Comment by joshstrange
1 year ago
> The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want, but really today is the last stop.
Well put!
This is something _so many_ college kids don't seem to understand. I had many friends who graduated then just stood around looking for where to go next. It hadn't come up in discussions but it became apparent they were surprised by the sudden end to the "tracks" while the students who saw them coming (or were told better/more often) all were befuddled, "How did you not see this coming?", "Did you expect someone to just walk up and offer you a job?", "You have never even interned in your field??".
I don't blame the kids, they don't know any better. They've spent their whole life focusing on the next goal, I talked about this specifically (in blog post) when I dropped out of college to go full-time into my profession. For me, learning "there are no tracks" and more importantly "you don't need to go to the end of the college track before you decide next steps" was freeing and empowering while also being a bit terrifying.
i think its interesting that for so many college kids, the post-graduation options that continue to provide tracks are also treated as the more "prestigious" options (go to grad school. work at big3/faang, etc).
it's not because they are any more prestigious or important, but because they provide a clear sense of achievement/external validation and kids that make it to the end of college are kids that have had decades of achievement/external validation being their primary measure of success.
and because of that, those places do an amazing job recruiting. i remember toward the end of my undergrad days there was huge sense of competition to get a "teach for america" position, even among folks with no interest in education. it was appealing simply because it was selective and provided a clear framework for 'next steps'.
> the post-graduation options that continue to provide tracks are also treated as the more "prestigious" options (go to grad school. work at big3/faang, etc).
Graduate school is a mixed bag when it comes to prestige. It's fairly well known that grad student lifestyle is a grind, highly competitive, and a financial sacrifice. You go into it for a love of academics, not as a default next step.
As for prestigious jobs like FAANG: I think you're downplaying the extreme compensation offered by many of these jobs. It's not just about prestige, it's about unlocking a level of wealth that is hard to ignore. It delivers on the dream people have when they imagine a university education unlocking incredible career options.
> Graduate school is a mixed bag when it comes to prestige. It's fairly well known that grad student lifestyle is a grind, highly competitive, and a financial sacrifice. You go into it for a love of academics, not as a default next step.
Sorry to be contrary, but almost every graduate student I have met was doing it for the prestige. The fact that they were doing a research degree, the chance of having their name on papers, the fact that they were "smarter" than people who couldn't get into graduate school.
I've worked with many people who directly stated that they went to grad school because they "didn't know what else to do". As well as several who couldn't get a job, so they went back to school.
It definitely isn't always for the love of academics.
grad school is definitely a prestige move. not a 'get rich move', but def a prestige move. prestige is not just money.
for med or law school, there are very clear hierarchies about who's better than who and next steps in your career. you get money AND intellectual status.
but for other sciences and humanities, it's a flex about pursuing abstract "truth" or "knowledge" of "beauty" or whatever and not caring about financial success. it is very monastic in that people make a show of forgoing traditional measures of status in service of their "calling".
... but as high-minded as these people are there is still a very clear hierarchy that lets you compare rank/compare yourself against your other recent grads so you can talk about who's doing well and who isn't even though none of them have money.
BUT grad school for CS and engineering is different because there's so much money and employability at the end of the rainbow. these aren't really a calling in the same way, and are closer to MBA degree becayse it's just a thing you do to get more money later. A comp sci PhD with a job in industry is lauded, but those folks don't understand the deep sense of failure that a non-CS PhD feels when they have to 'resort to' an industry job in the private sector
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I heard that quant finance companies target high-achievers by creating a sense of continuing tracks: recruiting based on high GPAs, an application process with a high-profile entrance exam, and so on. It creates an impression among their target group that such a company is where they "should" go to work, because it's at the top.
The weird thing with quant finance is that it basically started as a bunch of misfits from other disciplines. Mostly sub departments at banks and some funds no one ever heard of.
Now its a well trodden career path with specialized degree programs targeting it, online forums full of 16 year old aspirational hardos discussing which college to apply to in order to get into job 1 which leads to job 2 which leads to.. So again, train tracks.
Old quants are an interesting bunch to talk to. Guys who worked in plasma physics or are serious musicians or classically trained philosophy backgrounds, etc.
Now every grad resume I see for job openings looks exactly the same. I no longer deal with grad/intern programs thankfully.
Agree in spirit though I’m a bit doubtful of your details (exams or GPAs, etc). I think part of this is presenting the work as looking more like university and less like what students might imagine work to look like.
The flipside is that going off the tracks, you need to decide where you're going and you might get lost. Some people try to do something and then waste a lot of time just spinning their wheels. For them, some structure and some tracks might be necessary.
I guess we all need some amount of scaffolding in our life, at one point or another.
> the post-graduation options that continue to provide tracks are also treated as the more "prestigious" options (go to grad school. work at big3/faang, etc).
I think it's the other way around: the more prestigious option becomes the track.
> and because of that, those places do an amazing job recruiting
I think the absurd compensation helps a bit there too
I don’t see why that can’t be replicated in vocational trades.
Main challenge there is you don’t have a plumbing/electrical conglomerate like you have in tech to standardize recruiting.
Trade unions and apprenticeships provide some of this, especially in places where trade work is heavily unionized.
I didn't want to go to college. I worked throughout high school designing websites for an ad agency for $8/hr, after school until 7 at night and 5 days a week in the summer. After high school I went to work for another agency full time for a year. Only after my father kept cajoling me did I finally try college. I got a scholarship and came in a year older and six years more experienced than my freshman class.
What I found myself in was a group of very sincere, optimistic, wonderful kids who had no idea how the real world of engineering or advertising or design worked, but were fully persuaded that this $30k/yr education would prepare them for it and hand them the next waypoint on their life path (while also allowing them creative freedom to experiment in ways that they wouldn't be able to later, in the corporate world). I dropped out after 3 semesters because it was pointless, although in the last semester I jumped ahead from Typography 2 to 5, and skipped a bunch of other stuff. I had poached a lot of clients from my former agency, which had folded.
Since then, my life has had no rails whatsoever. I'm good at what I do and I go where I want and choose who I work for, and the world essentially rewards me for being good at figuring things out.
All of this comes down to a lack of imagination, and parents (like my father) trying to instill a sense in their children that one must pursue certain predefined paths to be successful. But completing a predefined quest doesn't make us more valuable; in fact, it makes us interchangeable. Being a difficult, unique, tough, anal obsessive prick at what you do is hard to ever replace with a formal education. And experience is king. So start early and ignore all the tracks you can.
Modern society tries very hard to lay tracks for everyone all the way to final station: The old folks home.
In my opinion, there are TOO MANY tracks.
We have plastered the entire map with so many tracks, that experiencing true freedom has become virtually impossible.
We’re also too many people on Earth to continue living in a green field world. Fantasizing about freedom and the absence of tracks is a Western thing; I don’t think you can afford trial-and-error paths or separating from the cohort of applicants when you live in Singapore, Taiwan, or China. Kalzumeus had to show his bride’s mother his revenue sheet before asking her hand, because startup creator is second to homeless in the humiliation ranking.
> Kalzumeus had to show his bride’s mother his revenue sheet before asking her hand, because startup creator is second to homeless in the humiliation ranking.
That's how marrying into an elite family worked in most of the world for most human history. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Shakespear#Engagement -
> In 1911 Pound returned from America and in October formally approached Dorothy's father asking permission to marry her. Pound told Shakespear he had a guaranteed annual income of £200 in addition to earnings from writing and Dorothy's own income of £150 a year. Shakespear refused on the grounds of insufficient income believing Pound overstated his potential to earn money writing poetry. [...]
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Yep. The illusion of Freedom is sold as a product, however, and people make a lot of money with it.
What do you mean by that?
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Very true and a good social circle consisting of people with ambitions and aspirations helps too. I remember back when we were in college, freshman year we formed a circle of some sort and moved to apartments next to each other for the sophomore year. My roommate in this setup out of the blue got an internship at a big company in the Bay Area, surprised all of us in this group. He was getting paid a really large amount per hour and at that point we didn't even know this was possible. That made us all realize that this is a thing and the job fairs from that point on weren't going to be bullshit like other events before. People were coming in with actual intent to hire, and were ready to pay interns a lot of money. And we saw once these people made friends in these internships and demonstrated themselves, they got hired through internal priority queues. We did the same, applied to places, interviewed, got flown for in person interviews. Got internships, and then those turned into full time offers. Everyone in my friend group had an internship from a well known company and had offers by the time they were graduating.
And then there was the other kind. It's not like we didn't enjoy our college days or go out to party more than we should. It's not like we studied extra. It was just this one guy in our friend group that did what he did, we saw what he did and got the message it was time and anything after that would be unnecessarily risking it.
The book “Excellent Sheep” has an interesting portion on this. At one point someone from a non-traditional background is bemoaning the mentality of his colleagues at a prestigious university. He says they are so used to following a template of moving from point A to point B that they are completely rudderless when put in a situation where there is no template defining “success”.
> I don't blame the kids, they don't know any better. They've spent their whole life focusing on the next goal.
No, they spent their whole lives being sheltered. Let's call it what it is. These people were on tracks because they were put on tracks from a young age and told that the track leads somewhere, and any questioning of the tracks was often met with a harsh rebuke. They didn't play outside with the neighborhood kids, they were at soccer practice. They didn't get a summer job at a shitty fast food joint, they were doing summer school or learning piano. Everything they've done from start to finish has been curated. Of course when the track ends abruptly it's catastrophic.
Independence, curiosity, and self-quesitoning and awareness are often not taught because "getting ahead" is more important.
I think you're assuming way too much.
From my observations, having low parental involvement and excessively unstructured upbringing doesn't automatically produce determined and self-directed adults. From my familiarity with several small towns, I would actually say it does the opposite. I can think of many people I knew as a kid who ended up stuck in small towns at dead-end jobs simply because inertia was the only thing they knew. Nobody ever jumped into their lives to push them to try different things or explore paths that weren't sitting right in front of them.
I couldn't agree more. Parental guidance or lack thereof can work differently for different people. There are incompetent and more competent parents everywhere. But that is beside the point. You can do better now. You can start steering your own ship. That degree you were pushed to get might come in handy or not.
> From my observations, having low parental involvement and excessively unstructured upbringing doesn't automatically produce determined and self-directed adults.
Sample of one, it indeed didn't. However being knocked around did help with being somewhat more ready and open to new things and uncharted territories. It also dramatically reduces the fear of the unknown and can be a significant confidence booster.
> These people were on tracks because they were put on tracks from a young age and told that the track leads somewhere, and any questioning of the tracks was often met with a harsh rebuke. They didn't play outside with the neighborhood kids, they were at soccer practice. They didn't get a summer job at a shitty fast food joint, they were doing summer school or learning piano. Everything they've done from start to finish has been curated. Of course when the track ends abruptly it's catastrophic.
It's not clear to me how the "tracks" were significantly different in, say, the past 80 years, at least in America. Compulsory schooling has been a thing for a long time. Getting an after school job delivering newspapers so you have a little spending money is not exactly a clever endeavor, and it's not clear to me you learn more life skills than you do having to manage homework (for example).
Get married to someone of the opposite gender, go to church every sunday, have kids. Work a job with a pension for 30 years, retire with a gold watch. (or the blue collar equivalent). Those are tracks.
I don't disagree with the premise that kids are more coddled today than they used to be, but the "tracks" metaphor is, if anything, less valid now than ever. There is more choice, and less stability, as far as I can tell.
Delayed adulthood is a real thing. Even 25 years ago many/most high school kids have after school and/or summer jobs. Now it is almost unheard of.
Their entire young lives are structured, parentally planned and resume padding. Then theres stuff like college admission consultants which have become very normalized, with allegedly 26% of parents hiring them per some study.
I worked from 14, had a crappy retail job throughout high school and my college prep was the $20 Kaplan CD lol. Whatever sports I played were the $50/season local league your parents drop you off at a couple nights a week. And my parents weren't poor, they were totally normal upper middle class low 6 figure earnings.
Nowadays the above is akin to smoking on an airplane with a baby in your lap.
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You learn quite a lot by working a regular job and getting a paycheck as a kid. It is utterly baffling that there are some kids graduating college that never worked a regular job. It's a problem that young kids in our modern world don't seem to even want to get jobs.
As far as I'm concerned, you are basically mentally stunted if you didn't work for pay in your teenage years.
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One reason is because people believe the trope you said: ” Get married to someone of the opposite gender, go to church every sunday, have kids. Work a job with a pension for 30 years, retire with a gold watch. (or the blue collar equivalent). Those are tracks.”
Sans the watch, we know that grafting onto community while accomplishing the statistically most meaningful tasks (per all psychological studies) opens all the doors to a content life full of more paths than can be explored before this short life is over.
But yeah, how they got where they were was never the point. The point was now you know. Now you understand you've been chasing a goal you never knew about. It is time to stop. Start thinking for yourself. Start steering the wheel. Stop drifting.
Those other things you mention are also "tracks". Getting a shitty fast food job is done not due to any kind of aspiration but simply because it's the default thing to do.
Imagine not being able to get a shitty fast food job because you are disabled. Or just moved to the US and speak too weird and don't have anyone to vouch for you.
Ditto for hanging out with the neighborhood kids. This assumes that you are one of them, and not a victim/target for them.
> Getting a shitty fast food job is done not due to any kind of aspiration but simply because it's the default thing to do.
This is the kind of "tracks" I'm most familiar with: Especially in small towns where ideas like individual freedoms, bucking the trend, and turning your nose up at higher education are common, you don't see it translating to a lot of success in life. You see it trapping people in cycles of poverty and dead-end jobs.
??? I got a job as a teenager because I wanted to buy a guitar. It had nothing to do with tracks. It's the same for most teens, they want to make a few extra bucks. Let's not forgot the majority of people on this forum were on a track of sorts that differs very much from the rest of the population. Being a bright nerdy kid is not the norm. Teens got jobs and mowed lawns to buy a car, weed, a guitar, etc, not to pad their highschool resume. That is not the norm unless you're at an expensive private school or already in the upper middle class or something.
What a strange response. Anything is a track if you only do that one thing. The point is that having diverse life experiences that challenge you make you a much more well-rounded person that can adapt and handle difficult situations.
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> Imagine not being able to get a shitty fast food job because ... Or just moved to the US and speak too weird and don't have anyone to vouch for you.
You've obviously never worked food.
These changes only occurred due to the dual income trap though.
The first bit is too similar to what a typical college kid would go through in India.
My assumption was that this would NOT be the case in the USA. You hear about kids dropping out and starting startups, or people just skipping college to work on what they like, or kids joining trade schools to get into welding.
Isn't this the norm in the USA / most of the developed world ?? Your comment confirms the same thing.. you dropped out..That's all I read and see everywhere about America, that you are free to take decisions like this (and often encouraged)
It feels odd to think to that kids in the USA are on a somewhat fixed train track, when there are so many opportunities + freedom + less judgement overall in the society.
The kids that fall into this bucket talk about it a lot (when they’re successful). The vast majority of successful people in America (for some definition of success) did not drop out, and the vast majority of drop outs do not find this type of mainstream success.
This is not to say that dropouts without that kind of success aren’t happy. I do believe that America does afford a lot of leeway for people to be happy and comfortable in non-traditional life paths. They’re just not the ones being discussed din this comment.
Dropping out is so “Silicon Valley” that the first episode of Silicon valley starts with a billionaire encouraging youths to drop out, and a kid successfully raising funding from him by touching him to his core: “If I don’t raise funding, I might… go to uni”. It’s a joke on SV.
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The lifetime value of a college degree in the United States is very high.
College is expensive, but it's nowhere near as expensive as the high private university tuitions you read about ($200K+). Most people have access to state universities that are much cheaper. Even at private universities most students are on sliding scale payments with scholarships. It's common for 10-20% or more of a university's students to be paying effectively $0 tuition.
While you definitely can skip college and still have a good career, the trades never really pay as well as internet lore suggests and the number of people who start startups and succeed is very small.
It's a relatively small percentage that want to do something outside the norm, and it does not go very well for a lot of them. There's a lot of survivor's bias in hearing about dropouts.
Interesting, too, how many institutions are very willing to jump in and put you back on an endless subway train. e.g. graduate school, postdoc, junior faculty, assistant professor, full professor...the ride never ends!
If you aren't careful though, the tracks can also continue. At BigCorp they have lots of titles to create a sense of urgency and box-ticking to progress from A to B to C to..
This is obnoxiously commonplace. At my first job they upgraded me from a level N engineer (1 or 2, probably) to a level N+1 engineer with a 10% pay rise or something.
The year after that I stumbled upon a new job which paid more than their highest value of N. They definitely don't want this to happen. They want you striving for (N+1)+1 only, so they can give it out whenever they think you feel like you're not progressing, and keep you in their system.
My wife was stressed out the other year because what was formerly a title system at her BigCo of A -> B -> C ->D got fragmented even further.
They added some system of "well to get from C to D, there is now C1->C2->C3->C4, and we've classified you as a C3, congrats".
Of course this week out of the blue her boss calls her with the "great news" that she's been "put up for promotion process for C4, but no guarantees"..
Anyway few understand this but even in these types of roles, the compensation bands are very very wide, with overlaps, and differ across departments. So just ask for money over title until your title limits their ability to give you money. You can't eat title.
I will highlight this part of your post, in context with the article [speech?]'s drdiving point:
> "You have never even interned in your field??".
The article is for people who don't have a field. In some circles, this is not a concept people speak about, but I think it represents many or most people who graduate university (in the US at least). The specialized fields like doctor, lawyer, engineer etc you hear about represent a minority of students and jobs. Many or most graduates end up in some variant of the fidelity customer service job.
The world is filled with office buildings, and generic office jobs. You need a college degree to get them, and no special skills.
Also interesting that part of the value of Y Combinator is to be more track.
It's hard to start a business with minimal life experience. All the more so a startup kind of business. There are lots of things to look for, to pay attention to - that you were carefully (?, more like randomly) sheltered from until then.
School beats agency out of students. It's particularly bad because agency seems relatively rare and if someone has the spark, the highest leverage thing that a society can do is to encourage it.
By the time most kids get out they're institutionalized and don't even know what they want.
I think it is easier and more obvious for kids from poorer families to figure it out they need to look around and try hard to earn some money. Do you need a laptop? Well you better earn some money to get one. Kids that get everything provided by parents often end up hopelessly lost when time to become independent comes.
And yet so many of them kinda rule the world by running the biggest corporations in the world. Your argument has so many holds, it can't hold water.
> And yet so many of them kinda rule the world by running the biggest corporations in the world.
Have you looked at the state of the world recently?
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Some of my university classmates just stayed in university after graduation... Even though most of them didn't have much interest in academic research or teaching. It was just the easiest things to do: just imagine tracks going further in the same direction. Inertia is powerful.
It's funny that the train tracks continue on for Asian kids in the dorm of grad school or engineering jobs
> I don't blame the kids, they don't know any better.
Blame parents, teachers etc. When I mean blame, really blame them unapologetically, I have no sympathies for them.
So I graduate, I call him up long distance, I say "Dad, now what?" He says, "Get a job."
Now I'm 25, make my yearly call again. I say Dad, "Now what?" He says, "I don't know, get married."
The Full Time Employment crowd is the people who continue the tracks.
Chilling by the watercooler, being paid for 8 hours a day with health insurance etc. while working 2 hours a day and/or bitching about your job. Or just enjoying life after work.
These people would be as much at home in Soviet Russia as they would in today’s USA. They want more security. The EU has become the new USSR for this. Lots of protections.
It’s what people want. They don’t actually want the AI disruption. But it’s coming because their employers don’t care what they want.
However if you claim to love capitalism and hate socialism, or whatever, then get a taste of it. Go hunting in the market for clients. Go spar and learn sales skills. Build your own company and service your own clients.
Or let the employer do it for you. But then you are just like a renter, not an owner — except on the supply side of the economy. And they may rent your time… for now.
The “American Dream” btw has become about renting money from banks — to finish college, to pay the mortgage on that house, etc. But the cost of all of it has gone up much more than your grandparents. It is just indentured servitude with a choice of landlords. At the end of the day, they want you to rent the money from banks to create demand for the money, so you can work for 30 years and pay it off. But the AI will break even that social contract.
Jobs will be going down
Entrepreurship will be going up
Find your people. And in the sense of getting a team of loyal badasses together. Build something new. Use AI. Don’t let your employer tell you how to use AI or use it to replace you.
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Do you know who that is? I don’t. So I don’t know if it’s unearned certainty or not.
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Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think you pumped the HN smugness too hard for HN.