone need to be some sort of entrepreneur.
Rather than add to the noise by podcasting/blogging, better advice would be to connect with most talented people who do what you do and learn from them. If you find that you have a platform and something to say, then do so.
I couldn't help but think of Mel Brooks' History of the World, pt.1 when reading the initial answer to "What do you do?". Could've been summed up as:
"What is the name of your occupation? What are the educational requirements to work in your career?"
"So I am a writer (I write books and articles). I’m a podcaster (I’ve had 10 million downloads of my podcast). I speak occasionally. And I advise or invest in over 30 different companies."
Writer comes off as a bit smug.. Also what domain do they work in?
I'm guessing they already had family, other contacts, or just the social status that allowed them to attain this arrangement.
Its hard to imagine a poverty stricken inner-city youth doing the same.
I did some brief research and I'd call it a mixed bag. Looks like he definitely had a high-tech upbringing, but not necessarily a silver spoon.
Wikipedia mentions he attended Cornell and CMU (PhD).
Freakonomics blog says "He grew up in a middle-class family that lived beyond its means, in large part because his dad was about to hit it big with a computer business and the family was banking on that success. Then the success happened, and the family lived even larger — until the business suddenly fell apart, leaving everyone devastated.
Years later, James struck out on his own and he, too, struck it big."
I think he being too flippant toward teenagers. Unless he is going to give his daughter a large trust fund allowance to live off of (which he sounds like he could afford), she'll need to focus on a careers path or two to make money and give life meaning. A career doesnt have to be a 9-5 job or solely to make money, as I think he is trying to say in his essay. And a person could change paths every few years as opportunity affords.
Plus I know a number of generally older adults who dont really have careers or jobs anymore. They managed to squirrel away enough savings or an income stream. Some may have major hobbies or projects you could call a vocation. Some just drift along.
Can we please take a second to notice that, almost by the definition of capitalism, "become an investor" is not career advice remotely helpful to anyone but the most privileged?
There is a lot of survivor bias here - many people who try to make their own business just plain fail. People who try to do so without already having had some work experience and savings built up often end up just scraping by at or below the poverty line, just trying to make ends meet.
Encouraging a 20 year old who is well educated, just without that final degree to quit and start their own thing is far different than telling your 13 year old daughter to quit school.
And saying that multi-millionaires have a diverse set of income streams does not mean that their first million did not come from a more focused effort in one specific area.
I'm not arguing that higher education is for everyone - clearly, it is not. But saying that nobody even needs a high school level of education is not a claim I am going to support.
My advice to a 13 year old is more along the lines of, keep learning, keep having fun, enjoy your teenage years, make teenage mistake while you still have the support structure of your parents (whether you like it or not), and just enjoying being young without too many responsibilities. There is no need to rush teenagers into adulthood.
> keep learning, keep having fun, enjoy your teenage years
Didn't learn squat from 5-10th grade. 11th and 12th I got into AP curriculum with fantastic teachers. I still talk to them. But you need fantastic instructors, the kind who would have been professors if they were not so selfless to work in public education, to make that happen.
It won't happen for 99% of children. I got incredibly lucky my last two years.
But the inbetween? The monotony of public educators with tenure, in the years between when I had learned the "basics" (arithmetic, reading, national and global history) <aside, I do need to mention that home ec and cooking were amazing classes to have in 6th grade, and were an exception to a multi-year rule> was a void. I spent my days playing Neverwinter Nights and learning NWScript (and thus basic C) to build campaigns for a multiplayer persistent world I was constantly on. This was in the years before World of Warcraft, which consumed the later years, and with those an education in Lua and engine hacking.
It is always incredibly harmful to assume schooling == learning. Even the social aspect is wrong - its an artificial setting. Bullying only exists as a pandemic when you are forced by law to be next to your bullies eight hours a day. The rest of us have the freedom to leave those people behind. You acquire no real world social experience in public education, just look at how out of whack everyone is their freshmen year when suddenly you are interacting with people voluntarily and can pick and chose your associations for the first time in your life.
It was not fun. It was not enjoyable. It was a purgatory. And I now have a 12 year old brother whom I can see the exact same thing happening to. And it will happen to millions of children every year until someone puts their foot down with the authority to do so and say this machine we grind the creative spark and imagination out of the younger generation in needs to stop, because I was lucky, and most are not.
On the other hand, as a teenager you can try many things that you later simply won't have time for. It's a shame if that time that could be used for exploration is wasted on cramming useless knowledge in school.
I would plead for a better school rather than dropping out, though. It's depressing that apparently even Altucher who is supposedly a millionaire can not find a decent school for his kids.
>I would plead for a better school rather than dropping out, though. It's depressing that apparently even Altucher who is supposedly a millionaire can not find a decent school for his kids.
Totally agree with the first part. School is only a waste if you go a mediocre school. There are plenty of excellent public and private schools available in the US. And most of the people browsing HN during working hours can afford the neighborhoods where those schools are located. Fixing the broken schools in less affluent areas is a more difficult problem.
I also find is astonishing that somebody who graduated from Cornell, then pursued a PhD at CMU would advocate for their own child to drop out of school at age 13. It's truly flabbergasting. Is he really asserting that he would be in the same, or better, position today had he skipped 4 years of high school, 4 years of undergraduate at one elite university, and then another handful of years at a second elite university? I'm calling shenanigans.
Yes, like the GP said, plenty of survivor bias. It's easy to say stuff like that after you have succeeded. But succeeding takes a lot more than dropping out of school and following your dreams™. Above all, it takes hard work, and it takes plenty of luck.
"keep learning, keep having fun, enjoy your teenage years"
That would be very nice indeed, but the way the current education system is structured, engaging a child's mind seems to be the educators' last priority. I can't remember another time in my life when I was so bored and restless as middle/high school.
People always talk about wishing they were kids again. Not me - the mere thought of having to sit through all those dull and mundane lectures makes me shudder.
I don't have enough karma (I guess?) to downvote this but if I could I would.
This article is terrible advice as has been pointed out already by many people in this thread but I just wanted to add my two cents.
"Academic education", up to undergraduates imo, is not so much about what you actually learn, but about the learning aptitudes and social aptitudes that the experience makes you develop. I think we can all relate.
This person seems to make massive generalisations from his (rather lucky I'd imagine) personal experience.
- Don't get (yourself|your girlfriend) pregnant.
- Don't get addicted to any drugs.
- Don't wreck my car after you turn 16.
- Take as many AP-prep classes as you can.
- Play in the band or orchestra.
- Take Spanish as your foreign language.
- Read books that are not required.
- Learn basic electronics.
- Take as many credit-equivalent tests (AP|IB|CLEP) as you can.
- Apply for all the scholarships. Yes, *all*.
- Avoid loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcy.
- When in doubt, choose the major that requires more math.
- Girls, don't get married before 22.
- Boys, don't get married, ever.
'- (Yes, I know this is incompatible advice.)
- Skip the reception; spend it on the honeymoon.
I decline to give much career advice, because the best jobs in the future probably don't even exist now. But whatever X is, the X Engineer will be paid more than anyone else in the X field.
Or, if your first language is anything other than English, take English as your foreign language. If you want a second foreign language, consider Mandarin.
"Skip the reception; spend it on the honeymoon" implies that the boys aren't going to listen to "Boys, don't get married, ever". But that second one is bad advice anyway - getting married was incredibly good for me. Instead, I'd say "Wait forever rather than marry the wrong person."
Of course they aren't going to listen to it. It's only there to stop them from getting married until they are mature enough to make serious life decisions without relying on advice from older people. The full, implied text would be, "Boys, don't get married, ever, [until you are mature enough to ignore this advice]."
And as in my observation, girls mature emotionally on a much more reliable schedule than boys, my advice to them is mostly to ward off the disaster that comes from trying to re-forge a boyfriend into a husband when he is clearly not ready for that yet. When he finally is ready, now he may need to get divorced before getting married. The implied advice is thus "Girls, don't get married before 22 [because it is extremely unlikely that any of the eligible men you have ever met before that time would be ready for the responsibility]."
It's very US-centric advice. And if your first language isn't English, you'll have a bit of difficulty following it anyway.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadEDIT: ^ The title was updated
The author says: And remember, there are zero formal education requirements for what I do.
While this is true for the author, it is obviously wrong for any job in Engineering, Finance, Medical, Lawyer, ...
So the idea that "Education leads to a job" is and will always remain true for these sort of jobs. What can change is How to obtain that education: Through the traditional college system or a different one.
If you're going to school and majoring in something without a career path, don't whine there aren't businesses lining up at your door with 6-figure salaries just dying to hire you.
College is an easy choice—especially the stigma around those that don't go to college. There's also that ridiculous fact about how much college-educated people earn over their lifetime. What that doesn't take into account is the entire world changed after 2007.
EDIT: Wrote a bit more about why people think they need to go to college a couple years ago. http://solomon.io/experience-deficiency/
People have always, and will always, complain about terrible jobs. That doesn't mean they made a stupid mistake which had an obviously better path. It just means they have a bad job.
She graduated in 2011 and is still continuously whining about how she can't find a job in her field (which is dying) and no one is hiring (in the areas she wants to live in) and she doesn't understand why people aren't lining up to hire her (despite the case she did zero interning or networking while in graduate school) see in case you didn't notice she got a Master's degree (and has zero soft or social skills) clearly that means she should just have a job handed to her!
Education is a good jumping off point for a lot of people and for a lot of jobs. However at some point education stops being an additive process and starts being really self-serving. Additive education is like going to school to be a doctor- you learn and you learn and you learn and you learn and at the end of it you have learned enough in a controlled environment to go off and be a doctor on your own. Self serving education is like getting a PhD in Medieval Literature- the only thing you can do with that degree is either go off and teach Medieval Literature to other students or maybe, MAYBE get a job as a historian in Medieval Literature.
I imagine schools would howl about how they have no possible way of knowing what might make their students more valuable in the future while at the same time becoming noticeably less likely to steer their lower-income students into a Marxist Film major and more toward something in healthcare, accounting, or engineering (if qualified) or maybe a 2-yr tech or trade specialty if engineering is too much of a stretch.
not exactly. One of the key points in this article is that certain "meta-skills" are as important, or moreso, than field-specific skills. You don't need a degree or formal education for most fields (outside of medicine, law, and engineering.) You can make a pretty decent living doing all sorts of things, if you can solve other peoples' problems, get stuff done, and handle pressure.
You probably don't learn those things majoring in art history. But you might learn those things working as a janitor while you're paying your way through an art history degree.
My freshman year, I couldn't decide if I should major in something that 'made sense' or if I should dive into film. I decided to talk to the school guidance counselors. They encouraged me to get into film, spouted off statistics ("85% of people don't hold jobs in their major!"), and encouraged me to follow that passion.
Well, I didn't realize at the time that, yeah, maybe 85% of the population didn't get their job because of their degree, but it's because the jobs they got were service-industry.
It's definitely my fault for trusting them with that kind of decision, but I believed they were authorities on the subject. Anyway, I'm back to programming now, so I guess I'm part of the 85%.
Who's telling high schoolers this? I don't think it's ever been true in recent history. Unless they're applying lowest-common-denominator logic?
We should probably stop looking down on people who do this (by choice or by necessity) and just embrace the fact that much of HN's readership is extraordinarily lucky that their job is their passion. Maybe if we taught that it's okay to have a job you dislike so long as it affords the things you do like, people would stop complaining that they didn't pull a winning lottery ticket like they were "supposed" to do.
If I had just done what I loved out of high school, I would have watched TV between efforts to get together with girls and alcohol.
We should stop pushing the myth, yes, but we should not fall into the opposite extreme. The situation is in reality quite complicated and there are far more choices than "do what you love and be bankrupt" and "do what you hate and make money", and, for once, the complication works out in your favor.
Job seekers: Make a list of your interests and talents. If you don't have a list, either think harder, or start trying some new things, stat. Order them vaguely by how much you like them. Now, go down the list, look out in the world, and ask what kind of living you can expect to make with that skill/talent/interest. Be realistic; for example, some musicians may make millions upon millions, but the median outcome is fairly poor. And be realistic about your level of talent/interest/dedication.
Most people really ought to be able to find something that is both at least sort of interesting and at least sort of economically viable. After all, in the US, even "median" income is a pretty good outcome, especially if you don't hate your job.
I practice what I preach. Technically, in a perfectly-aligned-for-jerf world, computer programmer is my second choice of job. My first-place job would be a music composer, preferably for games. (That's not just because "games are cool", but I actually like the idea of trying to create soundtracks that match up with the desired moods, and especially at the time games had much more interesting soundtracks than movies.) However, a sober and realistic examination of my skills, interests, and talents, matched up with my assessment of a rather high likelihood of total failure as a musician, along with the incredibly small number of slots available even under the best of circumstances, led me to discard that option, no matter how passionate about it I was. Everything in the 15 years since I graduated with my computer science degree has only reinforced my belief that I would have been a miserable economic failure as a composer. (It isn't necessarily "lack of talent", but that my talents led in a not-very-lucrative direction.)
In the basement studio I can afford to have because I make a good living, I have a framed dollar on the wall. I call it "The last dollar I made as a musician".
Really? You don't see anything wrong with that?
It took me two years of rambling around and finally I went back towards what I was always good with, computers. Flash forward 6 years later and I'm a developer who is making a comfortable living. I'm glad I have my degree in econ, I love the field, but I do feel like there is window of us who did get screwed as we made choices on the current economy, not the future economy 4 years later.
Your stats background could prob make you a lot of money if you could shift into data science. The stats + programming would be a good fit.
People drop the art major line constantly, but it's whole swathes of the sciences, engineering etc. that are out of work now.
The math field is being cannibalized by tech and finance, and the only sciences doing at all well are those with direct applications to healthcare or war materiel.
So if you throw the existing 'M' in with the 'T', and replace it with an 'H' for Healthcare, then fold the remaining part of the 'S' into 'M' for Military, we might have a "METH shortage".
Chemical engineering is a booming field (although maybe a bit less with oil prices down lately, I've been out of the loop for a couple years). Chemistry isn't.
This is happening all over the sciences. Drug companies routinely have jobs open (while they're laying off senior research staff elsewhere...), but good luck getting one of those jobs as a new PhD grad. It's almost as hard -- perhaps harder -- to get a "scientist" position at a drug company as it is to get a faculty position in academia. Think about that.
It was either that, or bump the Chemistry over to Chemical Engineering, and that seemed like too much extra work on top of CompSci.
One of the factors that will contribute to the collapse of higher education in the US is the disconnect between the degrees granted and the available jobs that require that specific degree. The universities are offering a gross disservice by blithely allowing students into a degree program before sitting their naive asses down in front of someone who will tell them in great detail how difficult it will be for them to actually get a job in their chosen field.
If they're fine with working retail and food service, fine, let the students in. If they want to pay off their loans, perhaps suggest a related but more remunerative field of study. Instead of Chemistry, why not try Chemical Engineering? Instead of Library Science, perhaps Computer Science with an emphasis on databases? Instead of Art History, maybe look into conservation and restoration, or perhaps try the business school for help managing galleries and museums? Otherwise, they're doing no better than offering expensive classes in buggy-whip manufacture. That field can now support maybe one whole person, who would probably also need to be Amish. A university does not need to teach that one guy. He can apprentice himself to the previous buggy-whip maker.
I knew many people in college that seemed to still have this idea in their senior year. They had given absolutely no thought to the employment process and how the degree in their chosen major was going to help or hinder.
Even though it should have been very obvious to me that I should do something with computers, in high school I decided I wanted to be a physicist because it "sounded fun". It took me 2 years of college to realize I was terrible at it, and there were absolutely zero career prospects on the other end of that degree. It seemed I was destined to make coffee for a PHd for the rest of my life for maybe $20k a year. Then one day I was writing some code after school like I'd done every day of my life, and the lightbulb turned on and I felt pretty stupid about it. Luckily 2 years into a physics major is a good time to switch to comp sci.
But who is handing out the correct advice to young people today? Is it getting to them? Are they processing it?
Is this actually true, though? This kind of makes it sound like everyone who went to college in the 70s and 80s was on easy street, but I don't know if that's reality or nostalgia.
Every other person had interned/worked, and had a full-time position.
But this was engineering, and I think I was lucky to go to school with a bunch of really bright people, because I learned a lot from them. I have no doubt it's different in other areas.
And most of the people that make the decision to go to college do it before being old enough to vote, drink, and a bunch of other things that as a society they are deemed to be unfit to do.
Of course people should be more aware of this,but instead of blaming people,finding ways to improve the system helps everyone. I strongly think colleges should have a legal requirement to disclose employment data to anyone picking any major.
So I think it is not the choice of major, but the associated expectations. They would still require some creative thinking to create their jobs.
What I saw several times, for example, was people studying to become journalists. This was a couple of years ago when I was still a student myself. When I asked them about their goals, they mentioned writing for some popular newspaper.
It boggled my mind that they would be studying journalism and not have their own blog and be unaware of the developments in media...
Contrast that with a string of recent CS graduates I've interviewed this year. 80% or more have been woefully unprepared for work in the field. I'm not sure what they're being taught, but it certainly isn't anything remotely like computer science in the business world.
Point being, if you're a mediocre student, your job prospects aren't that great, regardless of major. And if you're actually smart, the jobs are out there.
I fully agree with the mediocrity part though.
A few have been unable to discuss basic CS concepts to the point they should get refunds from their colleges. These were mostly smaller liberal arts schools.
Most are unable to work through basic design problems on the whiteboard (not programming and don't require couplex algorithms). I'm not looking for perfect answers - I just want them to talk through their thought process and ask intelligent questions.
What we need is more trade schools, without the stigma that they are somehow a lesser choice than a university. Rather than being judged on how many prestigious scholars and elite businessmen graduated, their main criteria is typically job placement after graduation. That's good news; it aligns their interest to properly prepare you to have a professional career after graduation.
Just because 'developer' as a job seems to be a good match for people who graduated from computer science or software engineering programs (and honestly, in some cases I'd dispute whether that's the case, too) doesn't mean every job should have a four year degree program that feeds directly into it, or that if your four year degree doesn't slot you directly into a workplace role it has no value.
"One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee."
Every book on and by famous/rich/successful people I've ever read touches on the subject on discipline and it can all be summed up with this: motivation, curiosity and drive fade away - in the end, only discipline is left to get you through the hardest mile.
I'd be willing to bet that when all those failed startup people spend a good 5-10 years thinking some more about their failures, the number 1 reason won't be "product-market fit", it'll be a lack of discipline in one or more areas (development, spending, sales).
Really it's about developing the behavioral pathways in your brain, your second nature if you will. For me, when something hard comes up, I automatically try to find a way around it or some way to accomplish the goal without dealing with the hard thing.
This is great for my creative problem solving skills since I'm able to automatically think outside the box and find workarounds to hard problems that can't feasibly be worked through.
However, when there is no workaround, actually convincing myself to do the hard work is extremely tough... my brain keeps automatically pausing and trying to find an easier way around and in those pauses I find it very easy to be distracted and a reason to put off the hard work just a little longer.
So yeah, sticking to a studying schedule would be a good way to exercise that discipline.
When you know that a task needs to be done, yet your body and your brain tell you to leave it for later, that they're too tired, that it's not worth it, etc.
When you know a task needs to be done to achieve the goal yet most of your colleagues and even part your own brain tells you to stop because... reasons, excuses.
I don't know how else to explain it, you just don't stop until the goal is reached, and long before that, motivation, excitement, curiosity, drive, and whatever else emotional factors people have will most likely have stopped...
http://jamesclear.com/delayed-gratification
Or you could say it was about self discipline, but self discipline is not what we traditionally think it is.
Additionally, the marshmallow study isn't the only research that shows this effect.
Nothing inherently wrong with any of those professions, except very few people are successful at them. Not to mention the prerequisite of a high net worth to become an accredited investor.
But maybe this is actually advice for a single 13 year old with a sizeable security net.
The moral of the story is ride the right coattails, don't be afraid to do some sketchy shit, and then if you luck out and get some money, then spend a bunch of time giving fairly dumb advice that has nothing to with your own success.
No wonder there's a teenager suicide epidemic in the Silicon Valley...
Won't bother sending this to my 15yo nephew.
Rather than add to the noise by podcasting/blogging, better advice would be to connect with most talented people who do what you do and learn from them. If you find that you have a platform and something to say, then do so.
"What is the name of your occupation? What are the educational requirements to work in your career?"
"So I am a writer (I write books and articles). I’m a podcaster (I’ve had 10 million downloads of my podcast). I speak occasionally. And I advise or invest in over 30 different companies."
"Oh, so you're a bullshit artist."
Being filthy rich; none.
-- Dr James Altucher, PhD.
Wikipedia mentions he attended Cornell and CMU (PhD).
Freakonomics blog says "He grew up in a middle-class family that lived beyond its means, in large part because his dad was about to hit it big with a computer business and the family was banking on that success. Then the success happened, and the family lived even larger — until the business suddenly fell apart, leaving everyone devastated.
Years later, James struck out on his own and he, too, struck it big."
http://freakonomics.com/2007/05/03/james-altucher-strikes-ag...
Plus I know a number of generally older adults who dont really have careers or jobs anymore. They managed to squirrel away enough savings or an income stream. Some may have major hobbies or projects you could call a vocation. Some just drift along.
Encouraging a 20 year old who is well educated, just without that final degree to quit and start their own thing is far different than telling your 13 year old daughter to quit school.
And saying that multi-millionaires have a diverse set of income streams does not mean that their first million did not come from a more focused effort in one specific area.
I'm not arguing that higher education is for everyone - clearly, it is not. But saying that nobody even needs a high school level of education is not a claim I am going to support.
My advice to a 13 year old is more along the lines of, keep learning, keep having fun, enjoy your teenage years, make teenage mistake while you still have the support structure of your parents (whether you like it or not), and just enjoying being young without too many responsibilities. There is no need to rush teenagers into adulthood.
> keep learning, keep having fun, enjoy your teenage years
Didn't learn squat from 5-10th grade. 11th and 12th I got into AP curriculum with fantastic teachers. I still talk to them. But you need fantastic instructors, the kind who would have been professors if they were not so selfless to work in public education, to make that happen.
It won't happen for 99% of children. I got incredibly lucky my last two years.
But the inbetween? The monotony of public educators with tenure, in the years between when I had learned the "basics" (arithmetic, reading, national and global history) <aside, I do need to mention that home ec and cooking were amazing classes to have in 6th grade, and were an exception to a multi-year rule> was a void. I spent my days playing Neverwinter Nights and learning NWScript (and thus basic C) to build campaigns for a multiplayer persistent world I was constantly on. This was in the years before World of Warcraft, which consumed the later years, and with those an education in Lua and engine hacking.
It is always incredibly harmful to assume schooling == learning. Even the social aspect is wrong - its an artificial setting. Bullying only exists as a pandemic when you are forced by law to be next to your bullies eight hours a day. The rest of us have the freedom to leave those people behind. You acquire no real world social experience in public education, just look at how out of whack everyone is their freshmen year when suddenly you are interacting with people voluntarily and can pick and chose your associations for the first time in your life.
It was not fun. It was not enjoyable. It was a purgatory. And I now have a 12 year old brother whom I can see the exact same thing happening to. And it will happen to millions of children every year until someone puts their foot down with the authority to do so and say this machine we grind the creative spark and imagination out of the younger generation in needs to stop, because I was lucky, and most are not.
I would plead for a better school rather than dropping out, though. It's depressing that apparently even Altucher who is supposedly a millionaire can not find a decent school for his kids.
Totally agree with the first part. School is only a waste if you go a mediocre school. There are plenty of excellent public and private schools available in the US. And most of the people browsing HN during working hours can afford the neighborhoods where those schools are located. Fixing the broken schools in less affluent areas is a more difficult problem.
I also find is astonishing that somebody who graduated from Cornell, then pursued a PhD at CMU would advocate for their own child to drop out of school at age 13. It's truly flabbergasting. Is he really asserting that he would be in the same, or better, position today had he skipped 4 years of high school, 4 years of undergraduate at one elite university, and then another handful of years at a second elite university? I'm calling shenanigans.
That would be very nice indeed, but the way the current education system is structured, engaging a child's mind seems to be the educators' last priority. I can't remember another time in my life when I was so bored and restless as middle/high school.
People always talk about wishing they were kids again. Not me - the mere thought of having to sit through all those dull and mundane lectures makes me shudder.
This article is terrible advice as has been pointed out already by many people in this thread but I just wanted to add my two cents.
"Academic education", up to undergraduates imo, is not so much about what you actually learn, but about the learning aptitudes and social aptitudes that the experience makes you develop. I think we can all relate.
This person seems to make massive generalisations from his (rather lucky I'd imagine) personal experience.
"Skip the reception; spend it on the honeymoon" implies that the boys aren't going to listen to "Boys, don't get married, ever". But that second one is bad advice anyway - getting married was incredibly good for me. Instead, I'd say "Wait forever rather than marry the wrong person."
And as in my observation, girls mature emotionally on a much more reliable schedule than boys, my advice to them is mostly to ward off the disaster that comes from trying to re-forge a boyfriend into a husband when he is clearly not ready for that yet. When he finally is ready, now he may need to get divorced before getting married. The implied advice is thus "Girls, don't get married before 22 [because it is extremely unlikely that any of the eligible men you have ever met before that time would be ready for the responsibility]."
It's very US-centric advice. And if your first language isn't English, you'll have a bit of difficulty following it anyway.