[HN Gopher] A generation of American men give up on college
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A generation of American men give up on college
Author : flowerbeater
Score : 347 points
Date : 2021-09-06 19:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| average joe: blue collar job, make 20$ per hour
|
| woke jane: liberal arts degree, 8$ per hour job at starbucks
| [deleted]
| noncompliant wrote:
| well this "woke jane" could still study and after a while learn
| a trade if education were affordable.
|
| there is nothing wrong with having an educated working class.
| nothing should restrict you from being a plumber with an
| history degree.
| mhb wrote:
| Video Games and the (Male) Meaning of Life:
| https://quillette.com/2018/12/14/video-games-and-the-male-me...
| usename_Here wrote:
| I agree on some of the points about support structures for women
| that don't exist for men. I've seen it occur even at the
| professional level, female co-workers are reached out to, invited
| to groups, given networking opportunities that I would have to
| put loads of effort to keep up with. It's biased treatment in the
| now, even if it's trying to offset the errors of the past.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Its not that the support structures do not exist, after all
| they never did and men did fine without them, its that college
| is suffused with an ideology that is anti-men, anti-merit and,
| for the most part, useless for anything but its own self-
| propagation.
| usename_Here wrote:
| Sure, those structures didn't exist prior, but that doesn't
| mean their existing now doesn't provide an advantage to those
| who benefit from them.
|
| And it's not that I'm against such structures or groups on
| the basis of shared identity that you're born with, but I
| think it would be beneficial for those structures (
| especially when they're company funded ) to have niches for
| those who don't fit niches.
| Applejinx wrote:
| You've got a fundamental difference of opinion around the
| basic purpose of the exercise and can't be trusted to have a
| rational opinion about what's really going on.
|
| What is 'merit' for?
|
| If your answer is 'distinguishing between things of worth and
| things that are valueless' then there's a problem, and you
| are prematurely contextualizing. Briefly, you cannot be
| trusted to dictate the contexts of value for the whole world
| around you. You're missing far too much. And it matters. Not
| just morally, but practically.
| triactual wrote:
| Trusted by whom?
| long_time_gone wrote:
| ==its that college is suffused with an ideology that is anti-
| men, anti-merit and, for the most part, useless for anything
| but its own self-propagation.==
|
| I never felt like this kind of victim while in college
| (mid-2000s). I wonder if all colleges have changed or if
| society has changed. If it is society that has changed, maybe
| our colleges are simply reflecting the real-world change.
| vimy wrote:
| It's only been the last +- 5 years that this became the
| dominant thinking at colleges.
| long_time_gone wrote:
| Based on which metric?
|
| Does the same thinking carryover to the construction
| industry which is 97% male?
| vimy wrote:
| It coincides with the election of Donald Trump. This
| ideology already had a foothold in some departments and
| Trump was the accelerant that made it spread everywhere.
| Longread if you want a more detailed explanation:
| https://newdiscourses.com/2021/04/rise-woke-cultural-
| revolut...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Calling Lindsay a professional mathematician is a
| stretch. Also he neglects to cite Derrick Bell and
| Richard Delgado and the whole critical legal studies
| movement.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| The last psychiatrist once wrote that women go where men are
| leaving.
|
| I don't know if this is true, but it seems to pop up in several
| areas.
| ffwacom wrote:
| Do you have a link to the post?
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I have been searching before but sadly could not find it.
| I'll keep searching.
|
| [Update]
|
| It's not the post I have been thinking of, but there is a
| line there
|
| https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-
| respecting_w...
|
| "[...] but you should wonder: when more women enter a field,
| it means less men did, and if the men stopped going there,
| where did they go? Why did they leave? I assume they aren't
| home with the kids, right?
|
| I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to
| observe that at the very moment in our history when we have
| the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be
| pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless [..] if
| some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual
| power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the
| Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if power
| seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go?"
| elevenoh wrote:
| IME, women - more than men - tend to naturally flow to where
| there's maximal social acceptance & minimal risk.
|
| This tends to be after the wave of early risk takers made it
| such.
|
| Example: We're seeing more % women entering the crypto space
| every year.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| This seems to happen in a parallel universe. From my first
| semester at university with 120 students, 5 were women. Out of
| those 1 made it till the end, which is more or less exactly the
| average of those that actually got their degree in the standard
| period of study.
|
| That said, I think university doesn't count as much as it did
| before. At least in softwareworld you can make it without a
| degree just fine. You have disadvantages for some higher
| positions in large companies. But who wants to do that job
| anyway? It seems rather unattractive today.
| notjes wrote:
| And women are more depressed than ever, swallowing Xanax by the
| hand full. Consumption of anti depressants rose 50% in the last
| 15 years, especially by women. 1/4 of women and 1/10 of men are
| doing it by now. One might argue, it is a very degen society if
| women need 1lb of happy pills per month to endure it.
| ano88888 wrote:
| Not everyone will become a self learning programmer. There are
| many subjects that college is best suited for. I actually see
| this as the decline of America. When a generation doesn't value
| education anymore, this is how China gets ahead of you.
| aeoleonn wrote:
| Not so fast.
|
| First review the blatant, widespread corruption in Chinese
| academia, before you consider fully accepting the value of
| education in China
|
| "In 2015, for instance, Britain-based publisher BioMed Central
| retracted 43 articles, including 41 from China. Later in the
| same year, Germany's Springer retracted 64 papers, nearly all
| from Chinese scholars, while the Dutch publishing company
| Elsevier retracted nine medical science articles written by
| Chinese researchers.
|
| "In what is said to be the largest single-incident retraction
| of journal publications in history, Springer Nature in 2017
| retracted 107 articles in Tumor Biology published between 2012
| and 2016, all of them authored by Chinese scholars from
| universities in Shanghai."
|
| https://wenr.wes.org/2018/04/the-economy-of-fraud-in-academi...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I went to pick up a book at the circulation desk at my uni close
| to the first day of classes and of the people in front of me and
| in back of me there were 9 girls and 0 boys in line.
|
| If the class were gender-balanced the odds of that would be
| 1/512; I have no idea what it means ("girls are much more
| interested in using the library?") but I think it's significant.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| It means exactly nothing. They could be a study group, they
| could be all be part of a club, I could go on...
|
| There is zero significance to that observation.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If the class were gender-balanced the odds of that would be
| 1/512
|
| If each arrival at the desk were an independent draw from the
| full class, then, sure, the chance of any given set of 9
| arrivals having 9 women would be 1/512. (Though the chance of
| the sequence of 10 including 9 women and 1 man is 10/1024, or
| about 5 times more likely; by cherry-picking the set of
| arrivals to consider, you are anready making the set around you
| seem more unlikely than it is.)
|
| Of course, if they were where independent the case, there'd
| also be a non-negligible case of a repeat in that set of
| arrivals; the fact that you chose a set in line at the same
| time demonstrates that they aren't a set of independent events.
| So the whole basis of your 1/512 even on the cherry-picked set
| is invalid.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| yeah i am a p-hacker who can do any kind of statistics so
| long as it is nonparametric statistics because i only know
| the binomial distribution
| savanaly wrote:
| On a site like this where anyone can comment and only a few
| do, this is the far greater problem compared to p-hacking:
| https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/mks/statmistakes/filedrawer
| .....
|
| There are probably 512 people in this thread right now that
| have had that same experience you did but didn't reject the
| null hypothesis so they're not commenting.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I dunno.
|
| I play the game of assessing the gender balance of groups
| a lot.
|
| Some of it is wondering where society is going, some of
| it is just trying to avoid sausage parties. Trans people
| don't give me any trouble because they want to be
| assigned a certain gender, non-binaries might force me to
| learn the multinomial distribution but those seem to turn
| up at the 1/256 - 1/512 level if that.
|
| I stopped going to Yoga classes in my ZIP code because
| they attract a lot of middle-aged and older men who, I
| think, are there to look at women without doing anything
| too strenuous.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| It is interesting; disregarding nitpicking about the
| calculation there could be multiple potential reasons that all
| are connected to the heart of the matter:
|
| - women more likely to study and solve logistical study
| problems together
|
| - men more likely to pirate books
|
| - men less likely to be out during normal hours
|
| - men less likely to choose majors requiring library books
|
| - and of course, higher college enrollment by women
|
| I am not saying any of these were necessarily in play in your
| situation, but some probably are and colleges and employers
| should be thinking about them.
| pwthornton wrote:
| I'd say seeing a 9-0 ratio is an outlier for sure, and maybe
| we don't need much deeper thought than that. I do, suspect,
| however, that women are more likely to go to the library than
| men. My assumption on this is the higher grades that female
| students earn on average.
| gamechangr wrote:
| We need learning certified but not controlled, both in cost and
| required general learning.
|
| 2 year associate degrees from community college are very
| affordable and cover the general education. Even those going into
| other work could afford that and their employer could offer
| assistance if not. If for example, the cost of a 2 year
| associates degree was $5,000- $10,000. That would make college
| affordable, but we as a society would have to recognize that as
| more than it currently is recognized for.
|
| The 4 year degree is meaningless now. It doesn't even translate
| to a useable skill most the time, but it's become the bare
| minimum.
|
| Then if certificates of specific skills...say "certificate of
| statistics" which could just be 3-5 classes on statistics were
| added for those who could afford it, that would bring down the
| cost.
|
| The idea of "going to college" and moving on campus is not an
| economical decision most 20 years old are prepared enough to
| understand. There appears to be too many people losing from that
| bet.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I'll repeat what tech companies love to say about hiring
| underrepresented classes: it's a pipeline problem. Because of a
| combination of social reasons, maturity, curricula, and pedagogy,
| men don't perform as well as women academically. Look at the
| graph on the top of this[1]. Men have lower GPAs in every
| subject. It's not surprising that leads to fewer going to college
| and fewer graduating.
|
| 1:
| https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info...
| pwthornton wrote:
| The thing that struck me right off the bat was that the lead
| photo of this story is of 18-year-old with a PS5 and pretty sweet
| setup in his bedroom. I don't have anything deep to add to this,
| but if you can sit at home in your childhood bedroom indefinitely
| playing video games and working menial jobs, maybe the allure is
| there.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Read the article he actually has two jobs one of which is music
| production which he's passionate about and invests his money
| into crypto.
|
| What can university truly offer an 18 year old who already
| knows what they want to do and is already doing it without an
| expensive education.
|
| Wish I was that on track when I was 18 and he'll probably be
| ahead of his peers who went to college by the time they
| graduate.
| pwthornton wrote:
| We don't have a lot of details as to what "invests his money
| into crypto" means and how that is going. The article doesn't
| touch on his music and music production skills, both of which
| could be honed substantially with a further music education.
| They could also be honed a lot by playing in a band and
| committing to a lot of practice. People can be self taught,
| but it generally requires a lot of practice and purpose, and
| this article doesn't touch on whether or not he is doing
| that.
|
| You can break into music production without a degree, of
| course, but it's going to be a challenge in the middle of
| nowhere Minnesota.
| dmix wrote:
| That probably works fine until your 30s...
|
| Plus that's assuming your parents aren't already old and can
| afford to feed and house you without seriously harming their
| own old age plans.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| Ever considered they might have picked that photo deliberately
| to give you a certain idea about the problem?
| aeoleonn wrote:
| That's what I immediately thought, "How convenient, a photo
| that suits article's the narrative: that all young men are
| NEETs (not in employment, education, or training). I suppose
| they couldn't have shown a productive young man as it would
| be antithetical to the author's thesis.",
| effingwewt wrote:
| I mean of the choice is between that and crippling debt and a
| useless degree, he's making the objectively smart move.
|
| The fact that they were able to buy things while living at home
| just drives the point home even more- he would not have the
| disposable income to make those purchases for many years if he
| decides to go to college.
| jasonboyd wrote:
| Wut? Are those the only choices? Is there nothing in between?
| Lay off the drama. I don't feel like my degree was useless
| (and I'm not even working in the field I got a degree in) and
| I certainly didn't graduate with crippling debt.
| effingwewt wrote:
| Survivorship bias with a N=1 doesn't change the absolute
| fact that most if not all degrees are worth far less than
| the debt taken on.
|
| Why your personal story is pertinent here is beyond me, OP
| was talking about the person in the article.
|
| It's not dramatic at all when we have 1.73[1] trillion in
| student loan debt, with an average of 39k each student.
|
| Starting your professional career years in debt is the
| definition of crippling debt.
|
| edit to add source
|
| [1] https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics
| crazy_horse wrote:
| The new student also has the option of choosing a not
| worthless degree, greatly increasing their odds.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yup. It's trivial to google "starting salaries for XXX"
| _before_ committing to a major and the loan.
| jasonboyd wrote:
| Claiming survivorship bias really makes it sound like we
| are talking about something much riskier than getting a
| college degree. I didn't survive, I planned. I got a two
| year degree from a local community college for a fraction
| of the price that those same credit hours would have cost
| at a university. I then went on to a modest in-state
| University to complete my four year degree. I can't put a
| sexy Ivy League college, or private college, or even a
| top-tier state university on my resume now but I didn't
| graduate with crippling debt. That was the trade off I
| made.
|
| Starting your professional career in debt is nobody's
| definition of "crippling debt". Whether 39k is too much
| student loan debt really depends on what the expected
| future earning potential is for a given degree. A quick
| search turns up plenty of resources that can help
| somebody make decisions about how much student loan debt
| they can comfortably or safely take on. Here is a
| teacher's guide[1] (it's a PDF link) from the Consumer
| Finance Protection Bureau one could use as a starting
| point.
|
| [1] https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_bu
| ilding_...
| pwthornton wrote:
| He works as a landscaper in Minnesota, which I presume does
| not offer robust employment year round. Even if he could work
| all seasons doing landscaping, his pay would come out to
| $26,000 a year, assuming he takes no days off.
|
| I am not sure this is a smart move. It seems like he is
| hoping his music career pans out, but we aren't given a lot
| of insight into his talent level there.
| belorn wrote:
| The lead image is there to direct the reader towards a specific
| way of thinking, similar in way that if the article has been
| about prison it would be an image of black young men dealing
| drugs. It is a narrative and implication that if "group X" did
| not _choose_ to do that then the problem that group X has would
| not exist. The author could as easily chosen an lead imagine of
| the same person in a class room with a narrative that it is the
| school system that is failing to get the demographic to enroll,
| or an image of an college class photo to illustrate the lack of
| diversity and imply subtle blame on which ever demographic that
| would dominate the image.
| prawn wrote:
| _" The author could as easily chosen an lead imagine of the
| same person in a class room"_
|
| Might vary where you live, but my understanding is that the
| author of a piece is not usually the one picking images and
| writing the headline. There are some instances where the
| writer and photographer are the same, but that's not the case
| here.
|
| It's a story about males who aren't in college, so why would
| they have photos of males in school? Stats about "people
| considering not going to college" is not as compelling as
| this story with stronger stats about what people are actually
| doing, IMO.
| belorn wrote:
| > It's a story about males who aren't in college, so why
| would they have photos of males in school?
|
| Here is an example of a article with a different narrative
| called: _Why Boys Are Failing in an Educational System
| Stacked Against Them_ (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-
| boys-are-failing-in-a_b_8...)
|
| Note that the focus of blame here is on the education
| system and then look at the image. The person in frame is
| the teacher, representing the Educational System, and the
| boy. The article mentions both college rates and high
| school dropout rates.
|
| You are right that its generally not the author of the
| written text that chose the image, through the words I
| would describe if I was being a more technical correct
| about it would be authors of the article since an article
| rarely if ever now days has a single author. There is the
| author/s of the text, the editor, the proof readers, layout
| design, image selection, and each participated in creation
| the collaborated created work.
| prawn wrote:
| As you said, that's a different narrative with a
| different picture. OP's story is about individuals saying
| they feel lost, and then it shows them bumming around at
| home.
|
| After I quit university and before I found my eventual
| career path back in the 90s, a relevant picture would've
| been me stuffing around on the computer as that's largely
| what I did (writing a book, playing Hextris, typing up
| things for my dad, seeing what a modem could do, etc).
| 8eye wrote:
| something about college men and a paywall
| the_only_law wrote:
| College is certainly a paywall. In the US at least.
| fnord77 wrote:
| born a generation too late to enjoy the 40:60 m/f ratio... oh
| well
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Great news, the concept that you need college to succeed was one
| of the greatest lies told to my generation. Pleased the next
| generation is waking up.
|
| End of the day if the loan can't be written off, if the loan is
| just handed out to 18 year olds and has almost no limit then the
| organization that asks for the loan will inevitably balloon out
| of all proportion and no longer be reflective at all of the value
| you get back for almost all cases.
|
| I say that as someone who managed to actually pay off their
| student loan, dread to think how people who are late 30s, still
| renting and still with 5 figures of college debt feel.
|
| Hope this trend continues, why throw away the down payment of a
| mortgage to an institution that has spent the past decade telling
| you they don't want you. If in 10 years I'm seeing headlines
| about colleges unable to stay open from low admissions I'll be
| smiling.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| The marketing on this to Gen X was incredibly effective as
| well.
|
| There was this pervading "common sense" that if you didn't go
| to college, you weren't going to be able to attract the kind of
| spouse that you wanted, or that you would somehow be looked
| down on in the reproductive market. The smart ones figured out
| that this was actually a handy way to filter out superficial
| candidates.
|
| Fast forward 25 years, and I see many middle-aged men who are
| dissatisfied with their corporate lives but haven't build any
| income potential in something other than corporate America, so
| they are stuck in jobs that are increasingly subject to the
| pressures of globalism, etc.
| sjg007 wrote:
| We can't all be plumbers.. college is worth it. You get
| access to technology. For computers it was that way until the
| 90s when you could get access outside of universities. All of
| the front end JavaScript web apps will be replaced with
| automation and drag and drop UIs. This will let some people
| scale but all those code academy kids will need to find new
| skills.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Computer Science graduates have done well and will continue
| to do well, although figuring out a post-40s career
| strategy is a huge necessity. Other fields, other than the
| specialties? Many will continue to suffer, IMO.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Where does this post 40s mean come from? I mean,
| seriously... it makes no sense.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Ageism. Yes, there are 50 year old devs that are on the
| cutting edge of their field, and still doing well, but by
| 40 you're looked at with increased skepticism if you
| haven't made your way into management
| sjg007 wrote:
| It seems like an irrational made up meme that risks
| becoming a self full filling prophecy. Much like the view
| that the only qualified interviews are Google interviews.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > Great news, the concept that you need college to succeed was
| one of the greatest lies told to my generation.
|
| I guess it means what you mean by "succeed". Going to college
| is and always has been a reliable way towards earning more
| money[0]. The issue isn't that college doesn't work, the issue
| is that it's basically an asset bubble of sorts and the cost
| exceeded its value.
|
| If huge chunks of future generations skip college because it's
| unaffordable, that will be bad for us as a society. It would be
| much better to reduce the cost of college so that it's more
| valuable for more people, rather than having younger
| generations opt out due to the high cost.
|
| 0 - Degree dependent, of course. Music degrees have been always
| poorly valued by the market.
| Grakel wrote:
| Everyone going to college has turned it into high school- in
| every metric. I'm a professor, and college is a lifestyle,
| the classes are a part time job, and there is greatly reduced
| academic rigor and seriousness. At some age, general
| education should become a personal journey, or soon we'll
| have PhDs in general studies and everyone will need one.
| silexia wrote:
| My kids will be strongly discouraged from going to college.
| Colleges have somehow devolved from centers of education
| into something else entirely. Colleges now often push
| extreme viewpoints that lack evidence, colleges have
| dangerous drinking and drug cultures, and colleges bury
| their students in debt that enslaves them for life.
|
| A good education can now be had on YouTube... I have spent
| the last year learning construction there and the quality
| of content is excellent. Years ago, I learned to program
| quite well using online courses and I am sure those have
| improved even further. I tried to learn diesel mechanics
| from a textbook That was the top rated in the field, it is
| shocking how terrible learning from a textbook is.
|
| I am going to have my kids do a combination of
| apprenticeships and online learning.
| poopypoopington wrote:
| This is a vastly overgeneralized statement. Where I went to
| college [in the US] was much more than a "part time job"
| and academic rigor was incredibly high. It was not uncommon
| for students to work 60-80 hours a week.
| bradlys wrote:
| > I'm a professor, and college is a lifestyle, the classes
| are a part time job, and there is greatly reduced academic
| rigor and seriousness.
|
| Where/what do you teach? When I was doing math & cs - they
| (especially math) were more than a full time job. Rigor was
| pretty high - lots of kids failing, dropping out, or
| transferring schools out. I see this still happening with
| people I know in school now - mind you not as severe since
| they're not in math.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > It would be much better to reduce the cost of college so
| that it's more valuable for more people
|
| To do that, would be very helpful if the government stopped
| giving zero interest loans. This is resulting in costs
| skyrocketing.
| yardie wrote:
| LOL. I wish the government gave 0-interest loans. As it
| stands in the US, Stafford Loans are higher than most car
| loans [3.73% undergrad, 5.28% graduate, 6.28% PLUS]. Costs
| are skyrocketing despite government loans. It's not the
| working/middle class students asking for new buildings, new
| "centers of research", new dorms, etc. Colleges are
| building these things, giving you the bill, and your
| options are go:not go.
| loonster wrote:
| As the percentage goes lower the amount of debt will
| increase. The same thing happened in mortgages. The
| monthly payment stayed relative constant (plus
| inflation).
| ric2b wrote:
| We're talking about teenagers, not adults with several
| years of household finance experience.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Bad for us as a society how?
| racl101 wrote:
| I imagine their point is people forgoing a post secondary
| education.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| The conflation of college with education was natural and
| understandable until the last 10-15 years, but that
| appears to be changing.
| Grakel wrote:
| Well said. Today it's a dating camp that you attend after
| high school before you settle into the debt economy.
| racl101 wrote:
| I agree as well. I'm just speculating about OP's point.
|
| Now you can get a pretty decent education from watching
| lots of videos and an education that commensurate with
| one that you'd plunk down thousands of dollars for at a
| university or college.
|
| Especially in the era of COVID where they would have you
| watch videos anyways during a period of lockdown.
|
| So glad I'm not a student right now. I'd feel so ripped
| off.
| JackFr wrote:
| Well, two ways. First, broadly speaking across the economy,
| a college graduate 2000 hours a year typically produces
| more GDP$ to the real economy than a non-college graduate.
| There are a lot of caveats to that statement, but broadly
| it's true and that's why people will refer to education as
| human capital. Second (and I believe this is the more
| controversial claim), as a society we really do benefit
| from intellectuals expert in history, literature and other
| liberal arts and from basic research, by which I mean
| scientific research which has no immediately forseeable
| practicable application.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Personally, I don't know. But I find it interesting that
| the only politically permissible way to even discuss it is
| by looking at how it could hurt women:
|
| > Yet the stakes are too high to ignore, she said. "If you
| care about our society, one, and, two, if you care about
| women, you have to care about the boys, too. If you have
| equally educated numbers of men and women that just makes a
| better society, and it makes it better for women."
|
| The possibility that it could be bad for men I guess is not
| a relevant consideration when evaluating the impact on
| society.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Going to college is and always has been a reliable way
| towards earning more money[0]. The issue isn't that college
| doesn't work, the issue is that it's basically an asset
| bubble of sorts and the cost exceeded its value.
|
| That last part about exceeding it's value contradicts the
| notion that it currently IS a reliable way toward earning
| more money. At least net more money.
|
| IMHO a bunch of professors should be able to start their own
| "non-profit" college with minimal overhead. But I suppose a
| lot of them aren't really into teaching anyway. Maybe we need
| to separate education from funding their hobbies (research).
| a123b456c wrote:
| Your idea sounds like a public university.
|
| We could even collectively own it through our state
| government.
| pc86 wrote:
| It depends on what you're comparing it to. You can go to a
| trade school and learn contracting, or be an electrician,
| or an HVAC installer, and in your late teens and early 20's
| you'll make a lot more than most college grads. But unless
| you branch out into your own business your income is capped
| lower than a generic college grad's probably is. And
| importantly, those careers are typically hell on your body.
| I know we all like to talk about the dangers of sitting all
| day but it doesn't compare to doing physical labor for a
| living, by any stretch. If you have particularly onerous
| private loans funding a marginal degree from a for-profit
| institution, you might net less lifetime earnings than a
| very skilled electrician in an in-demand market.
|
| If you're comparing it to unskilled labor, retail, customer
| service, or stuff like that, it's absolutely no contest
| you're still better off with the degree.
|
| And yeah your last bit there seems like the typical HN
| "let's reinvent this thing that already exist but 'from
| first principles!!1' but forgetting all the reasons it
| exists in the state it does now." Public colleges have too
| much overhead but some of it is justified and necessary to
| ensure licensing, credentialing, etc.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > and in your late teens and early 20's you'll make a lot
| more than most college grads.
|
| I question even this. I live in an area of the US without
| a strong union culture, and known a lot of people in the
| trades and it doesn't seem uncommon to see job postings
| for _X_ apprentice starting at $13-$15 and hour. I could
| get close to that at a shitty gas station clerk job.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Compare the apprentice to the college student: the
| apprentice gets paid to learn, while the student has to
| pay (borrow).
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| I'd like to see some harder numbers on this, too. I'm
| from a similar area, but, maybe things are different in
| other places. It would be great to see the figures
| adjusted for cost of living.
| the_only_law wrote:
| It's hard to get good data broken when you're looking
| into things like career level, etc. but when I go on the
| BLS salary page for my MSA I can see the following
|
| HVAC Repair. It's a pretty common trade out here. I have
| a number of family who's done it at one point. There's
| probably a pretty strong demand given how miserable I was
| when my AC died the other day. Annual median is $42,640
|
| Insurance Claims Processors, which in the particular city
| I live in tends to be one of the big options for
| otherwise unskilled college graduates. Annual median:
| $43,570
|
| Not that big of a difference, though I suppose you could
| argue the former has the slight advantage of not having
| as much educational debt burden, which probably exceeds
| that ~$1k difference.
|
| However like the GP noted, a person in the latter
| position likely has better options late career.
| gamechangr wrote:
| Isn't "apprentice" like an intern. Just the first 1-2
| years of on the job training until the wage goes up?
|
| I have a cousin he started as an electrician making $18
| an hour as an apprentice. He started making six figures 4
| years into the job. Granted he works quite a bit.
| mywittyname wrote:
| It's a feast or famine industry. It's been a feast for a
| while, and a lot of people who are relatively new to the
| industry haven't experienced a famine.
|
| My father is/was an electrician and 2008 decimated the
| industry. He was de facto laid off and worked part time
| for the better part of three years after. Of course,
| today there's tons of work and no one to do it. Any
| young'uns who came in between like 2002-2008 didn't make
| it through the GFC and switched careers, and the old-
| timers who weathered the storm don't have enough juice
| left to work the insane hours.
| michaelt wrote:
| College degrees are either incredibly overpriced, or
| incredibly good value for money, depending on how you analyse
| them.
|
| If you look at some CS graduate making $200,000 a year and
| assume they'd have made $50,000 without the degree, college
| looks like an incredibly good investment.
|
| On the other hand, if you look at someone paying $1000 per
| credit hour for online video lectures? I've seen online video
| at 1% that price being described as overpriced.
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _If you look at some CS graduate making $200,000 a year
| and assume they 'd have made $50,000 without the degree_
|
| This is the problem with assessing how valuable college is:
| you don't know how well off the person would've been if
| they had chosen not to go to college. You can't just
| compare all the people who went to college with all the
| people who didn't. You end up with a selection bias. You
| need to compare people who went to college with people who
| could've gone to college, but didn't.
|
| Also, there might be (is) a difference between what's good
| for the individual and what's good for society.
| inkblotuniverse wrote:
| Also, to the degree that college is used as a signal of
| intelligence/skill, it's a waste for individually and
| collectively. You could just have the college entry exams
| and hand out diplomas for those, and it would be nearly
| as good.
| bradlys wrote:
| Except they're not used as a measure of intelligence or
| skill? They're used as a measure of ability to go through
| a series of rigorous tests and do a bunch of work you
| might not like doing.
|
| They're a litmus test to see if you'd likely be good for
| doing a job you don't enjoy either. End of the day - work
| is work and they need history to show you can do more
| than the bare legal minimum of graduating high school.
| loonster wrote:
| Wouldn't 4 years of work history be a better assessment?
| bradlys wrote:
| Yes. However - why would an employer take a risk on a
| high school graduate when plenty of people with college
| degrees (often with internship experience) are applying?
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| > This is the problem with assessing how valuable college
| is: you don't know how well off the person would've been
| if they had chosen not to go to college.
|
| I think this is absolutely the key. If you just look at
| some of the figures given in [0], and do some simple
| math, you find out that someone with a bachelor's degree
| makes just a hair more than $26k per year more than
| someone with only a high school diploma. Over the course
| of, say, 40 years working, that comes out to a hair over
| $1M difference in favor of the college grad. So, it would
| seem that even if a 4 year degree cost $200k (which,
| sadly, is not an insane estimate these days [1]), it
| still seems like a no-brainer.
|
| But, that's as far as statistics can take us, I think,
| because, as you mentioned, we don't see what happens to
| people who choose not to go to college, but who could
| have successfully gotten a bachelor's degree. There's no
| literal way for us to ethically conduct that experiment.
|
| If I were to speculate a bit, I might wonder if the
| answer lies in looking at children of college graduates
| and comparing those children who went to college vs those
| who didn't. I have no idea if such a study is available
| or not, unfortunately.
|
| The other idea I have is that, although it pays off in
| the long run, maybe acquiring a significant amount of
| debt at a young age makes it harder to get by in the
| initial, post-college years harder. Considering the cost
| of housing and health care, this _seems_ like a
| reasonable hypothesis, but I 'd also like to see if
| there's research on that.
|
| ---
|
| [0]: https://www.northeastern.edu/bachelors-
| completion/news/avera...
|
| [1]:
| https://www.collegeavestudentloans.com/blog/estimating-
| the-t...
| wheelinsupial wrote:
| The challenge with looking at the statistics for an ROI
| is that lifetime earnings will vary by field of study,
| highest degree attained, and location. I am not familiar
| with US statistics agencies, but Stats Canada has looked
| at lifetime earnings by field of study. It is a little
| out of date as this is from 2010 [1], but it shows there
| are some large differences in earnings by field. In some
| cases a bachelor's degree results in lower earnings than
| a high school graduate. [2] shows that depending on major
| about 30% of graduates go on for further study. That
| further study may be a lower credential (e.g.,
| certificate or diploma) or a higher credential (e.g.,
| masters or professional degree). [3] shows an analysis of
| differences in earnings by field, gender, and highest
| degree level; with the largest increases in earnings
| coming for those from business, social sciences, and
| arts. Unfortunately [2] and [3] do not seem to be looking
| at lifetime earnings.
|
| For men, [1] shows the median lifetime earnings for high
| school graduates is $882,300. The median lifetime
| earnings for men with a bachelor's degree is 1,517,200.
| The lowest field is Fine and Applied Arts at $843,900,
| which is lower than the median lifetime earnings for
| those with a high school education, up to the highest
| median field of engineering with earnings of $1,845,000.
|
| For women, [1] shows median high school lifetime earnings
| of $458,900, median bachelor's earnings for all fields of
| $972,500, and lowest median bachelor's earnings of
| $652,100 (Fine and Applied Arts), and a highest of
| $1,169,100 (Business Administration). The interesting
| thing to note is for women there is only 1 of 18 field
| degree combinations (earnings are provided for bachelor's
| and associate's) where the woman's lifetime earnings
| decreases relative to a high school education alone (Fine
| and Applied Arts associates median earnings are
| $437,300). For men, 4 of 18 field degree combinations
| will result in lower lifetime earnings relative to high
| school education alone.
|
| There is further analysis in [1] of the earnings
| percentiles by each field showing that men with a
| business degree earn the most at the 90 percentile. This
| holds for women with a business degree.
|
| I don't see if this has been restricted to those whose
| highest education is a bachelor's degree or not, but
| there is also work that has shown increases in earnings
| by field for graduate or professional degrees [3]. It's
| possible that those earnings premiums have been captured
| in the reporting of [1], but [3] seems to come to the
| conclusion that most business, arts, and social sciences
| fields gain a large increase in salary for graduate or
| professional degrees.
|
| Hopefully those familiar with similar analysis from the
| US could help to provide that information.
|
| [1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-626-x/11-626-x
| 2014040...
|
| [2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-
| quotidien/150911/dq150...
|
| [3] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2018001/
| article...
| jimbokun wrote:
| What percentage of all college students are going straight
| into a $200,000 a year job?
| MrFoof wrote:
| Not only that, but in most markets those salaries _do not
| exist_.
|
| Even in markets that still pay well outside the valley
| like Boston, that level of compensation is still
| extremely limited and are < 1% of available positions
| most of which are quite senior.
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| My question is, to what degree is college a training
| center, and to what degree is it a toll bridge to the
| middle class?
|
| If I get charged $100 to cross a toll bridge in my car to
| get to my job, I wouldn't consider myself to have gotten a
| good deal, regardless of pay.
| racl101 wrote:
| > If huge chunks of future generations skip college because
| it's unaffordable, that will be bad for us as a society. It
| would be much better to reduce the cost of college so that
| it's more valuable for more people, rather than having
| younger generations opt out due to the high cost.
|
| You'd think so. But then again look at healthcare in the US.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Maybe, but I think it conflates two things: i) getting a
| college education and ii) the price of it. Maybe the price in
| the US just isn't right anymore.
|
| At the same time, the "elites" do make sure their offspring
| does get a prestigious (signaling) college/university
| education. So baring big changes to how society is run, some
| things will be difficult to get to without a college education.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| > Maybe the price in the US just isn't right anymore.
|
| Has it be right since at least the 1990s though? There's
| clear divergence between income and college costs in the USA,
| and it's hard to see why, given everyone in the industry
| seems to be taking a part of the honey pot. Seriously, how
| did we arrive to "textbook for a semester are more expensive
| than tuition is in other counties"?
| zabzonk wrote:
| > Seriously, how did we arrive to "textbook for a semester
| are more expensive than tuition is in other counties"?
|
| Academic corruption. They get kickbacks from the publishers
| for forcing these (always crap) textbooks on their
| students.
| bernulli wrote:
| That's not really a thing. Also, wait till you hear how
| much an academic makes from the articles they publish,
| and from those lucrative research grants from
| big-[oil,pharma,etc].
| zabzonk wrote:
| > That's not really a thing.
|
| Sorry, it is. I've worked in higher education and I've
| seen it happen. What other explanation do you have for
| the sales of these ludicrous "textbooks"?
| jjk166 wrote:
| It's not like there is a cheap alternative that the
| professors can switch to. All new edition textbooks are
| expensive. They can't specify out of print editions
| because then you can't guarantee that your students can
| get access to them, and the textbook companies update the
| problems in the books just enough to make using a
| different edition from the one specified impractical.
|
| Some publishers may incentivize using their particular
| textbook, but there isn't some vast conspiracy to jack up
| prices. The fact is textbooks are a niche product with a
| steep demand curve that can be paid for with subsidized
| loans, of course they're going to be ridiculously
| overpriced.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| As a professor, create your own PDF and give it to all
| the students free, update it if there's a new development
| in the field, which is something you'd know as a
| professor.
|
| It is really not that hard, these professors often write
| or collaborate on the textbooks themselves so they're
| writing them anyway. If the textbook is needed for
| learning and not just a way to get some extra money then
| this would be standard practice.
| professoretc wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not even sure how that would work? Like, if my
| department goes with a particular textbook, or a certain
| number of classes all use textbooks from the same
| publisher, then sometimes we get _discounts_ on things
| like solutions manuals or custom editions, but I don 't
| know how a publisher would pay a _particular professor_
| for picking their textbook.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Well they all send you free books, in the hope you'll
| pick their one.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Then don't require (note, require) students to buy
| textbooks at all - what are these lecturers supposed to
| be doing? Are there no libraries. Don't outdate them
| every year to make second hand ones useless.
|
| > ridiculously overpriced
|
| Well, you admit it yourself.
|
| And the books aren't even any good!
| jjk166 wrote:
| The lecturers are supposed to be lecturing.
|
| 300 kids taking a course in a 90 day semester, 10 copies
| in a library, each kid gets 3 days per semester with the
| class textbook. Would you pay 25000 for that semester of
| education? Maybe some students can go halvsies on a copy
| but the number of copies of the book that you need is
| roughly equivalent to the number of students. And before
| you say "well why doesn't the library just buy more
| copies" remember who pays for the library to buy those
| copies.
|
| The professors don't make the changes to the textbooks,
| the publishers do. Professors don't like it either, they
| have to update all of their materials every year to keep
| up with the changes too.
|
| No one is denying textbooks are expensive, I'm denying
| the conspiracy theory that professors and publishers are
| all colluding to manipulate the market.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I always found it funny that there were yearly rewrites
| to textbooks on subjects which hadn't really changed that
| much in hundreds of years. You telling me there isn't a
| good calculus textbook in the public domain yet? Really?
| This is a totally solvable problem, but the powers that
| be are getting by on grift.
| jjk166 wrote:
| It's not the information in the chapters that changes,
| it's the problems that students do for assignments that
| change. For example a problem where one train is going
| 105 mph and another is going 90 mph gets swapped for one
| where one plane is going 605 mph and another is going
| 590. Conceptually it's the same, but obviously a student
| doing the one problem is going to get a radically
| different answer from the one doing the other.
|
| And while calculus might have some public domain works
| that are acceptable, most fields have advanced pretty far
| since 1925, which might I remind you was before the
| discovery of DNA, penicillin, plate tectonics, molecular
| orbital theory, the neutron, the invention of digital
| electronics, Keynesian economics, Hemingway's first
| novel, etc.
| bernulli wrote:
| You can compare the price of college textbooks to the
| price of textbooks for professionals and you will see
| there is no difference. It's simply a niche market.
|
| Personally, I prefer decade old textbooks, hardcover,
| beautifully typeset, clear diagrams and equations, black
| and white. Of course that doesn't exist for every field.
| But try to imagine the complaints you get from students
| for teaching from 'obsolete' textbooks that aren't even
| in four color print.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| I'm guessing you haven't dealt with the spiral-bound,
| Kinkos-printed "text" written by the professor, sold for
| $75, and updated every semester to prevent resale?
|
| My wife had two of these every semester for her last two
| years of college.
| bernulli wrote:
| How is that a "kickback from the publishers for forcing
| these (always crap) textbooks on their students" ?
|
| I'm not denying that black sheep exist, I am denying a
| pervasive conspiracy of "big textbook" to the benefit of
| the professors.
|
| Also, an easy solution to not everyone buying Kinko-
| printed spiral bound lecture notes easily comes to
| mind...
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Not all college is not expensive. Diploma mills and elite
| colleges and pseudo-elite private colleges are expensive.
| Liberal arts degrees are expensive. Your local public
| community/technical college has great ROI for a career-
| related field. In most states, your public university has a
| great ROI as well. (If you are paying full price, it may be
| because you are on the "diploma mills" track within a
| multi-track school)
| unpolloloco wrote:
| The other problem is that prices have no relation to quality.
| The random private university that will saddle you with $250k
| in debt and no job prospects costs the same as Harvard, which
| will both give you more aid and give you a foot in the door
| pretty much anywhere. But the marketing to kids has been all
| about finding the right "fit" - not finding the school that
| will actually land them a job for a reasonable value.
|
| And to top that off, career "fit" has been marketed so hard
| to kids that no one wants to go into specialized trades,
| which will both almost definitely pay way better and be way
| more fulfilling than the random inside sales job that they
| land right out of school
| [deleted]
| twoslide wrote:
| Is the issue higher education (colleges/universities) or higher
| education finance? Sounds like the latter.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I don't think your conclusion is suggested by the statistics in
| the article. There is a decline in enrollment, but it is
| heavily focused on men and white men are even slightly behind
| other ethnicities. This holds true even for very high household
| incomes where the ROI on a degree is less important than the
| social prestige of being in a white collar career. If college
| was a bad deal, you would see women opting out as well.
| treis wrote:
| A large generalization but in my experience women operate
| under the assumption that they will marry a partner that has
| equal or greater earning potential. Men assume that they will
| have to support their partner.
|
| The other part of this is kids and biological reality. Can't
| imagine doing a trade or physical job while pregnant. Even
| after birth it took my wife a solid year or more before she
| was physically back to "normal".
| zefool wrote:
| Overall enrollment is down as well. It's mentioned in the
| article.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| >If college was a bad deal, you would see women opting out as
| well.
|
| Not necessarily. Bad deals are generally taken due to
| deceptive marketing, something that drove a lot of the
| college applications over the last two generations. If
| deceptive marketing is still in play but one group, e.g.
| American men, is no longer being targeted...
| mywittyname wrote:
| You're conflating college with student loans. Not everyone who
| goes to college comes out with tons, or even any debt.
| Additionally, federal loans for undergraduate degrees are
| capped (to ~$35kish right now). It is graduate school where
| people end up with six-figures of high interest debt, as
| graduate loans are unlimited.
|
| You don't _need_ to go to college to be successful, but the
| data speaks for itself. College graduates have always, on
| average, earned more and enjoyed significantly lower
| unemployment. Even if that weren 't the case, the fact that
| college-level jobs are easier on the body and people can
| generally do them well for 20+ years longer is a huge benefit.
|
| I was raised by two blue collar people and my parents were big
| on college. My father worked as an electrician and even by the
| time I was 16, his body was starting to give out. He's
| basically unable to ply his trade at this point due to several
| complications related to his career, and works a near-minimum
| wage office job now. I'm sure he would gladly trade half a
| years salary when he was 18 to get an additional 20 high-
| earning working years.
| pc86 wrote:
| 35, renting and another 12k left here. I am in the (relatively)
| lucky position that my loans are only about 6% interest so it's
| not quite an emergency for me to pay them back. Selfishly I
| stopped making extra payments to see if Biden actually kept his
| campaign promise of a minimum $10k forgiveness, but of course
| as soon as he was elected that disappeared.
|
| I know classmates of mine (2008) who still have 20, 30, 40k in
| debt. Even some of the kids who came from a bit of family money
| still struggled for the better part of their 20's to pay
| everything back.
| phoehne wrote:
| 4 unpopular opinions from an old:
|
| 1) There's a point to education. Decide what you're going to do
| and then prepare for it. Most likely you will need to get a job
| that either does something for someone because it's specialized,
| do something for someone because it's boring, or you will
| entertain people. If you want to be an electrician, great, line
| that up and get on with it. We need electricians. Going to
| college isn't a goal. It's a strategy to get to a goal, but
| that's not what we tell kids. We tell them it's the goal. If you
| want to go to college because you want to work as a civil
| engineer - awesome - we need civil engineers. Going to college to
| study civil engineering isn't the goal - working as a civil
| engineer is the goal. Many jobs, like licensed Civil Engineer,
| oncologist, or attorney from YouTube videos (even if you read
| _all_ the comments), require education ** as a strategy to get
| the job **. Other jobs require you work for a licensed
| practitioner. Some require a mix of the two (e.g. CPA or Welder).
|
| 2) I see too many men have extended adolescences into their 40's.
| If you want to man up, here's the list: 1) take care of the kids,
| 2) take care of the spouse, 3) take care of your job, 4) take
| care of your house, 5) your community, and somewhere along 8, 9
| or 10 is 'spend Saturday on the phone with you college buddies
| from 2007, on your fantasy draft.' If you're childless an
| unmarried, the list is 1) take care of your job, take care of
| your house, 3) take care of your community. I see too many guys
| with the list that focuses on fun. Many of them are unmarried.
| Mammals are expected to invest in their children. Men who show no
| ability to invest in anything besides themselves are probably
| signaling they are poor choices as mates. This is not to say they
| can't get laid, but are probably not messaging well as a long
| term bet. I suspect they over-compensate for their poor signaling
| by signaling hyper masculinity. They buy trucks they don't need,
| spend too much time at the gym, or engage in high-risk
| activities.
|
| 3) The better the job, the farther it is away from being
| automated. No one runs to a room to look up your records at the
| DMV any more - we've automated those clerks away through
| computers. Call centers are largely automated - thanks to
| computers. Bus and truck drivers will eventually be automated
| away - thanks to computers. If your job can be done by anyone
| with a few hours or days of training, chances are it will be
| automated away. This includes programmers, as well. Companies
| like Square will chip away at the market from the bottom up and
| hyper-scalers from the top down. Developers with the depth of
| knowledge (usually obtained by getting degrees and often advanced
| degrees) are better off than going through a boot camp to put
| buttons on a page. Whatever your field, make sure you are able to
| do something that automating it away would be impractical.
|
| 4) Some skills and jobs are more valuable than others. If you
| want to be a music producer or DJ, awesome. You be you. Just
| realize that unless you're better than 99.999% of the other
| wannabe music producers, DJs, indie game developers, founders
| with a 'great idea,' or whatever it is, you will make little
| money. If you want to be a successful book keeper, it's nowhere
| near as hard and requires only a little more preparation. While
| people may stream your latest mix on as free wall paper music,
| they will pay you good money to maintain their financial records
| and any related filings with the US Treasury or state agencies.
| That's not saying music is worthless, but it does say the average
| book keeper is more valuable to most people than the average
| musician. You're more likely to pay off that degree you got in
| Empathy Studies as a book keeper than DJ.
|
| What does all this have to do with the article? 1) people are
| becoming disillusioned with education for the wrong reason. They
| think that being smart and learned is just a con because they (or
| someone they know) got an education in a random major and is
| struggling. 2) Growing up asks how you can be of service rather
| than how someone can serve you - and I see a lot of men not
| growing up. Signaling you're a grownup will generally improve
| your fit and function in a society where people expect grownups.
| 3) Easy jobs disappear easily - you need to have enough
| investment in your skill, trade, or business that you provide
| more value than a shell script. 4) No one cares about your shitty
| music except maybe your girlfriend (she's lying) and your mother
| (also lying). Even if you're an entrepreneur, you're filling a
| need for someone else so think about the utility and value of
| what you're doing.
|
| That's it. That's all there is to it.
| frankbreetz wrote:
| On the other side: A stat shared at my most recent tech companies
| meeting, they are trying to hire more women.
|
| 5000 people applied for a single position and 15 of them were
| women. This was for a high paying tech job.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| They left out actual subjects chosen by students in the
| article.
|
| Still, doesn't that story also point to a surplus of engineers?
| exporectomy wrote:
| Computer science is the 3rd most popular subject for men but
| 18th for women. [1]
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/967826/number-
| bachelors-...
|
| Women really really like to study subjects related to people
| - even "homeland security, law enforcement and firefighting"
| is more popular among women than computer science.
| finiteseries wrote:
| What proportion are American raised/educated?
|
| Mirrors my experience though, and probably many in eg finance
| as well. There is a clear, well publicized path from degree ->
| money that any middle class+ guy can walk.
|
| Sad the article doesn't go into specifics though, it's all just
| "degrees".
| tchaffee wrote:
| What does your job description say? What are your company
| reviews on Glassdoor? What does the whisper network say about
| what it's like to work as a woman in tech at your company?
|
| Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women, you'd
| get 750 women applying.
|
| What are you doing to get so many women to give your company an
| immediate rejection and apply somewhere else?
| tarsinge wrote:
| > Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women,
| you'd get 750 women applying.
|
| High paying usually means senior, seniority is usually 5-10
| years, so you would need 15% 10 years ago.
| tchaffee wrote:
| Yep, that's why I used 15% because over the past 20 years
| it never dipped that low.
|
| Here's one source that shows 10 years ago it would have
| been about 18%.
|
| https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajo
| r...
| michaelt wrote:
| Perhaps frankbreetz works for a company that isn't very cool,
| making it people's third choice; and a disproportionate
| number of women got hired by their first or second choice
| employer.
| OJFord wrote:
| > Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women,
| you'd get 750 women applying.
|
| There were three in my cohort of ~35; and that was much more
| dense on that programme that was a (more CS-oriented) subset
| of the EE department's variants - something like 15 of 400 in
| first year, higher ratio (i.e. fewer female drop-outs/more
| doing MEng) by the end I think though. Only a few years ago.
|
| And even then, your conclusion is only valid for a graduate
| entry role - for something more senior you'd need to at least
| look at grad rates further back, if not what happens to
| people once in industry. (We've also assumed 100% grads - or
| even male/female anyway - do apply to industry at all, vs.
| not, or something else, or staying in academia, etc. I expect
| that's roughly true though.)
| tchaffee wrote:
| > for something more senior you'd need to at least look at
| grad rates further back
|
| Sure. They have never dipped as low as 15% which is why I
| used it as very safe and generous number. Here's one
| source.
|
| https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajo
| r...
|
| > if not what happens to people once in industry
|
| Indeed. What happens to people after they get a job is a
| relevant factor. It would be interesting to see both
| dropout rates over a career lifetime and if senior level
| women in tech are concentrated in a group of companies
| known to be good to work at via the whisper network.
|
| Even age is a factor. Most folks don't stick with their CS
| job until retirement age, although some are smart enough to
| save and retire before that age. Age discrimination is not
| exactly rare though.
|
| I have no idea where I'd get that kind of data or if it
| even exists, but maybe someone else does.
|
| Given that kind of data, an industry with a constant
| deficit of qualified senior level candidates would do well
| to improve that situation by figuring out how to reduce the
| dropouts.
| pwthornton wrote:
| One thing I am starting to wonder about is if there is a
| systematic guidance counseling failing in high schools and
| colleges. There are so many well paying tech jobs that we just
| aren't getting that many candidates for. Forget not having a
| great gender ratio, it is often hard to find a lot of
| candidates for my openings. If I can't offer sponsorship, it
| can take awhile
|
| There clearly seems to be a lot more knowledge in some
| countries about which jobs lead to high paying careers, and the
| U.S. still has an antiquated mindset about this.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > a lot more knowledge in some countries about which jobs
| lead to high paying careers
|
| The knowledge is there and completely trivial to obtain.
| Google "starting salaries for XXXX major".
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| It's also a failure on schools to prepare their top students
| for the useless signalling rituals necessary to _get_ the job
| in the first place. Either it 's a life skills class in high
| school teaching you how to fill out paper applications for a
| part-time job and an interview that will take anyone with a
| pulse who doesn't mouth off to the interviewer or it's a
| career development department that is optimized for getting
| business majors management internships but either clueless or
| 15 years old advice for getting started in STEM fields.
|
| Good programs exist in this space, but they're the exception
| (and no single person can possibly create a properly
| comprehensive survey without resorting to opinion polling).
| aogaili wrote:
| When I was studying software engineering, I met a girl who
| switched major after the first year.
|
| I saw her again once in the lab, and I asked her why did you
| switch, she said, and I quote her exact words: "why would I
| sit and code all day when I've this a$$, pointing at her
| back."
|
| I honestly didn't know what to say afterward. Our program had
| special scholarship for women, and we had only one woman (out
| of 30 or so) and that was more than 10 years ago.
| aogaili wrote:
| Why the downvote? I don't share her opinion, I'm just
| sharing an encounter I had. I was really surprised by her
| response, coming from different culture to the west, both
| of my parents are engineers.
|
| I met several great women developers in my career and I
| personally think the field will benefit a lot by having
| more diverse perspectives on the tools being created.
| watwut wrote:
| > I met several great women developers in my career
|
| Why is the other one poster child for feminity? I met
| guys who dropped out of college, because they could not
| keep grades due to regular whole night gaming.
|
| I met guys who switched out of CS, because they could not
| pass exams despite trying.
|
| In both gender, you get some amount of irresponsible,
| disinterested, troublemakers or simply people with too
| many mental issues to finish any school.
| aogaili wrote:
| Agreed,I don't want generalize.
|
| But that incident stuck in my head because I expected
| many answers but not the one she gave! Anyway, it was a
| light hearted conversation not to be taken seriously.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You'll actually find similar gender disparities in China and
| India. Maybe not as pronounced as the USA, but it's still
| there. Somehow there is something going on throughout the
| industry that crosses cultural boundaries.
| pharmakom wrote:
| From a sample of 3 countries (two with very traditional
| gender roles), I'm not convinced. In Eastern Europe
| software engineering was a female dominated field.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > From a sample of 3 countries (two with very traditional
| gender roles), I'm not convinced.
|
| These are the three biggest countries (40% of the world
| population), and also the ones most represented in tech
| here in the USA, at least (because they are the biggest).
| mpweiher wrote:
| That's the gender-equality paradox, STEM version: the
| more gender-equal a society, the more the genders self-
| segregate occupationally.
|
| It's important that this is not about any absolute value,
| but about the sign of the correlation. The "blank slate"
| hypothesis would predict that the correlation is
| positive, i.e. the more gender equal a society, the more
| equal the distribution.
|
| The opposite is actually the case, the correlation is
| negative.
|
| This _strongly_ suggests that the statistical differences
| in occupational preferences have an innate cause. That
| difference is _moderated_ by societal influence, not
| caused by it. When societal pressure are lessened or
| removed, the innate differences manifest more strongly.
|
| And of course, it needs to be stressed that these are
| statistical differences, not categorical ones, just like
| the outcomes are statistical and not categorical.
| Bayart wrote:
| It's a legacy of socialist regimes enforcing gender
| ratios. Gender disparity is usually proportional to
| freedom of choice. ie. countries where there's less
| pressure to choose a particular field are more disparate
| in their gender ratios across disciplines.
| PeterisP wrote:
| I was born in USSR and I don't recall any aspect there
| that would amount to "enforcing gender ratios". The way I
| recall the "gender politics" of the communist 1980s was
| that formally, gender was effectively ignored; in
| practice there were quite some prejudices; but the notion
| of discrimination wasn't even discussed much so anything
| similar to "affirmative action" or even caring about
| gender ratio would be quite alien to that regime.
|
| And yes, there were proportionally quite many female
| engineers and computer scientists. I might guess that
| this perhaps was facilitated by prejudices/discrimination
| in the "more macho" fields of construction engineering
| and industrial engineering, so all the high school girls
| with good STEM results would go to math and computer
| science fields instead of all the programs with a focus
| on heavy industry - but even those had a decent
| proportion of female engineers.
| orwin wrote:
| I'm not sure about that, i've hear Professor Emeritus
| Mallard talk about his youth in the genetical field and
| the first use of computers to assist geneticists, he told
| me that he basically never saw men doing computer work,
| and that changed in the 80s, along with the culture.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There were a _lot_ of women in computing in the 50s, 60s,
| and 70s, and they 've mostly been forgotten by the "Women
| don't really like this stuff" crowd.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I never encountered any in the 70s.
| OJFord wrote:
| Were they 'into' it though, or did the nature of the
| secretarial work they were doing change? At least as I
| understand it, that was predominantly (of _course_ there
| were exceptions, and female scientists, etc.!) the reason
| for the rise and fall of it.
|
| I'm not arguing for or against '"Women don't really like
| this stuff"' - I'm just saying an example against it
| needs to be women liking this stuff, not merely doing
| this stuff.
| wheelinsupial wrote:
| Apparently the amount of women in computer science majors
| peaked in the early-80s around 36-37%: https://www.npr.or
| g/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
| twic wrote:
| The story i've heard is that the olden days, operating a
| computer was seen as clerical work, just like being a
| secretary, so ideally suited to women.
|
| Then we got 8-bit microcomputers in every home, and
| operating a computer became a technical hobby, so ideally
| suited to boys.
|
| The generation of boys growing up playing with computers,
| and girls not playing with computers, swamped any
| existing biases in the industry.
|
| I wonder if the communist countries had the former phase,
| but because not so many homes had computers, not the
| latter.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| How many women were in electronics? I think the 8 Bit
| Homecomputer thing grew out of the electronics hobby, not
| office computers.
| zajio1am wrote:
| > The story i've heard is that the olden days, operating
| a computer was seen as clerical work, just like being a
| secretary, so ideally suited to women.
|
| The fact is that in the old days, there really was plenty
| of clerical work around computers that just disappeared.
| Like rewritting data to punched cards and swapping wheels
| with punched tapes. My grandmother worked in 'data-
| processing facility' in a communist country, the facility
| employed many women, but they were (from whay i heard)
| essentially clerical positions without much CS/EE
| knowledge.
| oldsecondhand wrote:
| It's a legacy of socialist systems where you can have 2
| years of paid maternity leave and then go back to your
| previous job.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| Also I guess you HAVE to go back to your job. Everybody
| has to do their part for society.
| Aerroon wrote:
| The Soviet Union also tried to encourage having children.
| Not only did they have maternity leave, there was even a
| 6% income tax on childlessness.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| Not true, at least not in Communist Poland. Jobless
| single men were sometimes prosecuted, but a stay-at-home-
| mom was something completely normal in families which
| could afford it (which there weren't that many of).
| pwthornton wrote:
| I'm not commenting on gender disparities in other
| countries, although I have seen first hand what you are
| saying about China and India. What I am saying is that when
| I hire for various tech jobs, I get a ton of non-American
| candidates. It can be hard to find good American candidates
| at times. The demand for the jobs is there, but it's
| clearly not be communicated to American high school and
| college kids enough.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I have come to realize that most people have no idea how
| much freaking money people are making in the corporate
| world...especially in tech. They simply have no exposure
| except to opportuities or jobs that take a decade or more
| to work up to the salary that barely-graduated college
| kids are being pushed to in tech.
|
| We are talking about whole population segments that dream
| of one day making $75k. They know that tech pays well but
| have no idea how outlandish the pay is compared to their
| experiences and expectations. They think their
| counterpart is tech is making $10k more than them, when
| in fact they are probably making $50-100k more.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| > Forget not having a great gender ratio, it is often hard to
| find a lot of candidates for my openings.
|
| Is your company paying a reasonable rate? I know a few people
| looking for entry level jobs in tech and they have trouble
| getting callbacks
| pwthornton wrote:
| We pay well, but not Google or Apple well. Not being a huge
| tech shop, we don't have a lot of H1-B opportunities laying
| around, which means I mostly deal with domestic candidates.
| I'll get candidates, for sure, but it can take awhile to
| fill roles.
|
| These are well paying jobs, but they do require a certain
| amount of skills. A lot of kids are getting college
| degrees, but coming out without enough skills to land a lot
| of in-demand jobs.
| underseacables wrote:
| Core classes should be cut in Half at least. University has
| become grossly over priced, because the government is picking up
| the tab, which has incentivized universities to add as many costs
| and classes as possible.
| motohagiography wrote:
| What these men don't understand, and nobody is telling them
| directly, is that college is how you essesntially conspire to
| manage (extract value from) the people who didn't go. College
| education is a tribe initiation, and you are in or you aren't.
| The pretenses and pretexts of subject matter and socializing are
| secondary to this one big thing.
|
| Everyone who graduates knows this, and this is the quiet part
| most won't even say out loud to themselves, and so we hear it's
| for other reasons like knowledge, relationships, and the
| experience. We will deny it and even gaslight people over it,
| because it's our source of social power, but for young men who
| need the concept framed concretely, this is the real choice.
|
| What these young men need to be told is: the way the world really
| works is, there are people who graduated, and people who didn't.
| The latter almost exclusively work for the former, and the former
| find each other so that they can assign them to manage the latter
| on their behalf. Further, the former work together to ensure that
| they do not work for the latter, or have any accountability to
| them. As an individual non-graduate, you will _always_ be working
| against a literal conspiracy against you. The exceptions who
| appear to "break through" and succeed, mainly exist and have
| their stories promoted to preserve the invisibility of the
| ceiling and keep you running on hope.
|
| Sure, you can make "six figures" (the stupidest euphemism for
| 100k that is the very bottom end salary of membership in the
| current elite) in a trades job, but what you will not have is
| opportunity. Salary means nothing if it is not supported by
| opportunity, autonomy, leverage into assets, and transferrable
| social status to your kids.
|
| The result is predictable, where they're having their countries,
| political levers, cultures and opportunities taken from them
| because they didn't realize they needed defending.
|
| If you have decided not to graduate, welcome to the underclass.
| They'll tell you that you do it to yourself, and you'll probably
| never understand.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Ignoring the flowery text here.. this is pretty spot-on. My
| brother in law is an amazing people person. He's able to
| convince anyone of anything. He always "knows a guy" and "is
| that person's second cousin". Never waits on line at a bar, and
| always the life of the party.
|
| This guy was born for sales.
|
| Perhaps unsurprisingly he also was terrible in college. Just
| did not work with his brain. He dropped out, worked some odd
| jobs, settled in to working a tree company, cutting down trees.
| Dangerous work to say the least.
|
| He finally went back to school and took like 2 classes a
| semester and graduated with whatever degree he could string
| together from the local college, and it took him ages, I think
| he spent 7 years total in undergrad. It was affordable because
| it was just some local state school.
|
| 2 months after graduation? He's a sales rep at a B2B software
| firm. A year later he's the top of his sales group. His
| potential is huge now, and that door was firmly shut to him
| before he graduated. College, for him, was just a piece of
| paper he needed, and his life took a dramatic turn when he got
| it.
| [deleted]
| dontthinkso wrote:
| Disagree, I have several friends who dropped out, and my
| brother dropped out of high school, and he is making 150k. A
| college degree will soon be a recognized as unnecessary.
| zepto wrote:
| "Young men get little help, in part, because schools are focused
| on encouraging historically underrepresented students. Jerlando
| Jackson, department chair, Education Leadership and Policy
| Analysis, at the University of Wisconsin's School of Education,
| said few campuses have been willing to spend limited funds on
| male underachievement that would also benefit white men, risking
| criticism for assisting those who have historically held the
| biggest educational advantages."
|
| So this is a direct result of the move away from color blind
| policies, to race based policies.
|
| > Keith E. Smith, a mental-health counselor and men's outreach
| coordinator at the University of Vermont, said that when he
| started working at the school in 2006 he found that men were much
| more likely to face consequences for the trouble they caused
| under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
|
| This is exactly what black students report as racism in school.
|
| Seems like evidence that race based policies are just racist.
|
| > In 2008, Mr. Smith proposed a men's center to help male
| students succeed. The proposal drew criticism from women who
| asked, "Why would you give more resources to the most privileged
| group on campus," he said. Funding wasn't appropriated, he said,
| and the center was never built.
|
| Obviously white men are not in fact privileged on university
| campuses.
|
| "Female students in the U.S. benefit from a support system
| established decades ago, spanning a period when women struggled
| to gain a foothold on college campuses. There are more than 500
| women's centers at schools nationwide. Most centers host clubs
| and organizations that work to help female students succeed."
|
| Men are failing _because it is the policy not to support them._
| wasmburger wrote:
| I also wonder about those in Silicon Valley telling young men
| "don't go to college" and the mostly male fascination with
| entrepreneurship and crytocurrency. The entire meme stock and
| "apes together are strong" seems like a young male flex. Could
| it be that college is just seen as "gay"?
|
| Are Academics Disproportionately Gay? A new analysis suggests
| that's the case, and that academic work -- at once solitary and
| social in nature -- makes it particularly attractive to those
| who are not straight.
|
| https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/26/study-suggest...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > Men are failing because it is the policy not to support them.
|
| And because _men need the support_. I suspect that a lot fewer
| men needed support in, say, 1950.
|
| Why do more men need support than did in 1950? I think the
| first reason may be because of education. Our education system
| is failing in a way that it wasn't in 1950. (This may be too
| harsh. If, say, 10% of high school graduates went to college in
| 1950, and 50% do now, then that means that the top 10% then
| were more prepared for college than the top 50% are now. But
| apples-to-apples would be to ask whether the top 10% then were
| better prepared than the top 10% are now. I don't have a good
| feel for the answer to that question.)
| II2II wrote:
| The other thing add that it is okay to support men who need
| that support. This was exactly what the Ontario Ministry of
| Education was encouraging men to get into teaching a decade
| ago. _They had data that showed boys attainment of literacy
| was declining and viewed more male role models as a potential
| solution_.
|
| It is also worth noting that providing supports for men does
| not mean removing supports for other under represented
| groups.
| zepto wrote:
| > And because men need the support. I suspect that a lot
| fewer men needed support in, say, 1950. > Why do more men
| need support than did in 1950?
|
| My answer is that when men were the vast majority consumers
| of higher education _the system was built to support them_.
|
| This accords with what the social justice people would say,
| and I think they are right about that.
|
| What they are wrong about is that men _today_ should be
| denied support _that other groups have today_ because men in
| the 1950s had support that other groups in the 1950s did not
| have.
| teawrecks wrote:
| After a few hundred years of race/gender based policies working
| in favor of whites/males, I don't know what else we would
| expect from a deliberate effort to reverse it. You can't expect
| to play a game, give one team an advantage for the first half,
| give neither team an advantage in the second half, and call it
| a fair game at the end. Yeah, it sucks for individuals in the
| meantime, but we were simply never going to achieve an equal
| opportunity society without taking from the group who was
| unfairly advantaged.
|
| If it stays this way for an extended period of time, then yeah,
| we will end up creating the inverse problem, but for now I
| don't know what else anyone expected. We just need to keep an
| eye on it, use science, don't hide any data, and have a well
| informed plan on how to ease back affirmative action as we
| determine that we have succeeded in undoing centuries of
| unfairness.
| rkk3 wrote:
| > After a few hundred years of race/gender based policies
| working in favor of whites/males, I don't know what else we
| would expect from a deliberate effort to reverse it
|
| White hasn't even meant the same thing for over a hundred
| years in America. Treating "white males" as a monolithic
| group is a vast over-simplification of all the different sub-
| groups and cultures who were not equally advantaged.
| zepto wrote:
| > You can't expect to play a game, give one team an advantage
| for the first half, give neither team an advantage in the
| second half, and call it a fair game at the end.
|
| The game you are referring to is one in which _you
| presuppose_ dividing people into 'teams'.
|
| I.e. you are simply assuming that racism is forever and that
| the only fairness comes dividing people by race and then
| balancing resources according to racial groups.
|
| This is just more racism. It's not the only solution.
|
| We don't have to ignore the effects of racism. There is
| nothing wrong with looking at _the kinds of disadvantage it
| has produced_ and then acting to support those who are
| impacted.
|
| However if we apply that support through racialized policies,
| we will never solve the problem.
|
| For example, we can see that black people historically are
| disproportionately impacted by policies that have prevented
| wealth building, such as redlining. Of course so have groups
| of low class white people been denied access to assets, just
| to a lesser extent.
|
| A racist solution would be to give advantages to black
| people.
|
| A non-racist solution is to support _anyone_ who has been
| less advantaged in wealth building.
|
| This will still disproportionately benefit black people but
| will be self-balancing and won't perpetuate racism or
| permanently embed it into our political and legal systems.
| teawrecks wrote:
| > The game you are referring to is one in which you
| presuppose dividing people into 'teams'.
|
| No, you're arguing against an artifact the analogy instead
| of acting in good faith to understand the meaning.
|
| Consider a game where all players are independent, but the
| "referee" arbitrarily chose half of the players to get an
| advantage. Let that be team 1, and everyone else be team 2.
| We got a new referee in the 2nd half, and that ref wants it
| to be a fair game; would it be unfair for them to
| acknowledging and try to correct for the 1st ref's team
| choices?
|
| (Now if you argue that there is no "referee" in real life,
| I'm going to assume you are being willingly obstinate.)
|
| > A non-racist solution is to support anyone who has been
| less advantaged in wealth building.
|
| So socialism, totally agree, in general that is the
| direction we should move back towards.
|
| But take note that you'll then have minorities who were
| forced to work 10x harder than their white peers say,
| "wtf?! I put in all that extra work to pull myself up by my
| bootstraps, and now you're just going to hand out success
| to everyone? I feel disenfranchised!"
|
| In a "fair" race, that person who worked 10x harder than
| their peers should be appreciably further along in the
| "game". The only way to make that correction is to
| acknowledge the divide already drawn by the first
| "referee".
| zepto wrote:
| As far as I can see you just restated the idea of
| dividing the world into teams based on race. That isn't
| an artifact of the analogy.
|
| That is the basis of racism.
|
| We can accept that a game like this was played, stop
| playing it, and work to undo the damage without
| continuing to play the game.
|
| >> A non-racist solution is to support anyone who has
| been less advantaged in wealth building.
|
| > So socialism, totally agree, in general that is the
| direction we should move back towards.
|
| No, I don't view socialism favorably and it's not
| implied. Creating institutions or programs that
| facilitate higher levels of economic participation by
| those who start with less does not imply socialism.
| teawrecks wrote:
| No, no individual or group consciously decided how races
| should be divided, that happened naturally. What you're
| saying its that acknowledging the divide exists is
| racist, which is the classic "color blind" excuse.
| chakkepolja wrote:
| Men don't complain. It's not the male biological imperative.
|
| Consider modern "feminists" and their obesity-is-fine
| propaganda. No man complains about male underwear models being
| very fit and handsome. If anything, men want to become like
| them.
| btreecat wrote:
| How is that a biological imperative and not just another form
| of social conditioning?
| wasmburger wrote:
| I wonder if it could be because masculinity is being challenged
| on campus in the current era. Why would a male who has issues
| with women want to go to a place where he will be challenged to
| change his views in sensitivty and toxic masculinity courses?
| Conversely, why would a male who does not have issues with women
| go to a place where he will be labeled as having toxic
| masculinity? It's not like these issues haven't been all over the
| press for years.
|
| #MeToo Is Making Colleges Teach Toxic Masculinity 101
|
| https://www.thedailybeast.com/metoo-is-making-colleges-teach...
|
| Toxic Masculinity and Higher Education
|
| https://www.higheredjobs.com/Articles/articleDisplay.cfm?ID=...
|
| And so on. A quick search turns up 1000's of such links
| s5300 wrote:
| This just in, people who have to spend the vast majority of
| their time studying don't enjoy being around raging douchebags
| in the bit of free time they have not studying
|
| More news at 11
|
| Also, your insinuation that males without issues with women
| equates to "toxic masculinity" is hilariously indicative of
| your personality.
|
| Go outside and touch grass and talk to people, yeesh
| aeoleonn wrote:
| Exactly. Universities have become a sink of misandrist
| neomarxist thought.
|
| It has led to an atmosphere of intellectual immaturity and
| victim-mentality-agrandizement. Universities now feel more like
| a coddled highschool experience than adulthood.
|
| Don't expect intelligent, strong-minded, strong-willed men to
| accept such silly, degenerate distractions from the supposed
| goal of these universities (to provide "education", skills,
| network, etc.).
| DasIch wrote:
| The term "toxic masculinity" does not and is not intended to
| imply that masculinity itself is toxic.
| doubleunplussed wrote:
| I don't know anyone who believes this. Words mean what
| they're intended to mean and interpreted to mean, and that's
| how it's used in practice. Claiming otherwise is just a bald-
| faced "nuh-uh" when people who use the term are confronted
| with the double standard.
|
| If there wasn't at least a little bit of complicity in it
| being interpreted as a general diss on masculinity, the term
| would never have caught on, or a different term would have
| been chosen in the first place. In the face of repeated
| misunderstandings, people using the term would pick a new
| one. They haven't done that. Why? It seems to me that they
| are quite happy to be "misunderstood" 95% of the time.
|
| The gender swapped equivalent seems to be "internalised
| misogyny". Do you think I could get away with calling it
| "toxic femininity" instead? Nobody would let that pass. Do
| you think I could get away with calling any obviously bad
| behaviour associated with femininity, "toxic femininity", at
| all? I don't think I could.
|
| It's widely considered by men to be an insulting term, and if
| people who use it don't want to insult people, they should
| pick another one. They don't though, which is telling.
| wwweston wrote:
| > I don't know anyone who believes this.
|
| Anyone who actually knows what adjectives are and how they
| work believes this.
|
| Or people familiar enough with the substance of the
| discussion to know it includes discussion of what _healthy_
| masculinity is. Here 's an easy-to-digest example:
|
| https://ifunny.co/picture/if-you-ever-find-yourself-
| confused...
|
| > Do you think I could get away with calling it "toxic
| femininity" instead? Nobody would let that pass.
|
| Oh, yes. Nobody would dare talk use the phrase toxic
| femininity. /s
|
| https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/women-vs-women-toxic-
| femini...
|
| https://thoughtcatalog.com/january-
| nelson/2020/07/15-example...
|
| https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-sexuality-and-
| ro...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/drnancydoyle/2021/07/13/we-
| need...
|
| https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanschocket2/toxic-femininity-
| exam...
|
| https://www.yesweekly.com/opinion/toxic-femininity-the-
| under...
|
| If you really think that femininity doesn't come under the
| microscope, then one can only assume you have no
| substantial familiarity with feminism.
| belorn wrote:
| All pejorative has a literal interpretation that is not
| pejorative. The question generally lies in how it will
| get interpreted and what implied message it carries. In
| most cases there exist a non-pejorative word that can
| used as a substitute which does not carry the same
| disrespectful connotation and hostility. As the
| pejoration of the word occurs, the assumptions that
| occurs is that continued usage has the intention of
| hostility.
| wwweston wrote:
| > All pejorative has a literal interpretation that is not
| pejorative.
|
| Even assuming that's true, it doesn't follow that every
| literal interpretation should be or is understood as
| pejorative, which leads to the question of why _this one_
| should be understood that way.
|
| Given that toxic masculinity has specific definitions and
| specific criticisms to offer that distinguish critically
| targeted behavior AND also has associated discussion
| affirming desirable masculine behavior, it makes much
| more sense to treat it as a specific technique than a
| general attack on masculinity.
|
| Unless, of course, you think that things like bullying or
| other forms of social violence for the purpose of
| establishing personal dominance or personal entertainment
| is part and parcel with masculinity. Which sounds kindof,
| I don't know... poisonous or something to me.
| belorn wrote:
| Pejoration is not prevented by a specific definition, and
| there is many examples of perfectly fine words being
| turned into a pejorative. As an example there is a very
| nice defined alternative word for happiness that was
| commonly used in songs which has no perfect modern
| substitute, and yet because of a different interpretation
| this word can't be used because those hearing it will
| interpret a disrespectful connotation and hostility.
|
| > bullying or other forms of social violence for the
| purpose of establishing personal dominance or personal
| entertainment is part and parcel with masculinity
|
| For those who think neither of those has anything to do
| with masculinity, using the word masculinity to describe
| it would be wrong. One could be a bit colorful to call it
| a poisonous use of words, ie injecting an harmful
| substance into the language.
|
| A few decades ago researchers looked at how language get
| used in conflicts, and they had a major discover. The
| most effective way to enable people to attack other
| people is to describe other human being as being less
| than human. Toxic waste. Insects. Poison. Garbage.
| Language that dehumanizing groups of people and
| dehumanizing their behavior is almost a requirement in
| order for human on human violence.
| heurisko wrote:
| > Oh, yes. Nobody would dare talk use the phrase toxic
| femininity. /s
|
| I think people certainly use the phrase "toxic
| femininity", but such examples are from the long-tail.
|
| In institutions, it is no-where near as discussed as much
| as "toxic masculinity", and probably discussing it would
| be be frowned upon.
|
| You can see mentions of "toxic masculinity" amongst
| United Nations literature, for example, which can't be
| said for "toxic femininity". For example, the expectation
| of being the breadwinner of the family is said to be one
| of the things that is "rooted in a patriarchal culture,
| creat[ing] toxic masculinity". [1]
|
| What isn't said, is that the expectation to become a
| competent man who is tries to support his family can also
| be a positive example of masculinity (and indeed is
| desirable to women), in addition to being the traditional
| one.
|
| If this expectation is cast only being a "toxic" one,
| then that is a confusing message for young men, and
| leaves them without what was one of the traditional
| motivation for going to college, and improving yourself,
| so that you can get a good job and better shoulder
| responsibility when you want to start a family.
|
| [1] https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2019/2/compil
| ation-b...
| wwweston wrote:
| > I think people certainly use the phrase "toxic
| femininity", but such examples are from the long-tail.
|
| Forbes and Psychology Today are long-tail low-relevance
| now?
|
| > What isn't said, is that the expectation to become a
| competent man who is tries to support his family can also
| be a positive example of masculinity
|
| Something along these lines is said in _many_ substantial
| discussions of masculinity (including the one I pointed
| to in GP). You want other examples?
|
| https://umatter.princeton.edu/respect-matters/healthy-
| mascul...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2mzxeViCko
|
| https://www.buzzfeed.com/sydrobinson1/examples-of-
| positive-m...
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/becomi
| ng-...
|
| Nobody is attacking competence as toxic, or support of
| family as toxic.
|
| What is _actually_ critiqued is a normalization of social
| violence, commenting on bullying or assault with "oh,
| boys will be boys," dismissal of feelings with "walk it
| off," the idea that real men don't go to therapy or turn
| to people for emotional help, etc etc.
|
| One can only think of that as a general attack on
| masculinity if... that's what you think masculinity is.
| Which sounds bona fide toxic to me.
| heurisko wrote:
| > Forbes and Psychology Today are long-tail low-relevance
| now?
|
| The publications are not, their discussion of "toxic
| femininity" is. Discussions of "toxic masculinity" have
| long been the hegemony.
|
| > Nobody is attacking competence as toxic
|
| I see this happening a lot. Particularly, that men who
| are in positions of power (might own their own company,
| or run other companies) have only reached where they are,
| because they benefit from a corrupt patriarchy, not
| because of their competency and willingness to work.
|
| > What is actually critiqued is a normalization of social
| violence, commenting on bullying or assault with "oh,
| boys will be boys," dismissal of feelings with "walk it
| off," the idea that real men don't go to therapy or turn
| to people for emotional help, etc etc.
|
| Why is this called "toxic masculinity"? To flip it
| around, could you imagine "toxic femininity" being used
| to a describe a woman not wanting to pursue engineering
| because she thinks it isn't what women typically are seen
| to do? Why would you say it is "toxic masculinity" when a
| man doesn't want to talk about his feelings, because it
| isn't what men typically are seen to do?
|
| The critique is accompanied with the idea that
| masculinity is itself a social construct, and if only
| boys/men could be freed from this social construct, then
| they will be free from "toxic" aspects of masculinity.
|
| However arguably this isn't the case, and leads you to
| worse outcomes for men and boys. For example, to "stop
| bullying" a headteacher in the UK banned (typically boys)
| from playing football at break times. [1] I don't believe
| masculinity is entirely a social construct, and here boys
| are being deprived of ways to positively express their
| masculinity, through competition and team building. I
| also think there is a difference in how men and women
| typically bond, with men tending to bond more through
| activities.
|
| Male bonding through shared activities is something that
| has declined a lot in the US (see the book "Bowling
| Alone"). If men are finding it more difficult today
| dealing with emotional issues, the answer may not be that
| they need to deal with their "toxic masculinity" by
| "speaking more", but they are actually suffering from
| their lack of ability to identify with other men through
| shared activities.
|
| It isn't, in other words, their own fault, but rather a
| shift in society, which in this individual example, would
| rather ban a game that involves competition and winners,
| in case there are losers, or exclusion. "Toxic
| masculinity" isn't therefore the issue, rather it would
| be a lack of ability to express masculinity.
|
| "Unstructured games can sometimes lead to nasty comments,
| aggressive behaviour or children feeling left out, she
| added." [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-
| london-56568473
| DasIch wrote:
| The discourse around these kinds of topics comes almost
| entirely from feminists at least the part that is
| constructive. That inevitably leads to some problems
| being ignored as they are not so interesting to
| feminists. I don't think you can fault them for that.
|
| Gender norms that are criticised by feminists are in real
| life frequently re-enforced by women for example. Even
| feminists like much of the political left are also
| fragmented and have differing opinions. This lack of a
| consensus combined with an expectation to behave in a
| specific way and a group that can be somewhat trigger
| happy in going from "statistically this group of people
| is privileged" to "this person from this group is
| privileged" is I think deeply problematic and challenging
| to navigate as a men. I also think it's incredibly stupid
| from political standpoint.
|
| Unfortunately it's difficult to engage in such
| discussions in a constructive way because they are very
| attractive to people who see feminists as an enemy.
| heurisko wrote:
| I usually try and avoid the discussion online, as it is
| polarising.
|
| One area I do think is interesting, is the issue of
| uncollected child maintenance payments (at least in the
| UK). [1] This has not had a campaign behind it, in the
| same way as the "Gender pay gap" has had, yet just also
| affects the material circumstances of many women.
|
| I imagine it could be one issue where there might be
| agreement on, between those who lean towards "traditional
| gender roles" and some feminist organisations.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/16
| /silenc...
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Yeah, but just man up and handle it. That's non-toxic.
| john_fushi wrote:
| Telling someone to "man up" is a telltale sign of toxic
| masculinity.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Why? Isn't it the opposite? Doesn't it refer to the best
| of what is masculine?
| heurisko wrote:
| Yet, as there is only the narrative of "toxic masculinity"
| and not also discussion of "toxic femininity", the term
| implies masculinity can turn toxic in a way femininity can't.
|
| There is a Wikipedia page on toxic masculinity, but not one
| on toxic femininity (it redirects to "Internalised sexism").
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internalized_sexism#%22Toxic.
| ..
| tayo42 wrote:
| My first impulse is to agree but thinking about it more what
| positives are there to take away from masculinity. Is any
| feature of being masculine that is really desirable? I guess
| I think the whole idea of trying to be masculine to be kind
| of lame...
| evilos wrote:
| There are plenty of positive traits that are associated
| with Masculinity: Bravery, Boldness, Self-Sufficiency,
| Discipline, Self-Assured, Skilled, Strong, etc.
|
| Of course this does not mean that these traits are somehow
| exclusive to or owned by Masculinity.
| DasIch wrote:
| > Standards of manliness or masculinity vary across
| different cultures and historical periods. Traits
| traditionally viewed as masculine in Western society
| include strength, courage, independence, leadership, and
| assertiveness.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculinity
|
| Much of that sounds positive to me. I think the toxicity
| primarily comes from people caring primarily about
| appearance. For example by trying to avoid being seen as
| weak or by trying to appear strong relative to other people
| by making them appear to be weak.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| That might be the "theory" (a word which does some heavy
| lifting in venues infected by "critical theory") but in
| practice it comes down to straight males and traditional male
| virtues being "toxic".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The term "toxic masculinity" does not and is not intended
| to imply that masculinity itself is toxic.
|
| I much the same way that "unusually large microbe" does not
| imply that microbes are generally unusually large.
|
| The "'toxic masculinity' means masculinity is uniformly
| toxic" thing is a reading so tendentious as to be
| incompatible with good faith.
| teddyh wrote:
| This is another very good example of a 'motte-and-bailey'
| term. The term means whatever you want it to mean, at any
| given moment. When the term is attacked, it retreats to mean
| only the toxic parts of masculinity. When not attacked, it
| means the inherent toxicity of all masculinity.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > The term "toxic masculinity" does not and is not intended
| to imply that masculinity itself is toxic.
|
| That's funny, really. I always only ever encounter it used by
| people who smear any and all masculinity as "toxic".
|
| Do you have a link to a place "toxic masculinity" is used to
| describe a minority subset of the male population?
| s5300 wrote:
| > That's funny, really. I always only ever encounter it
| used by people who smear any and all masculinity as
| "toxic".
|
| Sounds like you've managed to get yourself living in quite
| the bubble/echo chamber. Go explore the world dude.
| blueflow wrote:
| I'm unaware of any social circles use the term "toxic
| masculinity" and are not using it to smear men. People
| outside of those bubbles do not use the term at all,
| probably because its pretty offensive to males.
| [deleted]
| thinkingemote wrote:
| That's how it's used and understood though.
|
| I agree it was never intended to, but the reality is
| different. It should be dumped and a new term used.
| Simon321 wrote:
| To people recommending trades, there's nothing wrong with trades,
| but you can get more out of college than only a job. You can
| actually learn things that you wouldn't have learned otherwise.
| The environment also naturally stimulates and values learning,
| gathering knowledge and understanding. You can learn how to
| become a better person and think more critically.
|
| Seeing how many misinformation is going around and the people
| swallowing it, this seems more important than ever before.
| bmj wrote:
| I had a fantastic experience at college 25+ years ago. I went
| to a small liberal arts school, learned how to read and think
| well. I really appreciated that experience.
|
| When I graduated with my degree in philosophy I went on to run
| a small climbing gym. I was able to jump into software
| development during the first internet bubble, where start-ups
| needed warm bodies who can learn quickly. Fortunately, I had
| scholarships and graduated with minimal debt. So...it all
| worked out pretty well. I'm not sure it's worth taking on
| crushing debt for that experience without a guarantee of a job.
|
| That said, not every person is wired to go to college. There
| are plenty of trades that can foster the some sort of collegial
| experiences, if you find the right the person to train you.
| There are very thoughtful craftspeople out there.
| jdhn wrote:
| >but you can get more out of college than only a job. You can
| actually learn things that you wouldn't have learned otherwise.
|
| I hear this line parroted all the time, and it just rings so
| hollow. I can't remember any optional classes that I took in
| undergrad.
| geomark wrote:
| Some downsides of trades I have not seen mentioned yet are that
| many of them are hard on the body and/or somewhat risky. So you
| don't have as long a useful career as in most professions. My
| dad was a carpenter and I worked with him a few summers when I
| was young. He asked me how many 50-year-old roofers I had seen
| during those summers. A friend of his told me there is a reason
| you never see old welders and painters.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > You can actually learn things that you wouldn't have learned
| otherwise.
|
| I'm not so sure. Why do you need to pay someone to give you
| lists of books to read, rather than just buying and reading
| them yourself?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Why do you need to pay someone to give you lists of books
| to read, rather than just buying and reading them yourself?
|
| You don't. However, college isn't just a list of books to
| read, it also includes practical exercises and, most
| importantly, accountability mechanisms, and there is plenty
| of evidence that accountability mechanisms tend to improve
| performance.
| itronitron wrote:
| I agree that college should be for education and not 'to get a
| job'. But until the cost of college in the US comes back down
| to reality, it's going to fail the cost-benefit analysis.
| mbg721 wrote:
| Unless college has changed since I went (to a pretty average
| state school), you _can_ do all that, but the default seemed to
| be to start off in a program that sounds cool, realize the
| science classes are too hard, change to an easier major a
| couple times, finish off your gen-eds with some random survey
| classes where you just have to write a couple short papers
| compatible with the professor 's world-view, and stumble your
| way into a bachelor's degree.
|
| The most interesting college classes I took tolerated non-
| majors reluctantly, if at all. The expectation was that people
| who were there to be "well-rounded humans" weren't going to
| take the course seriously.
| twic wrote:
| Plenty of that misinformation is being swallowed and spread by
| people who went to college, so it's not clear that helped.
| geomark wrote:
| Plenty of that misinformation is being indoctrinated in
| people _at_ college.
| inkblotuniverse wrote:
| From my time at college, any 'critical thinking' seemed to
| mostly be a way to spread the college's accepted narrative,
| which contains its own brand of disinformation.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/DFwi7
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| COVID has accelerated this big time. Why spend $5,000 a semester
| to watch a Zoom lecture from an average professor when you can
| open YouTube in a new tab and see a world-class professor share
| the same information for free? It makes no rational sense.
|
| The moment that a serious, legitimate credential system appears,
| every average university will disappear overnight. We'll be left
| with an oligarch class that attends the top +-30 universities and
| everyone else getting a AmaGoogBook certificate of completion.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _Why spend $5,000 a semester to watch a Zoom lecture from an
| average professor when you can open YouTube a new tab and see a
| world-class professor share the same information for free? It
| makes no rational sense._
|
| Because there is much more possible value in college than just
| the education.
|
| Socializing is a huge part of it. College is a good place to
| learn how to make friends, date, network, etc.
|
| It's also nearly free at many schools, so I don't envision the
| future you're describing ever happening. Most 18-22 year olds
| couldn't think of a better place to be than on a campus almost
| exclusively filled with people in their age group.
| [deleted]
| imtringued wrote:
| The campus is closed.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| I am talking specifically about COVID and Zoom. I didn't say
| anything about on-campus learning.
| paulcole wrote:
| > I didn't say anything about on-campus learning
|
| You should have.
|
| It's not "world class professors" on YouTube that people
| are watching instead of their own university's zoom
| classes. They're not paying for zoom classes because they
| want to learn on campus.
|
| They still want to go to college, they just don't want to
| learn online.
| endominus wrote:
| This reminds me of a passage from Bryan Caplan's book, "The
| Case Against Education." Paraphrasing, there is nothing
| stopping you from walking into a lecture at Harvard or MIT or
| any other renowned center of learning. No one will ask you
| for identification or lock you outside. You can buy or
| download the same textbook and fill out the same homework.
| (In the case of your "socialization" value, again, no one is
| stopping you from just walking into a campus and socializing
| with peers there)
|
| No one does it because we intuitively understand that there
| is no real value in doing so; the purpose such institutions
| serve is credentialing, not education.
|
| (End paraphrase)
| slfnflctd wrote:
| Socialization is a _huge_ part of it - perhaps the biggest
| in terms of impact - because students who worked alongside
| each other during a similar stage of life, living within
| short walking distance of each other 24 /7, working toward
| a similar goal, develop a bond which can be _immensely_
| valuable later on in networking for job opportunities.
|
| Those students are much less likely to develop such a bond
| with some rando who just walked in off the street to check
| out what's going on. That person has zero investment in the
| experience other than expressed interest and would I'm
| certain be measurably less successful forming relationships
| with other students who could help their career in the
| future. They aren't in the same tribe.
|
| It makes me sick to say it, but this can be even more
| important than the credentialing. There are multiple
| stories of students dropping out to start companies and
| still benefitting from their college peer network in ways
| that wouldn't happen for someone that wasn't actually a
| 'true peer'.
|
| I think this is simply a biological tendency at the end of
| the day and don't see any easy way of changing it.
| yesenadam wrote:
| No real value?! Gee.
|
| Well, I did it :-) I did 2 or 3 years of philosophy courses
| at Sydney Uni. I mean, I just turned up. At the beginning
| of each semester I'd start doing every possible course,
| then just keep doing the ones I liked, with
| interesting/good/admirable lecturers, which turned out to
| be a lot, 2 or 3 times the amount of lectures weekly than
| if I'd been enrolled. Also was on their mailing list so
| also went to special visiting lectures, a regular
| discussion group, etc etc. No exam stress! I had such a
| great time. But yeah, most (non-university) people I
| mentioned it to laughed as if it was crazy.
| craftinator wrote:
| Most people don't have the time freedom to be able to do
| this. The opportunity cost would be too high, as they
| need to work to eat, and sitting in a class isn't work.
| OJFord wrote:
| Because you don't pay for instruction, you pay for examination
| and certification.
| sails wrote:
| I've heard the following described as the broadly tangible
| benefits, in no particular order. Will try find the source
|
| - Education
|
| - Certification
|
| - Network
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Which probably doesnt make sense to last 4 years. I assume
| this trend will lead to new types of certification
| pg_bot wrote:
| You don't pay for instruction or certification you pay for
| signaling. A student from Arizona State can be more competent
| than one from Harvard. Who do you think is going to have more
| doors opened for them?
| OJFord wrote:
| The Harvard certificate, yes.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > A student from Arizona State can be more competent than
| one from Harvard.
|
| The relevant question from the perspective of those doing
| the hiring is what is the probability a student from
| Arizona State is more competent than one from Harvard?
|
| Replace competent with well connected and/or otherwise
| useful.
| randomdata wrote:
| While you are right, the question still stands. There is no
| value in the latter two. The only value is in the first, and
| that's not what you're paying for, so why pay at all?
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Which in turn have massively devalued, given the majority of
| the job market in most Western countries is only interested
| in the unicorn willing to eat old bread.
| kingaillas wrote:
| >spend $5,000 a semester
|
| That's what I spent a semester (total)... in the early 90's.
|
| These days it is more like $5,000 a semester (per class)!
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > Why spend $5,000 a semester to watch a Zoom lecture from an
| average professor when you can open YouTube in a new tab and
| see a world-class professor share the same information for
| free?
|
| Because most employers will not even consider your application
| without a degree.
| [deleted]
| tablespoon wrote:
| > COVID has accelerated this big time. Why spend $5,000 a
| semester to watch a Zoom lecture from an average professor when
| you can open YouTube in a new tab and see a world-class
| professor share the same information for free? It makes no
| rational sense.
|
| I don't get that line of thinking:
|
| 1. Education isn't a passive lecture-consumption activity. A
| "world-class professor" who put a lecture on youtube is going
| to have exactly _zero_ time to talk to you as a student.
|
| 2. There's probably not that much difference between the
| teaching ability of a "world-class professor" and your
| "average" good professor. That's especially true for undergrad
| subjects.
|
| I think you're assuming a false equivalency, akin to "why have
| parents when you can watch videos made by the _best parents in
| the world_ on television? " The tech version may have many
| similarities, but it's not equivalent.
| spodek wrote:
| _The Boy Crisis_ by Warren Farrell covers this issue
| comprehensively. There are many beliefs and practices in our
| society that push boys and men out, especially in school.
|
| If you read the article, I recommend at least the free preview
| from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Crisis-Boys-Struggling-
| About/dp/1...
| temp8964 wrote:
| One thing is kind of obvious is that male-concentrated majors
| (hard sciences) in colleges are much much harder than female-
| concentrated majors (humanities, social sciences), see:
| https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1434944460526342147
| SandunGunn wrote:
| Curious what that means for society if the trend continues. The
| single people I know are only interested in finding someone in
| the same education bracket.
|
| Does this lead to many more unmarried people like Japan?
| zz865 wrote:
| I did tech degrees, but its pretty amazing going to other parts
| of the campus where there are 2 or 3 or more women for every man
| in the building. Its also weird to see lots of well educated
| female friends finding it really hard to find someone to settle
| down with. Yeah they should probably lower their standards but
| honestly deep down most guys dont want an over educated achiever
| wife.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| >honestly deep down most guys dont want an over educated
| achiever wife.
|
| Why not?
| inkblotuniverse wrote:
| Men want to be wanted, and women generally don't want to be
| with a lower-status man than themselves.
|
| What proportion of women tend to date men who earn less than
| them, are shorter than them, have a lesser degree than them?
| Not a very big one, and men know it, so they steer clear of
| those women.
|
| Similarly, most men prefer to date women shorter than them,
| who earn less than them, etc. Why? I'd guess because most men
| like to feel like they're providers and protectors, and most
| women like to feel provided and protected for by their
| partner.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| This all seems horribly insecure. I refuse to partake in it
| as a man.
| zz865 wrote:
| What does that mean? You will seek out a over educated
| achiever wife or avoid one?
| approxim8ion wrote:
| It means I won't be intimidated by my partner's
| credentials or success. "Over-educated" is not a thing.
|
| If men were free to chase whatever professional growth
| they wanted and women just had to stuff it because they
| would be avoided by men if they were "over-qualified"
| according to you, then that's a dynamic I cannot wait to
| see completely obliterated. I'm not saying only one
| partner being a provider or sole breadwinner is a bad
| thing, but it absolutely does not need to be the only
| role possible. These men you and GP talk about need to
| figure out what else they can bring to the table in a
| relationship, because the ability to put food on the
| table is hardly the only "desirable" thing people see in
| a partner, and it doesn't seem like a great thing to tie
| your self-worth to.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > "I'm sort of waiting for a light to come on so I figure out
| what to do next," he said.
|
| Interesting. Maybe guys who are not super-interested
| scientifically in a subject realize that it becomes a waste of
| time. Even their academically inclined peers will struggle since
| there arent nearly enough academic prospects for the number of
| Phd graduates. Then also these men grew up watching youtube stars
| etc. making it big without formal education.
|
| Maybe these men should be encouraged to get their education in
| europe. Credentialism of Ivy Leagues is becoming increasingly
| irrelevant, but the academic environment is still stimulating and
| not hostile to either men or women.
| throwinthsaway wrote:
| Getting into debt to get a piece of paper that only lets you
| begin to enter the job market after gathering enough credentials
| by either working for free or talking to others and hopefully
| trying your luck even though there are 100s for a single
| internship... College is a scam unless you're paying close
| attention and don't get into debt in the first place.
|
| Those who manage to jump through all of the hoops don't realize
| that there is a secondary scam waiting for them: working for a
| wage without significant stock options while someone makes
| millions sitting around doing nothing off of their effort. We've
| had movies made about this for many years and still it's so
| strange how it's not acknowledged.
|
| Also: who is friend or foe? The lines have blurred significantly,
| which is a driving force in WANTING to change things in the first
| place. There's even loss of solidarity between family members,
| next generations.
|
| There's no incentive to try. If I were the same age as these
| young men, I wouldn't bother either.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The proliferation of this attitude...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Aint-No-making-2nd-Second/dp/B002NAUW...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1271149M/Ain%27t_no_makin%27.
| ..
| PaulHoule wrote:
| To spoil a little, this book considers a group of low-
| income whites and a group of low-income blacks.
|
| As teenagers the whites have a pessimistic attitude about
| success but the blacks are more optimistic. Barriers to the
| success of both groups are looming.
|
| The first edition of the book stops there: one is left with
| the feeling that the plight of the two groups is not that
| different (e.g. "systemic racism" is a real thing but
| doesn't seem salient when you are know "white people with
| black problems") Somehow, however, the blacks believe that
| "they can overcome".
|
| In a follow-up study a decade later both groups are doing
| poorly, but the blacks in particular have had their hopes
| dashed by poverty, problems with the law, problems with
| work, etc.
| atraac wrote:
| > Those who manage to jump through all of the hoops don't
| realize that there is a secondary scam waiting for them:
| working for a wage without significant stock options while
| someone makes millions sitting around doing nothing off of
| their effort.
|
| I know this is the thing in US and shouldn't surprise me but
| I'm based in central Europe and honestly the thought of this
| still feels so abstract to me. I'd love to have an option of
| choosing jobs that offer stock options.
| durnygbur wrote:
| Europe is behind of America in this regards, Europeans are
| submissive, timid, and desperate. Want to know where are your
| stock options? Travel south to the Mediterranean and watch -
| mansions, palaces, yachts, butiques, luxurious hotels,
| hostesses and models, German limousines and supercars. There
| they are.
| heurisko wrote:
| I'm a Northern European and just buy stock on the market.
| My union is pretty strong, and I enjoy healthcare and more
| than two weeks holiday I hear is typical in the states.
|
| It's not altogether a good idea to have a lot invested in
| the company you work for, as if they go under, your stock
| is also not worth so much, and you might lose your income
| at the same time too.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar.
| It's a particularly avoidable kind of hell and we
| definitely want to avoid it on this site.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Edit: we've unfortunately had to ask you this kind of thing
| repeatedly already:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27224106 (May 2021)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26773557 (April 2021)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20954524 (Sept 2019)
|
| If you do it again we will ban you, so no more of this,
| please.
| walsand21 wrote:
| Can I ask what movies you have in mind?
| iejnfw wrote:
| >working for a wage without significant stock options while
| someone makes millions sitting around doing nothing off of
| their effort
|
| This seems to characterise almost every single place I have
| worked for or interviewed at in different ways. I have
| interviewed at smaller businesses where the entire "management"
| team doesn't do anything, doesn't come into the office, and is
| just various family members of the original founder.
|
| Then there are the larger businesses that have a network of
| people who all know each other and connected and occupy
| positions with "manager" in them, whose day consists of just
| telling people to do things that the person they are telling
| could figure out and do without their existence and better.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Stock options and other scalable forms of compensation are a
| huge deal for our organization now.
|
| The funny thing is we also don't give a shit about credentials
| anymore. We just want work ethic followed loosely by
| experience.
|
| Willingness to endure difficult things and learn is all we are
| really going for in a new hire these days.
|
| What is amazing to me is all of the business leaders who still
| insist on upholding these arbitrary gatekeepers. You are
| leaving a ton of talent on the table.
|
| I think the answer for many is to focus harder on the business
| value equation and to just let the people be free. Running a
| business like a power fantasy is not going to get you there.
| The more you try to control people the harder it will be to
| make money with them in the long term.
| baron816 wrote:
| A lot of this is driven by narratives--A narrative that college
| isn't worth it anymore. A narrative that (white) men are
| uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. And a
| narrative that those men aren't wanted by society any more.
|
| I'm not convinced that all those men need to go to college, but
| they clearly need something. They need to feel like they're part
| of society. Nothing good can come of an entire generation that
| feels lost, without purpose, and unwanted.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| They need options. I feel our current school system isn't set
| up for young men at all. A lot would prefer hands on work as
| opposed to classroom learning. Promotion of trades schools as
| alternatives that aren't "lesser" would help a lot.
| mercy_dude wrote:
| > A narrative that college isn't worth it anymore
|
| Is it entirely false though? What benefit does a college degree
| in sociology does to a person (and even broader society) when
| the person will likely be in over 100k+ debt?
| ajuc wrote:
| The right question is - why does it have to cost so much when
| it's possible to teach the same exact thing for ~3k USD in
| eastern Europe :) And then these developers come to USA or
| western Europe and it doesn't seem that they are performing
| badly :)
| happythen wrote:
| No way. Being white is definitely a leg up. Well, at least for
| me, a white guy, no college degree. Life is much easier. I
| don't think there is any support missing for us, that actually
| sounds hilarious. We need to work on lifting others up.
| SunlightEdge wrote:
| Yeah. I think its really difficult (impossible?) to know what
| its like for the other gender/other ethnicities - even if
| there is more cultural outputs/conversations out there about
| different groups its still really hard/impossible to know
| what its like for others. Having said that working class
| (poor) white males are known to have amongst the worst
| educational performance in the UK. This is different from
| employment. If I had my time back I would seriously consider
| not going to uni/get a masters and just become a
| plumber/electrician. I reckon I would be as happy/if not
| happier then doing an office job.
| icare_1er wrote:
| Based on the number of "affirmative-action" initiatives that
| I see all over the US, in many tech-companies (I don't know
| about other fields), I'd say that being a women, or black, is
| definitely a huge plus to get your foot through the door,
| with many recruitment programs blatantly saying they are only
| for minorities, which sounds to me like pretty much
| segregation in reverse, but that indeed seems to be the
| agenda of some leftists.
| Miner49er wrote:
| Maybe a few tech companies are like this, but the rest of
| the country isn't.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I'm a white guy and I bootstrapped my career with no degree
| and little college (dropped out of community college) by
| simply padded my resume doing some basic contracting gigs
| for friends and their professional networks and parlayed
| that into full-time work. I'm now an engineering manager at
| a unicorn.
|
| I will also say that for all this talk about how easy
| Blacks and women have it, I don't buy it, and I think
| people spinning tales about how "My company only hires
| Blacks and women" aren't involved in technical hiring. We
| are _desperate_ for experienced talent and are under
| tremendous pressure to build an effective team. We don 't
| have the luxury to be picky about demographics. And my team
| isn't unique: It's the same story from my peers both inside
| and outside my company. Likewise, the pipeline itself
| doesn't have very many women or Black candidates from what
| I can see, so even these people got automatic interviews I
| doubt it would change team demographics significantly. And
| finally: if this is indeed "segregation in reverse" (which
| it's not: it would just be segregation with the roles
| reversed), where are these tech companies where the
| majority of their engineers aren't White or Asian men?
| datavirtue wrote:
| This. Everywhere I have been as a team lead has had
| issues hiring. I don't remember ever having two desirable
| candidates in the pipeline at the same time and getting
| one felt like striking gold. We didn't give two shits
| what your gender or race was.
| [deleted]
| happythen wrote:
| > foot through the door
|
| Yea, but we got no problem getting to that door. Minorities
| might get pulled over and get a knee on the neck. Women
| might get assaulted on their way. Being a white dude, I'll
| get a taxi there, no problem. So if I have to try harder to
| get the position, pretty understandable, since I got the
| head start.
|
| Not saying life is easy for anyone, saying it's so much
| easier being a white dude with a nice hair cut. You know I
| used to be so broke I had to "beg" for gas money at a gas
| station to get to my first day at a new job, first person I
| asked gave me a $20. Life. is. easier.
| exporectomy wrote:
| > a knee on the neck. Women might get assaulted
|
| You've been reading too much news. That doesn't happen to
| normal people in real life. Blacks have a huge
| disadvantage of poor upbringing by their own family and
| community and women have a huge "disadvantage" of not
| wanting to be a computer programmer.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| > Blacks have a huge disadvantage of poor upbringing by
| their own family and community
|
| The actual issue is they have to interview with people
| holding the same ignorant assumptions you do.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >The actual issue is they have to interview with people
| holding the same ignorant assumptions you do.
|
| And then "helping them" with public assistance programs
| that have rules that are purpose built to incentivize
| familial instability.
| icare_1er wrote:
| Are you saying that the number of one-mum families is
| constant across all ethnicities ? :o)
|
| Leftists and their communists approach to the mere
| statistics....
| happythen wrote:
| No, I just get outdoors and live with real people, and
| see it myself. I've been pulled over in a car with two
| other dudes, and watched the darkest skin guy get the
| crap kicked out of him because they thought he is a
| gangster, while we had to sit on a curb and watch. Where
| I went to school, counselors tried to get me to take AP
| classes, which I didn't want, while my friends with
| darker skin, and better grades, had to go on the wait
| list. I lived in an area where 13 year old pregnancies
| were regular. Guys raping chicks while they are passed
| out drunk in high school was regular. Jumping the gay
| kids were regular. I got to watch it, empathize with my
| friends, but I never had to bear the burden. My burden
| was folks like you, denying there are any problems
| because you are so safe, can't fathom life being
| different, even when it's across the street.
|
| > normal people
|
| Point exactly, when you say normal, you are thinking of
| white dude America. And yes, this does not happen to
| them.
| klyrs wrote:
| Women have the disadvantage that if they reveal their
| gender online, they're barraged with sexual harassment
| and even death threats for nothing but being a woman. Do
| you suppose this treatment encourages curiosity in
| computing?
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| You must not have a lot of women friends in tech to say
| this, all of my women friends in tech have had one hell of
| a bad time breaking in. The default attitude of recruiters
| and interviewers when they interview a women is to assume
| they know nothing.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| > with many recruitment programs blatantly saying they are
| only for minorities
|
| Really? I understood that it was illegal to discriminate
| based on gender, race, etc in the US
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It is illegal, but that doesn't stop people from doing
| it. In the US, things like this have to go to court to
| actually be struck down, and there haven't been any
| sympathetic plaintiffs suing over these laws yet.
|
| When "positive discrimination" makes it before a judge,
| it usually gets stuck down.
| icare_1er wrote:
| It is widespread in big-tech.
|
| This is an-ex Google engineer talking about one he saw
| and created a video about:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pizXzR7ZQ8Q
| Avicebron wrote:
| i have never heard of anyone doing anything illegal
| dnissley wrote:
| Can you hear yourself though? Can you put yourself in the
| shoes of a young white man? They are recipients of this
| message on a regular basis. When many of them end up having a
| difficult time despite being told how easy they have it, and
| how if they received help that would just be resources being
| taken away from less privileged people, it's easy for them to
| think something's wrong with themselves, to feel unwanted,
| depressed, and to end up taking the route outlined by the
| article.
| happythen wrote:
| I was young once, and I am white. Yea sure, I understand
| it. And this is no way new, I had plenty of other white
| people feeling sorry for me because, "the country is being
| taken from the white man". That is ooooold, old, old. Fear
| based racism been around.
|
| But to your weak sauce point, some folks are just going to
| have a hard go at life, but is it easier being white
| through life, no matter what? Yea, for sure. No one says
| it's an easy life, but it is easier being light skinned.
|
| > unwanted, depressed
|
| I think there used to be some organizations that helped
| with that. Specifically white men. You know, the kind that
| would give them a purpose, make them feel wanted. You got a
| hood and everything.
| dnissley wrote:
| My observations are not racist, or rooted in fear. They
| are, however, rooted in compassion for my fellow human
| beings who find themselves in the crosshairs of
| reactionary political ideologies, even if they wear
| labels like "progressive", "feminist", or "anti-racist".
|
| I'm mixed so I can generally wriggle out of such
| accusations by playing the race card. The only situation
| I ever feel good about doing so are ones like this.
| happythen wrote:
| > crosshairs of reactionary political ideologies
|
| You feel sorry for young white men because they have to
| deal with politics? "Ferrari owners pay an unfair amount
| of car insurance."
| dnissley wrote:
| Ah yes, the notion that the white race holds the same
| vaunted position that Ferrari does among car makes --
| held by racists and anti-racists alike.
| happythen wrote:
| haha not so much, feeling sorry for someone that can
| afford a Ferrari and then complains about the car
| insurance would be ridiculous. Similar to feeling sorry
| for white guys having to deal with politics, its
| warranted, not serious, and does not deserve more
| attention that many other REAL issues. But anyways, have
| a good day.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Many white men aren't able to (figuratively) afford a
| Ferrari. That's the point that the person you are
| replying to appears to be making.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| The examples in the article tell a different story. Mr.
| Briles could easily go to college if he wanted to. It's
| just that he would rather stay at home and "invest" in
| cryptocurrencies and make music, and his parents fund it.
| That is a very privileged position to be in.
| aklemm wrote:
| Before any of that, I'd blame the disappearance of the sense of
| service. One's general mindset should be on what one can
| contribute, and the rest will follow.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| I would like to bring up a point often missed with blue collar
| housing work (plumber, electrician, dry wall, etc). It is
| _EASY_ to start your own thing. Once you are licensed and
| bonded you can quickly buy your own truck, hire an apprentice,
| setup yelp, setup an online receptionist and be overbooked.
| Right now plumbers are hard to get and electricians are months
| out. The plumbers I work with cannot keep up with the work and
| make over $80 per hour (no where florida). If "Bobs orlando
| plumbing" runs out of work, they just park the truck. There is
| NO overhead.
|
| If you contrast to an attorney or doctor -- those
| firms/practices are extremely challenging to start and operate
| on your own. The salaries of your employees are high at best,
| marketing is extremely expensive, and insurance can wipe out a
| firm/practice.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| > It is EASY to start your own thing.
|
| Not withstanding restrictive licensing systems that require
| you to put in X years working crap jobs for crap pay under
| someone who already has the license to ensure that you've
| "paid enough dues" you're not gonna go around undercutting
| everyone once you get your license.
| [deleted]
| zapnuk wrote:
| I wonder how woman feel reading such comments. Men dominated
| better paying jobs and positions of power since forever. It
| took 50+ years between equal rights before the law to equal
| opportunities in the labour market and education.
|
| Men still have every opportunity a woman has. In addition, they
| are still recognized more for leading positions. They also
| dominate about every trade related job.
|
| Yet, they are 'left without a purpose', when all they need it
| to do is do whatever they want.
| ourlordcaffeine wrote:
| "all they need it to do is do whatever they want" sounds like
| a very middle class take on things.
|
| People from working class rust belt towns in the UK, for
| example, can't just do what they want, since there are no
| opportunities. But they are told that they are privileged and
| can do what they want, and then people wonder why support for
| labour/leftism has plummeted in working class communities.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| Women didn't and don't need well paying jobs to start a
| family.
|
| What "equal right" do you mean, that "equaled opportunities
| in the labor market and education"?
|
| Also you seem to miss on the fact that men get worse grades
| in school (which some say is because of discrimination),
| which makes it harder for them to enter university.
| s5300 wrote:
| Why is it that you default to the idea that women want to
| start a family?
|
| It's a big ass cool world we have going on, and starting a
| family effectively ties you down from being able to explore
| it.
|
| Good grief.
| blueflow wrote:
| Pattern i observed: When a women settles with a partner
| and they are doing well financially, they start wanting
| to have kids. I blame instincts.
| s5300 wrote:
| That's some great anecdata from you, I'm sure that it
| applies to the wants of all women everywhere, right?
| blueflow wrote:
| I mean, wanting kids is surely something that evolution
| would select for.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| That's not what their argument is about at all. Don't
| change the context to argue in bad faith.
|
| Women don't have the same financial expectations as men
| do. This is true even today, despite all the push for
| equal pay and equal rights. Often, that's prior to even
| getting into a relationship. If you seek an indication,
| ask a bunch of guys if they would settle for a girl still
| living at home and then ask the inverse, both groups aged
| in their 20s.
|
| Given how men are increasingly "giving up on society"
| because of these standards being harder to achieve every
| day, GP's argument isn't that improbable at all.
| s5300 wrote:
| I'm not changing context or attempting to argue in bad
| faith. The statement is just asinine and delusional with
| regards to American culture at least.
|
| You sound like you have some preconceived notion of you
| or your friends being wronged by women or something that
| I'm not going to be able to shake or have a reasonable
| discussion about.
|
| I will however say, in words that may appease your
| ideology - it's honestly never been easier to get a
| banging hot girlfriend than in the current climate. You
| literally just have to not be completely fucking weird,
| have a hint of how to dress in something that compliments
| your figure, have the smallest standards of 21st century
| developed country hygiene, and one ever so slightly
| interesting hobby. Seriously, women will throw themselves
| at you.
|
| But keep telling yourself what you want to think and
| reinforcing your views. I've honestly felt nothing but
| bad for women in STEM lately after an internship as a
| MechE in a fairly large and well known company. The older
| men acted fucking disgustingly towards the female
| interns, when all they're trying to do is make a career
| in STEM.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| Americans don't have families anymore? OK, that's news to
| me, I admit.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| First you kneejerk towards "who says women want X?" when
| the argument was clearly "men often need this to be
| perceived as a partner, to get X". How you fail to see
| the leap there is beyond me.
|
| Second, please keep your preconceived notions of me to
| yourself. They do not add to the discussion at all.
|
| As for what's left worth responding to. Look up the rise
| of male sexlessness compared to female sexlessness if you
| seek further evidence of what's happening. The massive
| filtering and selection criteria happening in online
| dating. Considering your American-based view, surely you
| aren't blind to the increasing rates of gymgoers and even
| steroid use, and the men's grooming industry growing ever
| more. If anything, that doesn't signify a lack of men
| trying to maintain themselves, yet it still contradicts
| your idea of "just take a shower, go buy some clothes and
| get a girlfriend bro".
|
| >But keep telling yourself what you want to think and
| reinforcing your views. I've honestly felt nothing but
| bad for women in STEM lately after an internship as a
| MechE in a fairly large and well known company.
|
| As an aside, how can you in the same breath accuse me of
| wanting to form an echo chamber when you immediately cite
| your own anecdote as a reason to push your own view,
| despite the fact your anecdote does not invalidate the
| concerns of men at all? Surely you do not lack the
| capacity to feel for both the struggles of men and women,
| regardless of the cause? Men and women have their own
| troubles, and this incessant need to trivialize one over
| the other is exactly why we're not getting any further.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| Lots of people want to start families. It's not something
| I invented or "default to". There is nothing wrong with
| wanting to start families, either. Some may find that
| nothing in the big as cool world is as cool as having
| children.
|
| Nobody says you have to do that, but if some men and
| women want to do it, it will show up in the statistics.
|
| Also even if you don't want a family and just want to
| explore the world alone, you don't need that much money.
| What exactly, do you want all the money for, that a high
| end career would give you? Also working 60 hour weeks
| would also prevent you from exploring the world, wouldn't
| it?
| busterarm wrote:
| The default state of affairs is that organisms want to
| reproduce and in our species the female is uniquely
| equipped for this purpose.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My grandmother worked as a mechanic for the phone company in
| the nine-teens. Her sister did whatever she wanted, she
| started and ran her own business.
| umanwizard wrote:
| What are the "nine-teens"?
| WalterBright wrote:
| 1910-1920
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Given he went to Caltech in the 80s, probably the 1910s
| icare_1er wrote:
| No one ever stopped women from pursuing career in high-
| frequency trading or anything else. No one ever stopped women
| from inventing Amazon or Microsoft from their garage. No one
| ever stopped women from choosing to graduated in science,
| maths, finance, rather than art, litterature, or "gender
| studies".
| jensensbutton wrote:
| As recently as 1970 women in the US weren't allowed to open
| checking accounts or get loans from a bank by themselves,
| but tell me more about how no one _ever_ stopped women from
| doing what they want.
| icare_1er wrote:
| I fail to see how a women being unable to open a bank
| account in the 60s, explains why a girl born in 2000,
| would not want to spend her time geeking on her computer
| trying to build a website, in 2012. But i'm all ears.
| watwut wrote:
| > would not want to spend her time geeking on her
| computer
|
| Well, based on studies I have seen, if the family had
| only one computer, it waay often in boys room rather then
| in girls room. PC was assumed to be boys toy.
|
| The culture emerges from there.
|
| Anecdotally, that is patter I do see around. Parents of
| young girls are way more often enforcing "no screen till
| this or that age" while parents of young boys almost brag
| about boys playing games on them.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I've never known a family with a family computer put it
| anywhere but a common area. I'm sure they're out there
| but I've never seen it.
|
| Maybe boys get more screen time in families like that
| because they're more interested in computers? Maybe it's
| assumed to be a boys toy because boys show more interest
| in it?
| icare_1er wrote:
| Yes, out of the blue, in all countries, and all cultures,
| on all continents, parents spontaneously put computers
| and screen, engines, motors, in kids rooms. What a weird
| collective behavior ! I'm sure it has nothing to do with
| the many experiments carried out on children, from the
| youngest of age, showing that even 2 days after birth,
| boys and girls had different attractions to moving
| objecs, or human faces for instance !
| busterarm wrote:
| And in 1970 direct deposit did not exist, everyone was
| paid by check and could go cash it at the issuing bank,
| which was always local. Man or woman. Whether you had an
| account or not.
|
| i.e, the banking situation you mention was not a barrier
| to employment whatsoever.
| gilbetron wrote:
| They literally have. That's exactly what nearly all of
| history has been. Women face an entire pipeline of people
| trying to stop them from pursuing anything beyond a family.
| My wife, in high school, was directly told never to take
| any math in college because girls can't do math. From the
| moment they are born, most women were told they can't do
| things boys can do. Yes, these days a fair amount of girls
| are finally told they can do things, but they still face
| discrimination. A man fails at something and they'll be
| told to stand back up and keep trying. A woman fails, and
| they get told, "well, nice try, you did your best! Go ahead
| and start a family!"
|
| As another anecdote, I have friends that are married and
| both in the same science field in academia. Both work at
| the same university. The woman was told that she needed to
| prove that she wasn't just hired because of her husband.
| The man was not told the same.
| zapnuk wrote:
| One might think the whole sexism and gender roles thing and
| would be discouraging woman from perusing certain fields.
| icare_1er wrote:
| This famous hoax has been debunked many times. For a
| start, the countries where women pursue IT and science
| the most, are the most patriarchists (Turkey, Iran,
| Algeria, Middle-east, etc...). The more relaxed are
| gender-roles, the more women choose to study arts and
| litterature, or "gender studies", the same who then
| complain that there are not enough women building trains.
|
| Second, as many in the west have seen here, we were all
| pushed towards studying, pursuing masters, etc. This was
| the policy in most of the western countries (some may say
| this was silly but this is another debate). I have seen
| first hand our teachers (mostly female, by the ways)
| pushing us to apply to Science curriculums, and my fellow
| female students do everything they could to avoid it.
| watwut wrote:
| Yeah, I have seen this about Eastern Europe (Russia) and
| all it convinced me about what that the author dont
| understand neither Eastern Europe nor sexism. It counted
| fiends considered non-technical in Eastern Europe as
| technical. It counted school of basic administration as
| technical economy too.
|
| It also assumed that sexism is straight line. In fact,
| while easter europe is overall more sexist, there are
| many aspects in which it is less sexist. Some aspects of
| American sexism are present much less.
|
| The confusion is effectively from American assuming that
| every single aspect of their country must be superior.
| kingaillas wrote:
| It's not a hoax, it is call the gender equality paradox.
|
| https://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-
| gir...
|
| Countries with lousy job prospects for women (to sum it
| up bluntly) see higher STEM participation from women.
| lyaa wrote:
| As someone who has experience with the educational
| systems of the middle east, I find it amusing how you are
| misinterpreting the situation.
|
| It's extremely hard for women in these countries to get
| good careers in any field other than teaching or medicine
| especially since they are often forced to marry and leave
| the work force (they can't work without their husbands'
| permission and they almost always handle all child care).
| It is the norm for women to marry right after graduating
| from college and not doing so is seen as abnormal.
|
| The combination of this results in women going to college
| and studying what they actually _like_ in their final
| years of "freedom." They choose STEM because they like
| it.
|
| In the west, women are probably as inherently interested
| in STEM as in these other countries, but they also know
| that they need to get a job and they often choose career
| paths that would give them less pain due to harassment or
| discrimination.
| Levitz wrote:
| So let me get this straight.
|
| Your reasoning is that in brutally sexist societies women
| choose to study completely male-dominated fields because
| they don't have to make a living after it, whereas in the
| most egalitarian societies in the entire world sexism
| pushes them towards traditionally female fields to escape
| discrimination?
| icare_1er wrote:
| So, that makes you reach the following conclusion: "the
| more a society is egalitarian - say, Scandinavian
| countries, the more it forces women to do painting and
| arts".
|
| Are you saying that "egalitarian" societies are in fact
| sexist, and that teaching schools/staff (largely
| populated by progressive left-wing women), are in fact
| preventing little girls from doing maths and learning C
| in their bedroom ?
| inkblotuniverse wrote:
| A common hypothesis is that there are genetic and
| social/economic aspects that push people towards one
| field or another. If you make an effort to remove all
| social forces, and succeed, then the only forces left are
| the inborn ones- so their effects maximize. So, if there
| are any inborn differences in the distribution of
| interest in e.g. engineering between men and women, you
| would expect to see their effects most keenly in the most
| low-pressure countries. Inegalitarianism adds pressure
| that money is useful for dealing with.
| lyaa wrote:
| The point is, in middle eastern societies, the realities
| of working in STEM don't impact the choices women make
| for their college majors as much. Most of them go to
| college before marriage with the expectation of not
| having a long term career in what they study (public
| colleges are almost always free there, btw). They decide
| what to do considering different sets of pressures in
| comparison to women in the west.
|
| Women in more egalitarian societies make their choices
| under different pressures. They need more of a long-term
| plan for their career choice and they don't have as many
| children or marry or leave the workforce as early nor as
| often as women in the middle east.
|
| Do note though that as more women get into STEM, the
| experienced and perceived discrimination levels drop
| dramatically and even more women make the switch. Also, I
| think it's useful to note that there has been a systemic
| reduction in what I call the level of "generational
| misogyny." I can confirm from my own experience that
| there is a huge difference in how older vs younger
| (<40yo) men interact with women.
|
| Younger folks are way more egalitarian and some of them
| assume that they all get the same treatment from older
| folks but that is just not true. A 30 years old male
| researcher could have entirely pleasant and productive
| working relationships with both female researchers in his
| generation and male researchers in their 60s. He might
| not expect or understand the degree of hostility or
| discrimination his female colleagues face when dealing
| with these very same older researchers. I believe that as
| time passes and the egalitarian culture actually gets to
| the "top of the food chain," we will see a distribution
| that is more representative of male and female
| preferences without the added discriminatory pressure.
| icare_1er wrote:
| So: "women choose a career that would give them less
| pain".
|
| You can flip it any way you want, you will always end up
| with the following conclusion which demolishes your
| feminists dogmas: that women and men have inherently
| different interests, which, big news, is not surprising,
| given that they are different.
| icare_1er wrote:
| You speak like someone or something is forcefully
| preventing a girl from studying IT if she wants to. I
| like how feminists make it sound like they live under the
| Taliban. Give me one actual example of a girl that was
| prevented from doing what she wanted.... it's the
| opposite. Women are freer than ever to do whatever they
| want. Bad luck for feminist dogmas: it produces the
| opposite result of what they hoped for, and confirms the
| gender bias.
| lyaa wrote:
| ?? It's entirely reasonable for two populations to make
| statistically different choices when they are under
| different pressures. It is exactly what is happening with
| what is being discussed in this thread: white men
| skipping college because they have face pressures to earn
| money, feel college is not for them, etc. Women face
| different levels of these pressures and also pressure to
| skip STEM and go into "feminine" majors.
|
| The different pressures are sufficient to explain much of
| the different major choices, especially when considering
| the changing distribution in other countries with
| different sets of pressures.
|
| There are indeed differences between men and women --
| cis-men can't give birth, for instance. However, other
| than the statistical population differences, an average
| man and an average women with equitable socioeconomic
| settings are incredibly similar in many areas. Perhaps
| even in an ideal world there would be more female
| biologists and more male IT workers. That would be fine.
| What matters is that a human who is interested in
| something would have a fighting chance to get there.
|
| Right now, cultural and societal factors are tipping
| different scales in different ways. For future
| generation, we would do well to reduce the imbalance --
| encourage and support minorities, women, and, yes, white
| men. People face different battles and helping some does
| not mean others have to be ignored.
| kibbleble wrote:
| The more relaxed gender roles a society has, the more men
| aspire to be musicians, philosophers, comedians, sports
| journalists, filmmakers, poets, or motivational speakers
| instead of studying for a useful STEM career.
| throwtheworld wrote:
| > A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and
| life is just easy for them.
|
| This is very perspective dependent. I'm a black college student
| now and every conversation with friends back home includes some
| mention of dropping out because it's not for us as well. When
| you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in
| the job market because they could get their last names and
| LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it's
| hard to believe that'll change post-graduation. And most of us
| are already in planning on entrepreneurship because we know
| we're not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS
| degrees. It's like if I'll have to sell sneakers to make ends
| meet after college anyways I might as well drop out and use
| that money bootstrapping this inventory SaaS. Innovation out of
| desperation, I guess.
|
| It's no way to live. But I think we're approaching an
| inflection point.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "I'm a black college student now and every conversation with
| friends back home includes some mention of dropping out
| because it's not for us as well."
|
| I can only recommend that you have to base life decisions on
| your own experience, because it can differ dramatically.
|
| I have an experience from which I have drawn some conclusions
| - I am an immigrant and many of my co-immigrants are
| convinced that the locals dislike them, they feel they are
| being treated unfairly, etc.
|
| I was unable to square my experience with their's: surely
| they can't be imagining things, but at the same time I cannot
| be just magically lucky. Some of them are older generation,
| maybe things were different back then. Maybe, when they face
| difficulties they are more likely to attribute it to
| discrimination. Maybe some behavioural stereotyoes play a
| role - I don't know.
|
| For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment,
| create two fake Linkedin profiles, identical except
| background- try applying for jobs with them. Never got round
| to it.
| throwtheworld wrote:
| > For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment
|
| We did something like this! But we swapped slightly
| reworded resumes and the response ratio leaned even further
| in the white classmate's favor. We just laughed, as if we
| couldn't believe that what we half-joked about actually
| happened. I'm long past the point of being sad. I guess
| that's life.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| A study has been made with your experiment here in Canada.
| The result was that the white-sounding profiles got more
| interviews based solely on last name, no picture needed.
|
| [PDF, French]: https://www.cdpdj.qc.ca/Publications/etude_t
| esting_discrimin...
| damagednoob wrote:
| Where are you and your friends getting your information from?
| If you're in the US or Europe, IMO the market for programmers
| has never been better. It may be a struggle to get the first
| job but if you persevere, it will get easier.
| b7a9a9a wrote:
| complete your degree and then do federal contracting; for
| entrepreneurship:
|
| https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/grow-your-
| business/minori...
|
| > we're not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS
| degrees.
|
| You are exactly what the federal government is looking for.
| US contract procurement has a significant racial spoils
| system within it.
| throwtheworld wrote:
| This is one of the things I was looking into, thank you!
| nickd2001 wrote:
| Do you mean by "we know we're not what companies are looking
| for even with fancy CS degrees", simply that they're looking
| for identically qualified people that aren't black? If so,
| I'm extremely sorry to hear this, and disgusted that its
| happening. I can't actually think of anyone I worked with
| who'd knowingly treat or value a black colleague or interview
| candidate any differently, but maybe that's white blindness
| on my part, maybe its been going on and I didn't notice. In
| case this is helpful info, I know that Capital One tech has
| robust D&I policies and seeks to redress the balance. They
| sponsor an organisation called "Blacks in Tech". Their senior
| management seem to say it makes good business sense and
| provides competitive edge, to reward talented people who
| happen to be black, whom other employers are too
| stupid/racist to consider hiring and/or promoting quick
| enough once hired. so, if I were a black American looking for
| a job in tech I'd look at Capital One if struggling to get
| anywhere with other employers.
| astura wrote:
| >that they're looking for identically qualified people that
| aren't black?
|
| You see this here on HN all the time, articles about "how
| we do hiring" that start out with "I would only hire
| someone who I'd want to get coffee with." Which, to me at
| least, makes it sound like the person is looking to hire
| friends/drinking buddies that also have technical skills,
| not employees. It's a signal that the person is looking for
| "their type of people."
|
| It's so acceptable to hire this way that people feel
| comfortable opening publishing that, under their own name,
| as something they are proud of.
|
| I'm not even black (but I am a woman, I grew up poor, and
| I'm on the older side) and constantly reading about hiring
| procedures like that makes me feel like I'm very much not
| welcome.
| nickd2001 wrote:
| Seems to me 100% their loss, if they don't want you! I'm
| white and male, but the wrong side of 40. Occasionally
| I've faced ageist "humour". But anywhere that's
| unfriendly to older people, women, non-white people,
| would IMHO suck to work even if you were young, white,
| male etc. Wouldn't wanna work with prejudiced people even
| if they think I'm "like them". Working in a diverse
| inclusive team is far more joyful, as well as more
| productive. BTW in my current workplace, there's a lady
| who's both older and black. She's awesome at her job, has
| a unique set of skills built up over many years. IMHO
| she's irreplaceable as well as a fun nice person to work
| with. So thank goodness we don't have something that'd
| have made her feel unwelcome....
| arglebarglegar wrote:
| this is also what people mean when they don't hire
| someone because they're not a good "culture fit" the
| facade on this discrimination is razor thin
| datavirtue wrote:
| Capital One is a great place to work. When it comes to
| corporate behemoths it doesn't have much competition that I
| know of. Very supportive culture that is obsessively
| focused on improving teams, the culture, and processes.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >It's like if I'll have to sell sneakers to make ends meet
| after college anyways
|
| Just for what it's worth, I (not black, but from a different
| group that is not looked upon kindly by HR types) took the
| route of EEE Degree -> PhD (dropped out) -> Software Engineer
| at Relatively Elite company (not FAANG, but about as good as
| we have in Melbourne, AU) -> running eCommerce businesses
| from home (selling used video games on eBay as well as a USB
| oscilloscope I designed as a student, mostly through Amazon).
|
| If you're smart and skilled, you can make an absolute killing
| doing something that stoners or less intelligent people do to
| "get by", and at the same time spend massive amounts of
| quality time with your (probably at this stage future) wife
| and kids.
|
| If you want to have a chat about it, feel free to shoot us an
| email (see profile). But long story short, even if you're
| locked out of the traditional job market it doesn't mean you
| should give up on developing your skills or give up hope.
| Capitalism provides, man.
| Aunche wrote:
| I can't speak for your personal experience, but at least on
| paper, companies are begging for more diverse hires, even
| blatantly admitting to breaking the Civil Rights act to do
| so.
|
| https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/132267679726609094-s.
| ..
|
| >students who are a member of a group that is historically
| underrepresented in the technology industry will receive
| priority in the selection process. This group includes women,
| ethnic minorities and students with disabilities.
| throwtheworld wrote:
| Unfortunately, once you're giving "priority" to such a
| broad group of people (e.g. every permutation of gender,
| whatever you consider ethnic, and ability minorities) it
| becomes easy to say one thing and continue doing another.
|
| The companies that have to virtue-signal do so because you
| wouldn't notice if they didn't tell you. I'd prefer they
| skip that and hire who they want without the pretense, and
| if that's not me, fine, but please be honest.
| _Nat_ wrote:
| Dropping out of a fancy Computer Science program that you're
| already in would seem like an extraordinarily bad idea.
|
| If someone's trying to talk you into quitting and giving up
| because no one wants you because you're black, well.. that
| doesn't sound like a good friend to me.
|
| Don't get me wrong -- a few tech-billionaires dropped out of
| college, and apparently it worked out for some. So if you
| want to try that out, then that'd seem like a different
| issue. But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy.
|
| All that said, if you want to feel out the waters, why not
| apply for an internship? Internships can be awesome! -- you
| can get experience and money while still being a student,
| plus it can be fun!
| throwtheworld wrote:
| > Dropping out of a fancy Computer Science program that
| you're already in would seem like an extraordinarily bad
| idea
|
| Of course haha the name brand and few cool professors are
| keeping me at this point. But I never expected to go from
| the highest ranking/gpa/scores to having leaving academia
| even at the edge of the table.
|
| > But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy.
|
| It's more like "if I can make X amount anyways today, why
| do it Y way when I'll be behind anyways? Might as well gain
| the experience and be in the same position 4-5 years from
| now?" if that makes sense but I understand it sounding rash
| through text.
|
| > why not apply for an internship?
|
| It seems we all have the same issue of never getting
| responses online. It's very odd considering we've done
| incredibly well when the interview is direct with the
| person hiring (as in this is the person that makes the
| final decision), but situations like that are limited.
| notJim wrote:
| Apologies if this is obvious, but if you're not getting
| callbacks, usually the issue is with your resume or
| application. If you haven't already, I would look for
| groups that review resumes and applications (especially
| groups that involve people who are already working or
| have experience hiring.) You could also try posting on
| the /r/cscareerquestions subreddit to have people
| critique your resume.
| treis wrote:
| Send me your resume to and I'll pass it along:
|
| taway1343@gmail.com
| listless wrote:
| > "We know we're not what companies are looking for"
|
| Why do you say that? Because I can tell you as an employee of
| a FAANG company that you are exactly what these companies are
| looking for. They've got serious diversity issues -
| especially among Black men (not assuming a gender here just
| facts) - and they are desperate to balance themselves out.
|
| I mean that as an encouraging statement. You ARE who is being
| looked for. Be confident in that and use it to your
| advantage.
| baron816 wrote:
| I think your comment, and the responses to it help advance my
| point: there are a bunch of narratives out there that are not
| wholly rooted in reality (or out of date in your case). These
| can have detrimental effects.
|
| There are certainly black individuals who would pursue a
| career in tech, if not for the (perhaps earned) perception
| that tech is hostile towards black people. Things have
| changed, but the narrative hasn't, and that is doing real
| damage.
|
| I'm trying to say the same sort of thing applies to white men
| and college--just there being a _perception_ of college
| campuses being hostile to them is going to prevent many of
| them from going. And people will be hurt by that, in one way
| or another.
| 10x-dev wrote:
| This doesn't match up with my experience as an interviewer at
| several FAANGs.
|
| HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if
| you're gay, a woman, and/or black they are already incredibly
| inclined to hire you, as long as you pass the interviews.
|
| It's not a walk in the park, but you have this going for you
| and it's a big advantage imo.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly
|
| This kind of implies that they don't actually hire
| diversely or the issue wouldn't be so dire ...
| zzbzq wrote:
| It could also imply lack of candidates.
|
| Which is demonstrably true; they're not hiring from the
| general population they're hiring largely from
| universities, and you can look at those universities and
| see there's already an imbalance in demographics of the
| available job candidates.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Your experience does not match research on the job market
| generally. Multiple studies show increased responses to
| resumes with "whitened" names. This is, of course, at odds
| with the white victimhood narrative that unqualified
| minorities are taking jobs, when it is in fact the opposite
| which is occurring.
|
| https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-
| resumes...
| Kranar wrote:
| I just went over the actual study itself and it does not
| support your claim:
|
| http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20
| MS%...
|
| It's a sort of interesting read but nothing too dramatic
| and whether it's evidence of racism is subject to
| interpretation. What isn't subject to interpretation is
| the claim that the study shows that "whitened" names
| increase callbacks. On the contrary whitening names has
| no effect on callbacks as indicated on page 31:
|
| "Whitening the name only (versus not whitening at all)
| did not make a statistically significant difference for
| black applicants"
|
| The actual study shows that removing racial indicators
| from experience is what results in a gap in callbacks. So
| someone who represents themselves as the leader of their
| campus' "Black Student Business Association" is less
| likely to get a call back than someone who represented
| themselves as the leader of their campus' "Student
| Business Association". They refer to the removal of
| racial indicators as whitening but I think that's
| prematurely jumping to conclusions. The name aspect is
| certainly a form of whitening, since black names are
| being changed to white names. But it's premature to refer
| to the removal of racial indicators and making the
| experience racially neutral as a form of whitening.
|
| Other forms of experience that explicitly mention race
| result in less callbacks than when that same experience
| doesn't mention race. Whether this is racism or not can
| not be concluded strictly based off of the study's
| parameters. For example, if I were presented with one
| candidate who was in charge of the university's "Law
| Society" I would probably pick that person over someone
| who was in charge of that university's "Black Law
| Society", and I don't think I would be racist for doing
| so. I would consider being in charge of an organization
| that is open to all races or is independent of race as a
| more prestigious accomplishment than being in charge of
| an organization that is race specific.
|
| To test whether I was racist in my decision making, I
| would need to pick someone who was not in charge of
| anything over someone who was in charge of the "Black Law
| Society", with all else being equal. The study did not do
| this comparison and unfortunately the study does not
| present the raw data so there's no way for me to do this
| analysis myself.
|
| I could bicker about some of the methodological issues as
| well which are not exactly rigorous, as well as the fact
| that this study is not exactly pertinent to this
| conversation as they only looked at internships for jobs
| that are not technical in nature, with the bulk of them
| being sales and marketing, and customer service jobs,
| instead of engineering, computer science, law, or
| professional jobs.
|
| Ultimately no study is going to be perfect but one should
| not read too much into many of these studies. They are
| not nearly as rigorous or definitive as one would expect
| and furthermore they don't tend to generalize.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| > I just went over the actual study itself and it does
| not support your claim:
|
| Good catch, I had been thinking of another study which
| looked specifically at only changing names on resumes.
| That's:
|
| Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and
| Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination
|
| https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
|
| In any event, its not a single study that's looked at
| this. Have a look at this meta-analysis of 24 studies
|
| https://www.pnas.org/content/114/41/10870.full
| throwtheworld wrote:
| > long as you pass the interviews.
|
| 40 applications and 2 resume consultations later and no
| interview even offered. Meanwhile, some guy you run circles
| around in real world programming/business experience is 8
| for 10. My white classmates noticed this before I did
| because I've just accepted it as part of life.
| akomtu wrote:
| Referrals is the secret sauce. Those 8/10 guys don't just
| send resumes to the public company address.
| tchaffee wrote:
| > as long as you pass the interviews.
|
| Aren't these are known to be extremely difficult interviews
| compared to most tech interviews? What percentage of
| candidates who apply get hired? I would imagine the numbers
| are quite low?
| 10x-dev wrote:
| My opinion is that generalist interviews are difficult
| but not 'extremely'. For example, here is a problem I
| came up with at one company:
|
| Given a list of chapters in a video course, and a list of
| user bookmarks, write a function that groups the
| bookmarks by chapter. Chapters and bookmarks are defined
| as millisecond offsets from 0 (the start of the video
| file).
|
| I'd specify the data structures for junior devs and let
| the more senior people work those out.
|
| Your average developer that gets hired can solve and unit
| test the solution in less than 35 minutes. Those who
| don't might be having an off day, or I didn't do a good
| job at explaining the problem and details, or they didn't
| ask the right questions or who knows. The point is, a
| thousand things can go wrong, but the problem itself
| isn't that difficult. A few loops and a hashmap gets you
| an acceptable solution.
|
| This and the other problems in the interview question
| databases at FAANGs are typical of what's in the Cracking
| the Coding Interview book. Whether someone's ability to
| solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of
| their skill level is a hot topic of debate, but if one
| wants to join these companies, then hacking the process
| by learning to solve algorithm and data structure
| problems is acceptable and not a particularly complex
| process. It's high overhead for the candidate, but at the
| very least it proves that they can learn, and learning
| the custom tools and code quickly is about half the
| skillet required to be successful at a FAANG.
| tchaffee wrote:
| > then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm
| and data structure problems is acceptable
|
| Have you considered that underrepresented candidates
| might not have the free time outside of university,
| family, and job responsibilities in order to compete with
| those whose families can support them to focus on only
| university and preparing for interviews?
|
| If HR wants their diversity numbers up, maybe HR needs to
| consider having some diversity in the interview process
| itself? I wouldn't expect a cookie cutter process to
| result in much diversity of background or thought.
|
| > Whether someone's ability to solve these types of
| problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a
| hot topic of debate
|
| One of the best interviewing tips I learned that has
| served me extremely well is to try disprove my impression
| of the candidate. It seems like this process entirely
| fails at that.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| The problem is that companies also want an objective
| hiring process, because otherwise employee bias will seep
| in. The fact that these two issues are in opposition
| (plus the general recruiting pipeline issues) are why
| this is such a difficult problem to solve.
| tchaffee wrote:
| > The problem is that companies also want an objective
| hiring process
|
| Usually only at a very superficial level. Enough to
| comply with the law. And to be fair, some companies do
| have good intentions with a little extra effort and money
| put into diversity efforts.
|
| A truly objective hiring process would take into account
| that Joe and Charley who both got the same results on the
| coding test are not equally qualified if Joe grew up
| poor, with parents who never graduated high school, paid
| his own way through university by working full-time, and
| along with raising a child as a single parent. While
| Charley comes from a wealthy family and focused only on
| studying and job interview prep. With his parents passing
| along some of their own higher education to him as
| needed, connecting him to their large network for job
| opportunities, etc.
|
| Joe is obviously a better candidate. His starting line
| was far behind Charley's and yet he crossed the finish
| line at the same time. Joe would be a better candidate
| even if he passed the finish line a little after Charley.
| If you want a truly objective hiring process you need to
| look at starting lines, not just finish lines.
|
| Most companies are doing almost the opposite and only
| looking at the finish line. They want to look only at the
| skills and exclude the actual person in a misguided
| effort to be objective.
|
| All that really does it amplify existing societal bias
| and privilege by rewarding those who got the most breaks
| in life.
|
| > this is such a difficult problem to solve.
|
| Agreed. And it would be more expensive. Part of why the
| status quo is so hard to change. You've got to spend the
| money and do the work. Or take shortcuts and discriminate
| on one side or the other.
| yardie wrote:
| There are a lot more people of color trying to break into
| the field than there are companies willing to hire them.
| There is a big difference between what they are saying and
| what they are implementing and I can say with absolute
| confidence that diversity is just lip service. FAANGs
| primarily recruit from other FAANGs. If none of those
| companies are diverse how are they going to diversify their
| recruitment?
| snakeboy wrote:
| > FAANGs primarily recruit from other FAANGs
|
| How could that be? I was under the impression that a huge
| amount of new hires come in each year from fresh
| university graduates.
| yardie wrote:
| Take Apple for example, out of the 600+ jobs posted on
| their career website only 19 even mention students. And
| some of those are actual student jobs: student outreach,
| student recruiters. If they have a different pipeline for
| recruiting students I'm not aware of it. If new graduate
| positions are only recruited at campus job fairs that has
| a greater potential to be worse. FAANGs haven't been
| recruiting from majority minority schhols or HBCUs.
| babyblueblanket wrote:
| There was actually a big twitter thread by a black
| recruiter at Google (now cut) who out and out said that
| Google's interviewing engineers looked down on black
| seniors and ranked them universally lower than white
| seniors, particularly black seniors from historically
| black universities. She had to fight tooth and nail to
| accomplish getting the first black entry-level-from-
| college hire in all of Google's history.
| rkk3 wrote:
| The thread https://twitter.com/realabril/status/134113581
| 9487100928?lan...
|
| And it was specifically about hiring from HBU's vs other
| elite institutions, not about hiring black applicants in
| general which is how you described it.
| [deleted]
| 10x-dev wrote:
| Why attribute malice to people at these companies when it
| is possible that all the challenges and disadvantages
| minorities and women have to surpass, in the end, result
| in those groups not coming up at the top, with the
| ultimate sorting function being the hiring process?
|
| I see getting hired as the last stage in the pipeline,
| with the first stages being your family, then your
| education and then employment.
|
| The more things go wrong in the first stages, the less
| likely it is for one to succeed at getting to the top of
| the next stage.
|
| If people from underprivileged families can only afford
| to go to the 50% best school in the state, then to the
| 75% best college, then by the time they enter the job
| search page, they won't be at the top of the list (again,
| on average).
|
| I'll use myself as an example: I had the privilege of
| coding for entire weekends when I was young, while my
| peers had to work the land. This gave me a distinct
| advantage early on, which I capitalized on, so at an
| interview with a company I am more likely to get hired
| than if those same peers had hypothetically applied,
| again because it wouldn't make sense for a company to
| pass on the best candidate when they are all competing
| for talent, regardless of race, gender, height or other
| ways of splitting people into groups.
|
| I think everyone agrees that the current situation when
| it comes to diversity in the workplace is not acceptable,
| and we should definitely fix it, but in my opinion, if
| companies are competing fairly for talent, then that part
| of the pipeline doesn't really need fixing. We can
| instead use it as a test to see if the attempts at fixing
| the earlier stages result in better numbers.
|
| P.S. This a difficult subject and I don't intend to
| offend anyone. Despite my relative privilege above,
| compared to my peers in the US, I still grew up in a poor
| and underprivileged family and am behind my current peers
| both financially and socially, so it's a topic that hits
| home for me.
| spoonjim wrote:
| You must have bad information because FAANG companies compete
| over hiring black software engineers. They want to get their
| numbers up and there aren't many to hire.
| tchaffee wrote:
| How many FAANG companies are there? I guess five from the
| name. Does every black applicant with a CS degree get a job
| if they apply? It's a free pass?
|
| Your sample size of five elite companies can't be taken as
| a serious attempt to describe the actual experience of
| black CS grads applying for jobs.
| throwaway556677 wrote:
| A charitable (and, I think, reasonable) reading would be
| that the poster used FAANG as a representation of the
| overall trend in tech. FAANG are what the rest of the
| industry aspires to be, after all.
| astura wrote:
| What's "tech?" Large VC funded B2C companies get a lot of
| press and are most well known but I'd imagine most
| software engineering jobs are either at "non-tech"
| companies or companies that provide B2B services.
| tchaffee wrote:
| How many CS jobs are even in the "the industry" though?
| Home Depot, Walmart, and Nestle are examples of massive
| companies that do not aspire to be Facebook or anything
| like it, but who hire lots of software engineers. Most
| companies are not tech companies, although a handful of
| tech giants have done very well.
| simonh wrote:
| The top 5 have recruited over a million people between
| 2000 and 2018. That's an average of about 50,000 new
| recruits per year. Not all of those are in engineering of
| course, and those are global numbers, but still they hire
| tens of thousands of engineers every year. Here in the UK
| local software companies constantly complain that the
| cream of every year's CS grads emigrate to the US.
| tchaffee wrote:
| Doing the rough math, Google employs about 80,000
| engineers today. Generously assuming the other FAANGs
| employ as many engineers, you get about 400,000
| engineers. There are about 26 million software engineers
| in the world.
|
| So that's 1.5% of all engineers. And that's being very
| generous. The real number is surely below 1%. No surprise
| that the most desirable companies hire the top 1%.
|
| (Happy for someone to correct my numbers and the
| resulting percentage - it's based on a few Google
| searches).
|
| Unless my numbers are way off, it's safe to say that over
| 99% of engineers in the world are not working at a FAANG.
| I stand by my claim that we should not be using what
| happens at FAANGs as reliable anecdotal evidence of the
| interview experience for most candidates.
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| My company is only hiring black engineers or women. You
| have no chance if you are a white man and don't have an in.
| spoonjim wrote:
| What company can afford to be so exclusive in hiring?
| dudul wrote:
| It's not as extrem for me, but I was told by HR that all
| female/non-white applicants had to move automatically to
| the phone screen step, regardless of the resume.
| astura wrote:
| So you're guessing everyone's race/ethnicity and gender
| identity based on their resume?
| dudul wrote:
| Our application form has a required field for LinkedIn
| profile, so we use the picture/name. If there is no way
| to make a guess we just treat it as a normal application
| and review the resume.
| spoonjim wrote:
| I assume Chinese and Indians are not included in "non-
| white"?
| dudul wrote:
| I personally do count them as "non-white" when reviewing
| applications. Our DE&I group only reports "white vs non-
| white" and "males vs females" ratios, so I assume they
| are considered "asians" and lumped into "non-white".
| sgerenser wrote:
| That really makes no sense if the goal is to increase
| "minority" representation. In my experience at BigTech
| Indian and Chinese applicants outnumbered white by at
| least 2:1.
| spoonjim wrote:
| But it's not the point. The point is to keep the Twitter
| mob at bay.
| exporectomy wrote:
| How is that legal?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Breaking the law is only illegal if the law is enforced.
| jpxw wrote:
| It isn't. But nobody cares about that. Employment law
| appears to only work in one direction.
| exporectomy wrote:
| Yep. I've converted myself to a member of the native
| ethnicity because my government has a policy of
| preferentially buying from native-owned businesses but
| failed to define nativeness using any immutable or
| objective characteristics. I just have to remember my new
| ethnicity on any future forms that ask for it. It may
| also entitle me to enhanced healthcare services.
| xphilter wrote:
| I hope you're kidding. What a terrible thing to do.
| aleister_777 wrote:
| It's also terrible to consider that "enhanced health
| services" are only reserved for certain shades on the
| color wheel.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| People can just go on the internet and say whatever they
| like.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| When was the last non-black hire at your company?
| RickJWagner wrote:
| Please reconsider.
|
| As far as I can tell, Big Tech has terrible numbers for
| diversity and they are tripping over themselves trying to
| bring the numbers up. I really, truly believe that non-white,
| non-male candidates are not going to suffer if they can get
| the resume on the table.
|
| Stay the course. Good things await.
| rkk3 wrote:
| > some mention of dropping out because it's not for us as
| well
|
| That is cultural transition & stereotype threat first-
| generation college attendees face, regardless of race.
|
| > When you see people with equivalent resumes already
| coasting by in the job market because they could get their
| last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an
| interview it's hard to believe that'll change post-graduation
|
| If anything, they are probably getting introductions/doors
| opened for them by friends & family. It sounds like you are
| probably applying for some of the most competitive positions
| in the world, Google and many other places have less than 1%
| acceptance rate for interns. Harvard is an order of magnitude
| less selective. It sucks, but don't let struggling to get an
| internship get you down.
| arthur_sav wrote:
| > Innovation out of desperation, I guess.
|
| It's the only way to innovate imo.
| jmeister wrote:
| I'm sorry, in 2021, companies and universities are bending
| over backwards to hire black candidates.
|
| This falls in the "earth is not flat" category in 2021, I
| will not bother posting evidence, as a litmus test of the HN
| crowd.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm sorry, I'm black and this is not my experience. I will
| not bother posting evidence either, because why does
| evidence matter when you already know something to be true,
| right?
| LightG wrote:
| Do you hear that?
|
| It's the sound of your mind closing ...
| tchaffee wrote:
| Both can be true. The number you really need is what
| percentage of black people with a CS degree end up actually
| getting a job offer.
|
| And highly publicized diversity efforts by tech giants does
| not necessarily reflect what the average company in Ohio is
| doing. The news is not the data, so yeah, you really do
| need more evidence than "it's what I heard".
| icare_1er wrote:
| >what percentage of black people with a CS degree end up
| actually getting a job offer.
|
| So, the next step after forcing universities to give out
| degrees, is to force companies to hire minorities just to
| produce statistics that would please liberals ?
|
| Really starts to sound like Communist countries declaring
| what the unemployment figures should be, by law.
| Cipater wrote:
| This is the funniest thing I've read on Hackernews in a
| while.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > I'm a black college student now and every conversation
| > with friends back home includes some mention of >
| dropping out because it's not for us as well.
|
| Naive question, I don't live where you live. But who is the
| "us" that your friends speak of? Black people? Black
| Americans? Black people from a specific subculture?
|
| And finally, what determines that college is not for the "us"
| your friend refers to? Culture? Post-graduation job
| prospects? At least from his perspective.
| bmj wrote:
| _I'm not convinced that all those men need to go to college,
| but they clearly need something._
|
| This. We are seeing the results of what was reported in the
| book _Boys Adrift_.
|
| My older son just graduated high school. He has no interest in
| college at the moment, and has shown a gift for working with
| his hands. He is currently doing a carpentry apprenticeship
| with an acquaintance that runs a renovation and design company.
| He loves the work, loves the people he works with[0], and comes
| home and wants to build more stuff. He's making pretty decent
| money as an 18 year old, and is part of something that very
| much embodied.
|
| [0] His crew is run by Swedish woman who was trained as a metal
| worker, so it isn't just a bunch of dudes, which is also great.
| ttmb wrote:
| > [0] His crew is run by Swedish woman who was trained as a
| metal worker
|
| It is a small world and I am 98% sure that your son has been
| in my house recently.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I very much struggled with discipline and motivation at
| university and eventually dropped out. It was not until I
| started working when I became a highly motivated self-driven
| learner. Now I _love_ studying and learning (and teaching),
| but I do it at my own pace and I choose the things that
| matter for my work or are just plain fun.
|
| Looking back a decade later, it would have been very
| beneficial if I didn't go to university but instead did an
| apprenticeship and developed from there, built up confidence
| and independence incrementally and forming my path
| iteratively.
|
| Most of my friends and family actually went (are going) on
| such a path, from apprenticeship/trade-school to working and
| eventually advanced training or university later in life.
|
| In Switzerland this model is widely appreciated and seems to
| be the default (I didn't look at numbers). Newly the (first)
| apprenticeship is called "Erstausbildung" (initial
| education), implying that it is the first of many steps in
| our education, revisited/expanded at later stages in life.
|
| In many other (OECD) countries this seems not to be the case
| and college/university is regarded as the default or thing to
| aspire to for everyone. I personally don't agree with that
| notion and have become more and more convinced of a more
| continuous and flexible education that isn't necessarily tied
| to academics.
| odessacubbage wrote:
| it is a lot easier to be motivated to learn when you're
| doing something you want to do and filling in the gaps your
| knowledge as-needed as opposed to grinding gen-eds because
| _they 'll be on the test_... that gates your placement into
| another set of gen-eds.
| sadfev wrote:
| I think that's a better approach.
|
| I hope some of the implicit stigma around older undergrads
| goes away too.
|
| Not everyone is motivated or gifted enough at 18 to grind
| through 4 years while maximizing social interactions and
| general happiness.
|
| I really do believe university education is very beneficial
| to most people but at different stages of their lives and
| one solution fits all is not good.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > [0] His crew is run by Swedish woman who was trained as a
| metal worker, so it isn't just a bunch of dudes, which is
| also great.
|
| I find it fascinating you needed to drop this comment in
| order to justify your son's work environment, implying that
| all male environments are inherently toxic. It's very rare to
| find people suggesting that an all female work environment is
| inherently bad.
| lazyeye wrote:
| I thought the same. It gets a little tiresome the very
| narrow railroad tracks of thought we are now expected to
| adhere to on any given topic. Any minor diversion always
| require some statement to imply "hey Im still on the
| railroad tracks..."
| bmj wrote:
| I'm not justifying his work environment, merely pointing
| out that it is more diverse than the usual construction
| site. I simply appreciate that as an 18 year old, he is
| getting a unique experience.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I have a 20 year old (21 in 2 days, god help me) son in
| college now, and one of his friends and our neighbor the same
| age dropped out and started welding school. As far as I know
| he loves it.
|
| As a son of a blue collar mechanic, I am all for this; we
| need more tradespeople in the US, and I suspect he'll be well
| on his way to financial security at least as early if not
| earlier than my son (if he takes care of his finances).
| gjvc wrote:
| Amen to this, Sir.
|
| There's this from the .uk perspective
| https://www.fixradio.co.uk/fix-
| feed/features/post/everybody-...
| LightG wrote:
| "And a narrative that those men aren't wanted by society any
| more."
|
| Citation needed.
|
| (Edit: I assume this is getting downvoted by men with self-
| esteem issues. There are ways you can work on that. Good luck).
| apples_oranges wrote:
| I think your assumption is wrong. Your comment simply added
| no or not enough value.
| LightG wrote:
| Thank you for your thoughts. Fascinating.
|
| For your delectation and learning:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=self%20esteem%20train
| i...
| postsantum wrote:
| Didn't downvote, but there are many people annoyed by endless
| asking for citations in response to an opinion piece
| Miner49er wrote:
| > A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and
| life is just easy for them.
|
| I doubt this has anything to do with it. What is the argument
| here? They hear this and believe it so they don't think they
| need school?
|
| I grew up in a white, working class community, and in my
| experience nobody paid attention to liberals on Twitter calling
| them privelaged. Certainly not enough to decide not to go to
| college over it.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| It's weirder; the claim is that young white men hear that
| it's easier for young white men so they give up entirely.
|
| Like the claim that all those people that joined the extreme
| right wing groups because the "libs said they were Nazis so
| why not".
| mint2 wrote:
| Being a white male, anecdotally there is more peer and cultural
| pressure to care about sports, cars, tv, eating tons of meat,
| and drinking then there is to succeed at school. And for a few
| decades now a major political party has been bolstering anti-
| science and anti college messages.
|
| It is unsurprising less men are finishing college in the face
| of that culture.
|
| While there's going to be many causes, the aforementioned seem
| more important than a message of privilege.
| fredgrott wrote:
| It's more accurate to say that Universities and Colleges are
| extinct so the story should be what is taking its place and
| what are the consequences...
|
| Its just like the Ed loan program..
|
| Many don't realize its a teaching goal tool, those that get
| that they need to form a business around their brand to pay off
| the loan win and those that do not lose and society loses.
|
| We should not bet on society losing this time around such as
| the elites did in the US!
| pelasaco wrote:
| I think that's exactly how racism works right? You segregate
| people by how they look like and you make them believe that
| because how they look like and their origins they are less
| important then the others. Kind of funny how we humans think:
| "let's correct a mistake repeating it over and over again".
| nemo44x wrote:
| When one of progressives guiding philosophies is _"The only
| remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The
| only remedy to present discrimination is future
| discrimination."_ then this is exactly the plan. It's all in
| their texts and one only has to read them to see plainly the
| type of policy they work towards.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Just so you know, chalk me up as an 'anti-woke' leftist.
| Which might mean "Economist(TM) centrist".
|
| I can be in support of anti-systemic-racism actions that
| _do not_ act on an individual level. I can support
| universal healthcare, higher income equality and whatnot,
| without the binary race worldview that Kendi puts out.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Yes you can - you'd be a "Western Liberal", or "Liberal
| Scientist" or whatever else we want to name the
| philosophy of thought that began with the Enlightenment.
| And being a "leftist" in that is 100% consistent with
| that.
|
| We tend to refer to "liberals" as people on the left but
| in general a liberal is anyone who is consistent with
| liberal beliefs which include a fair amount of
| "conservatism" as well. However, there's quite a few
| folks on the right that are as illiberal as the
| progressives are on the left.
| nomoreplease wrote:
| Where are these texts? I didn't know that this is actually
| written down
| nemo44x wrote:
| https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1118351/how-to-be-an-
| antirac...
| kendisaidit wrote:
| Why is this guy being downvoted for quoting Ibram X Kendi,
| author of How to Be an Antiracist?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Inconvenient truth.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I don't think that's actually something progressives
| generally believe. Do you have any evidence?
| nemo44x wrote:
| Read "How to be an Anti-Raciat" by Ibram X Kendi. It was
| a top selling book last year and he is a leading figure
| of the progressive left. His academic work is cited
| heavily in other progressive academic literature.
| refenestrator wrote:
| There's an interesting dynamic here where imo the silent
| majority of progressives don't buy his approach and think
| it's counterproductive, but any lone soul who says so is
| called out, which side are you on here anyways.
|
| So this guy gets to represent himself as a spokesman for
| the movement and nobody really wants to contradict it
| under their real name.
| zepto wrote:
| > the silent majority of progressives
|
| Really, from what I can see all of current progressivism
| is compatible with his approach.
|
| The silent majority of people _who would have called
| themselves progressives a decade ago_ are silent because
| they are _silenced_ and called racists or just right-wing
| if they question the new orthodoxy.
|
| Ergo, the people you are referring to as a silent
| majority are no longer included as _progressives._
| harimau777 wrote:
| I think that the issue goes both ways. Modern
| conservatives have adopted a strategy of ignoring or
| exploiting discrimination and inequality. So if someone
| cares about addressing those issues, then the current
| progressives are the only game in town.
| refenestrator wrote:
| If all of my policy preferences code as progressive but I
| think Kendi and the white fragility lady are jackasses,
| what does that make me then under your definition?
| zepto wrote:
| Someone who is looking for another group. Kendi and
| DiAngelo's ideas _are what progressives are actually
| enacting._
| nemo44x wrote:
| Charitably, cognitively dissonant and more harshly, a
| useful idiot some would say. I'd assume an egalitarian
| person who means well and has started to become
| suspicious of the more illiberal aspects of progressive
| motivations.
| refenestrator wrote:
| Wow. So, what, I have to vote Trump now? That won't be
| happening but always interesting to hear different
| perspectives.
| zepto wrote:
| > So, what, I have to vote Trump now?
|
| Why is that the implied option?
| harimau777 wrote:
| Americans live in a two party system. The only realistic
| alternative to the Democrats, who are associated with
| progressives, are the Republicans.
| zepto wrote:
| Even if you believe that a two party system is the only
| possibility, you can do many things that don't involve
| voting for Trump.
| refenestrator wrote:
| The 'useful idiot' part that I replied to.
| nemo44x wrote:
| "Useful idiot" is a term coined back in the day to
| describe people who unwittingly spread the propaganda of
| communists without really understanding the ultimate
| goals. In this case being a progressive while disagreeing
| with the leading ideas of the movement.
|
| And no it doesn't mean a vote for Trump. It means not
| supporting candidates that parrot this type of rhetoric
| and to not support causes/movements that are a part of
| it. FWIW Trump did ban critical race theory from being
| brought into federal offices and Biden quickly reinstated
| it under the guise of "learning to be nice to each other"
| - which it isn't. Biden, in this case, I believe is a
| useful idiot for propagating their propaganda, mistaking
| it for harmless "diversity training". There's a big
| difference!
| nemo44x wrote:
| He isn't a lone wolf or something though. Critical Theory
| covers not only race (as in this case) but gender,
| sexuality, disability and fat studies, and all types of
| "social justice" scholarship. They all come from
| Postcolonial Theory (essentially deconstructing Western
| thought and Western Liberalism) which has had a massive
| influence on all of these as they have adapted them.
|
| From bell hooks and Kimberle Crenshaw (intersectionality)
| into leading theories on feminist and racial thought -
| this is the progressive and academic left. It is the
| leading thought in every elite university. And you can't
| run away from it and say "us silent majority
| progressives...." - a progressive is either this or they
| aren't progressive by today's standard. It is a social
| force that is trying to get inside of everything it can,
| from unrelated academic scholarship (look at what's in
| modern STEM curricula) as well as corporate America and
| now elite high schools.
|
| My advice is to choose Liberalism without identity
| politics and reject this school of thought as illiberal,
| totalitarian, and harmful.
|
| (For what it's worth, the entire scholarship of critical
| theory isn't all awful. There's good things in there and
| the identification of many societal problems is probably
| right. However, it isn't unique to them and their
| solutions for these problems are awful and regressive.)
| refenestrator wrote:
| I'm not trying to let anyone off the hook, just
| describing the dynamics as I see them.
|
| I identify as a cultural moderate for that reason. This
| stuff is all divorced from actual politics, economics or
| governing, it's purely cultural.
| tck42 wrote:
| That quote, in context, is available here.
|
| https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/june/ibram-x-
| kendi-d...
|
| I think it's pretty clear from the full text that he's not
| advocating for racism against past racists or their
| offspring (which, intentional or not, is what your use of
| the quote makes it sound like).
| nemo44x wrote:
| He's advocating for "anti-racism" which claims there is
| no such thing as "not racist" policy, only racist policy
| and anti-racist policy. But he jumps through hoops to
| redefine racism so that it can suit his argument that
| "not racist" doesn't exist. That if you don't consider
| race in literally everything then you are racist, by his
| definition. This is in direct opposition to the Civil
| Rights act of 1964:
|
| _" Since the 1960s, racist power has commandeered the
| term "racial discrimination," transforming the act of
| discriminating on the basis of race into an inherently
| racist act. But if racial discrimination is defined as
| treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor
| or against an individual based on that person's race,
| then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The
| defining question is whether the discrimination is
| creating equity or inequity." _
| tck42 wrote:
| I think the redefining racism you mention is simply
| pointing out, at a high level, that one law does not
| erase injustice ingrained into power systems that were
| instructed by racism for literally hundreds of years, or
| the effects those systems have had on the targets of this
| racism and their offspring (things like generational
| wealth accumulation), and everyone else subject to those
| systems.
|
| The other thing is the idea that, for those of us growing
| up in various segments of society that are affected by
| the above, our very mechanism of thought was generated by
| this system, and that affects how we think about and
| perceive these systems (and everything else).
|
| I believe he's simply advocating for being conscious of
| the above two facts, when examining these systems and
| reforming them (and of course when teaching the history
| of these systems). To ignore race and racism as if it
| never happened is to allow all of that ingrained racism
| to perpetuate (of systems and of thought). All of this
| sounds pretty reasonable to me, but that may be due to my
| particular experience.
|
| That said - I'm no expert, I've only read the linked
| passage so far, though I've now ordered the book and will
| start reading it tonight. I'll refrain from commenting
| further here (I think we're pretty off-topic already).
| Thanks for the discussion!
| [deleted]
| nemo44x wrote:
| It's not as off-topic as you might think as critical
| theory covers a wide range of things.
|
| One of the biggest issues with Kendi and similar works
| (of which there are many in the academic world) are they
| paint a false dichotomy and they frame themselves as the
| only legitimate response to historical racism, etc. That
| is, anti-racism is the only way to combat "white
| supremacy". It's illiberal in this regard (and in fact,
| the entire body of critical theory is not only skeptical
| to western liberalism but actively attacks it as "the
| tools of the oppressor") and I hope you find his remedies
| as totalitarian and insane as I do. For instance, I don't
| think a "Department of Anti-Racism" which is staffed by
| "formally trained anti-racists" and not appointed by
| elected officials with the authority to "clear" all
| local, state, and federal policies to ensure they are
| "anti-racist" is a good idea. And to be equipped with
| "disciplinary tools" to punish non-compliance...
|
| https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-
| politi...
| jimbokun wrote:
| In the linked article, for lower income groups white men
| trail black men for college admissions. (Let alone black
| women.)
|
| You can't always unequivocally state that white people
| are privileged over non-whites in every circumstance.
| Obviously it's going to be true in many cases, but it
| can't always be just assumed.
| zepto wrote:
| Right - he ignores that 'in favor of' one group means 'to
| the disadvantage of other groups'.
|
| Racial discrimination _is_ inherently racist.
| gumby wrote:
| > A lot of this is driven by narratives...
|
| You give three examples but only tie the last to the admissions
| issue. Could you expand on the others and how they might be
| relevant to this issue?
| teekert wrote:
| _...an entire generation that feels lost, without purpose, and
| unwanted._ I 'd argue that it is largely up to the parents to
| instill a feeling of worth and help kids/young adults find
| intrinsic motivation, not the educational system.
| stemlord wrote:
| It isn't necessarily just the educational system that's
| leaving this impression, it is a culture at large, for
| example on social media, and in various fields including the
| arts. Parents can influence all they want but the outside
| world needs to support these influences to an extent or they
| fall flat.
| teekert wrote:
| Yeah, I suppose that's true, you do need some resilience to
| peer/societal pressure. I could be a struggle.
| mint2 wrote:
| But what are the parents to do when they weren't taught to do
| that by their own parents? There needs to be an intervention
| to break the cycle.
| smitty1e wrote:
| My brother in law is an electrician.
|
| I had enough EE in college to change a light switch without
| burning the house down.
|
| However, that book-learnin' fell apart when confronted with
| troubleshooting a strangely wired room, and I got very polite
| while asking him over to bail me out.
|
| These fellows eschewing the ivory tower, where being of
| European extraction and bearing a Y-chromosome on the college
| campus is an indictment, are going to trade schools and will
| make fat piles of cash repairing plumbing.
|
| Hopefully, they are gracious with all the Grievance Studies
| majors who are standing by to condescend in their direction.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > These fellows eschewing the ivory tower, where being of
| European extraction and bearing a Y-chromosome on the college
| campus is an indictment
|
| I hate to have to mention this, but not all American men are
| white.
| inkblotuniverse wrote:
| What does that have to do with the quoted sentence?
| tchaffee wrote:
| > I got very polite while asking him over to bail me out.
|
| > all the Grievance Studies majors
|
| So you're polite to those you find useful and insulting to
| people majoring in something you presumably disagree with?
| And assuming they will all be condescending to a plumber or
| electrician for some reason?
|
| Perhaps you don't have to look quite so far away if you're
| looking to reduce the amount of condescending happening in
| the room you're standing in?
| znpy wrote:
| > These fellows eschewing the ivory tower [...] are going to
| trade schools and will make fat piles of cash repairing
| plumbing.
|
| I read somewhere that (ironocally) plumbing it the less
| likely thing to be "automated" via an AI or something.
| [deleted]
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I've was a union electrician for a few years.
|
| Get in early. Get in a union. 25-30 years to retirement in
| most unions. You don't want to be 60, and still in
| construction.
|
| The test is easy, but figure 1000-2000 guys are taking the
| test too, so you need to get most of the questions right to
| get in. An oral interview counts for 1/2 the hiring process.
|
| Just say you love working with your hands--love unions, but
| understand the needs of the contractors too.
|
| Remember it's construction. You're around guys all day long.
| It's brainless work, and you will never have to act cheery
| when the owner's spoiled kid comes to work.
|
| I do not recommend non-union construction at all.
|
| Then again---hide in school for a long time. I loved college.
| It was cheaper 25 years ago though, and not that fun, but
| much better than any job I've had.
|
| Your interest will change as you age.
| thehappypm wrote:
| This sounds like a lot of advice that boomers give, "do
| exactly what I did".
| atoav wrote:
| I am a certified EE and have a MA of fine Arts (film). Living
| in Europe where I had to pay 350 Euros per semester (which
| included a public transport ticket for the whole province), I
| didn't have to make a choice between the two. I did both
| because I was interested in both.
|
| After university I was well equiped to do freelancer work in
| my field and earned well.
|
| I don't think this "you have to be hard or else you won't
| survive"-mentality in the US is very beneficial to its
| society as a whole. Ideally you want to live in a society
| where everybody is well educated, healthy, happy, friendly
| and so on. Maybe it is a naive idea, but I think this is more
| achievable if there is collective investment into those goals
| rather than internal economical warfare where everybody is a
| army of one, except for the big corporations who will happily
| milk a atomized, divided population.
|
| Yet I am constantly amazed by how much some of you guys
| endure. I just wish you wouldn't have to.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| > "you have to be hard or else you won't survive"-mentality
|
| Europeans often have this opinion but I don't think it's an
| accurate reading of the issue. The issue is not that
| Americans work too hard, it's that this hard work is no
| longer actually amounting to anything. In the past, you
| could pay for college by working summers at the local
| restaurant. Today the average debt is $30K and you _still_
| won 't get a decent job.
|
| The article (and others) just show that American men are
| starting to put their efforts into places that do reward
| them; namely, the trades and entrepreneurship.
| alistairSH wrote:
| To clarify a bit... 42% of students graduate
| (undergraduate studies) without any debt. And 78% of
| graduates have less than $30k in debt.
|
| The numbers aren't great, but the majority of students
| finish with either zero debt or a very manageable amount
| of debt. There is a small fraction of students taking
| massive loans that skew the overall picture.
|
| And bachelor degree holders continue to earn, on average,
| $1 million more than high school graduates over their
| career.
|
| All that said, I agree college should be affordable
| without loans. Summer jobs, co-ops/internships, etc.
|
| https://www.aplu.org/projects-and-initiatives/college-
| costs-...
| gamechangr wrote:
| That is restricting the conversation to those who
| finished.
|
| Many young 20's somethings don't complete college, but
| end up with debt as well.
|
| If the question is whether is a difficult for society to
| maintain college as a necessity for success, they should
| be included in the review.
| atoav wrote:
| > The article (and others) just show that American men
| are starting to put their efforts into places that do
| reward them; namely, the trades and entrepreneurship.
|
| Good point. I did not intend to argue otherwise. To go
| into trade is not an irrational reaction on an individual
| level -- quite the opposite in fact. What I did argue
| however, was that making it hard for people to get a
| higher education is not a good thing for a society. Not
| good in the short term, because educated societes will
| make more informed decisions, and at the same time not a
| sustainable strategy for any western society that wants
| to play any role in the next century.
|
| Having an educated society should be in the national
| interest just like having public roads or drinkable water
| is.
|
| > accurate reading of the issue. The issue is not that
| Americans work too hard, it's that this hard work is no
| longer actually amounting to anything.
|
| That was the American dream. This is a nice model to keep
| big numbers of people playing the lottery and bear a ton
| of stress, because they have the hope that one day they
| might win and then everything will pay off.
|
| But even of you are one of the few lucky ones that wins
| you still live in a society where 90% are struggling and
| crushed. There may be people that enjoy being on top
| while everybody else suffers, but I personally would
| prefer being middle class in a society where nobody is
| poor over being a billionaire in a society where
| everybody is crushed. Maybe this is empathy, but maybe it
| is also just egoistic: I like to walk through my city and
| not see suffering, I like to walk through my country
| without having to fear being robbed, shot or angrily
| screamed at. I simply prefer living in a healthy, happy
| society where people help each other over living in one
| where everybody has to kick down to stay on top.
|
| Not that that any nation achieved that goal, but there
| are certainly observable differences in tone between the
| industrial nations.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| You have still missed my point. The American dream was an
| effective, real thing for a long period of time. Most
| Americans today are descendants of poor immigrants that
| worked hard and gave their children a better quality of
| life. This wasn't "a lottery" and your characterization
| of it as such is both historically misinformed and just
| ideological in nature.
|
| As I said, the issue is that this hard work no longer
| results in progress. The system has become broken. This
| is easily observable via a bevy of statistical measures
| like inequality and college costs.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I think you missed his point - the world has changed, its
| more complex, you cant keep applying strategy of 1900's
| and expect it to work.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| ...but we aren't still applying the strategy of 1900s.
| That's the entire point of my posts.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Yeah the cireent system is broken no matter what you are
| after
| Applejinx wrote:
| I'm an American and agree completely. My concern is that
| this '90% struggling' is considered by too many to be a
| default, the desired state of things. This pops up over
| and over again in so many ways.
|
| I think it leads to people drawing their distinctions,
| around who is superior and who is inferior, and then it
| leads to those people making an unnecessary logical jump
| and deciding that those inferior people need to be HURT
| or REMOVED... and we've seen all this before.
|
| And they go from there to decide that anyone arguing,
| wishes to crown those inferior people as the kings, and
| hurt the superior ones, because that's the only way they
| can perceive anything anymore... and they just get
| hostile and paranoid we've seen all that before too.
|
| I don't know how to convince them that seeking a
| civilized environment for all the people (without it
| being conditional on performance) produces the best
| societal result, through the widest possible range for
| SOME person of whatever description to excel.
|
| It seems like there are a lot of people for whom, they're
| more than happy to throw away overall system performance
| because they're mad that anything lower-performing can
| even exist. They are PC builders so mad that RAM can't
| run as fast as L2 cache that they're all CPU and refuse
| to have any RAM installed. It's stark madness from my
| point of view.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| People are not components in an engineered system. When
| you work with statistics it might appear that way, but
| people have a way of creating conflict and chaos when
| least expected. It is a fallacy to think that one need
| only set up the right societal structures and this
| problem will magically vanish.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Define 'problem' and why anybody would think the
| requirement was that it would magically vanish, else
| society does not count.
|
| Society functions THROUGH conflict and chaos. It's like
| brownian motion, noise in circuitry: if you're trying to
| define an ideology where there's no more conflict, the
| most direct way is to define an enemy and then rally
| everyone to destroy it. And that is said to work for a
| thousand years but actually blows up within ten, leaving
| enormous wreckage and shame.
|
| Better to design the fault-tolerant system that runs
| through conflict and chaos.
| text70 wrote:
| I hope you are not talking about people. We break bones,
| bump our heads, or lose too much blood and we are out of
| commission.
|
| What you are talking about is a war-based society, a
| fault-tolerant system, with lots of redundancy, that runs
| through conflict and chaos. The last two decades were an
| experiment in that one.
| dagw wrote:
| _Today the average debt is $30K_
|
| That sounds...reasonable. I can't speak for the rest of
| Europe but a $30k student loan would be perfectly normal
| after a 4-5 year of study in Sweden.
|
| Back of the envelope, $30k for 4 years is $625 a month
| and that is not much for just food and rent.
| golemotron wrote:
| > The article (and others) just show that American men
| are starting to put their efforts into places that do
| reward them; namely, the trades and entrepreneurship.
|
| Call it toxic or not, there's a male drive toward
| autonomy. Joining corporations that are run by HR just
| isn't as attractive.
| roenxi wrote:
| If you are a certified EE, you almost certainly paid for
| your own MA with your own taxes.
|
| So I don't have a problem with the MA, but the framing of
| "life is wonderful in Europe" is missing the fact that the
| only theoretical upside is you had less choice.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| How do exactly do you get from "I could afford to go to
| college for a STEM professional degree and an arts MA
| without any debt or financial stress" to "Less choice"?
| roenxi wrote:
| If he? hadn't consumed the resources necessary to get the
| MA, he would still have paid the same amount of taxes -
| most of which will be subsidising other people.
|
| But if paying the full cost, there would be a choice
| where down one path there is more money because less
| resources were consumed, and one that would be roughly
| equivalent.
| sammalloy wrote:
| I just want to point out that a MA in film was extremely
| cheap at one time. A friend of mine got one at a state
| school for about $5 grand in the early 1990s. The issue
| is that inflation and rising costs in the US have wildly
| diverged from real wages. People aren't going to college
| in the US because it isn't economically feasible.
| Meanwhile, all my European friends have PhDs which were
| subsidized by their native countries. The fact of the
| matter is that the US is not taking care of their
| citizens, and has failed an entire generation.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I determined I didn't want to continue school around
| 17/18 for a variety of reasons. Some out of my own
| arrogance and some I still hold to this day. Because of
| this of course, I didn't "set myself up" for school so to
| speak. Didn't bother with managing good grades, taking
| standardized tests or building my portfolio with any of
| the academic or non academic line items schools typically
| look at.
|
| Flash forward and I start to rethink the decision. I want
| to go back now, but I've attempted multiple times to
| investigate it and the numbers never work. Because I
| didn't play my HS years correctly, the bureaucracy will
| not let me in, regardless of the things I've accomplished
| in the years since. Additionally the price is just so
| prohibitive, combined with the fact that I would get next
| to no aid and even a standard State school would be
| ridiculously expensive. These are just a handful of the
| issues though. Let's not even bring up how I would need a
| simultaneously drop out of the workforce, suddenly
| turning the financial burden into Tuition/Books/Fees +
| everything needed to survive.
|
| I'm really convinced that universities in the US do not
| want non traditional students at all. Obviously there are
| some programs that target them, but are often limited.
| I.e. you have to be part of the right demographic, be
| limited in the areas you can study. A notable state
| university near me offers over a dozen online Bachelors
| programs, but not a single "useful" degree, they're all
| BA's in subjects that people in HN mock. Other seem to
| cobble together "made up" degrees, which are bachelors
| that don't have a traditional or on-campus equivalent and
| seem to be not particularly useful for employment in
| attempt to scam poorer, non-credentialed people out of
| their money.
|
| I could still probably go back, but since I can not hack
| my way out of the bureaucracy or financial cost, majority
| of the value proposition would be completely dead by the
| time o could manage it.
| grayclhn wrote:
| Start with community college part time, get grades and
| take prerequisites, then apply to other programs.
| Spending two years at community college and then
| transferring to a 4 year college is pretty common as well
| if you want to attend full time, but part time is going
| to be easier.
|
| I don't know where you live or what you want to study,
| but if you focus on taking the coursework you need it
| becomes a lot easier. I'd suggest calling admissions
| departments as well, not trying to piece everything
| together yourself online. Feel free to email me if you
| want to share more information and I can give more
| specific and better researched suggestions.
| the_only_law wrote:
| The problem with part time is it adds significantly to
| the time cost. The attractiveness of a degree to me
| declined significantly if I won't be able to complete it
| till my 30s. I can stomach the lost wages if education
| could be completes in a mostly standard time, but
| otherwise there's already a very good case to be made for
| staying with what I do now.
| atoav wrote:
| Yeah, bit I am willing to pay more taxes if it benefits
| my environment. Because this is what I think it means to
| be part of a society. They made it possible for me to
| choose more or less free of economic pressure what I want
| to study, so me supporting them is only good and fair.
|
| I mean, what is the goal of a good live? Extract as many
| resources from your surroundings as possible, kicking
| your competition down and then die in an slightly above
| average house? I want to live a good live _and_ leave my
| environment in a better shape than I entered it in,
| because the two are not a contradiction.
| davidw wrote:
| > I want to live a good live and leave my environment in
| a better shape than I entered it in
|
| This seems like a pretty good guiding principle in life.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| There are upsides to living in a society where the
| average person is more well off, especially when those
| who have it hardest also have to struggle less. We are
| social animals living in a complex society, and no man is
| an island.
|
| Edit: Of course, if you're very well off and live
| somewhere that's relatively stable, large gaps in
| equality might benefit you. That's for a select few
| though.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| 'You almost certainly paid for your own MA with your own
| taxes'
|
| Thanks cap, there is always this one commenter who thinks
| we in europe don't understand how taxes work.
| refurb wrote:
| Don't more Americans have a 4-year university degree than
| Europeans?
|
| OECD data seems to suggest so
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertia
| r...
| arthur_sav wrote:
| Agreed, there should be a threshold where people can get
| the minimum to live a normal life. Basic healthcare, a job
| with liveable wage, easy access to education etc...
|
| However, there should be a playground for innovation as
| well.
|
| Europe makes it so damn hard to innovate because of it's
| many laws. Ambitious people inevitably move to the US.
| hollerith wrote:
| I am pretty sure that the US graduates a larger fraction of
| its population from college than Germany does. At least
| that was true in 2012:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/r-us-falls-behind-in-
| college...
|
| (ignore the headline and go to the actual numbers)
| someguydave wrote:
| having a degree is no guarantee that you possess
| employable skills.
|
| Germany is much better at shunting people away from
| university who are not qualified to be there. Generally,
| they go to trade schools and apprenticeships.
| xattt wrote:
| The piles of cash come at the expense of physical health. I
| can't imagine being a labourer at 55.
|
| I'm a registered nurse which is a weird hybrid of university-
| level knowledge (understanding pharm and patho) but also it
| is a physical trade (turning patients, providing personal
| cares, mental resilience). It has roots in being vocational
| with a push in the last 50 years to provide an academic
| background to turn it into a profession.
|
| Floor nursing is the bread and butter of the profession, but
| it burns you quick. Older nurses, particularly in medical-
| surgical nursing, tend to take on less stressful 8 hour day
| shifts, end up as spinsters, or have a terrible home life
| that they've resigned into accepting.
|
| I moved into a desk position in my mid 30s and can't possibly
| imagine going back to the physicality of it all.
| symlinkk wrote:
| I can't imagine it can be better for you physically or
| mentally to hunch over a desk for 8 hours a day in dead
| silence vs being on your feet, walking and talking to
| people.
| xattt wrote:
| There is a trade-off indeed. My overall quality of life
| improved.
|
| I wore a fitness tracker then and now. I averaged about
| 10 km in a given shift, where as my daily total now is
| now closer to 5 or 6. However, now I have time and energy
| at the end of the day to do an actual physical activity
| instead of coming home like a limp noodle and taking the
| next day to recover.
|
| Mentally, there is comradery that I absolutely miss. This
| is something really hard to explain unless you're in it.
| When things got tough, the dark humour got us through. We
| took care of each others' loved ones (at their family's
| request). We demanded excellence from each other, and
| (rightfully) called out unsafe practice and supported
| staff as needed.
|
| However, my home life suffered. It was fine at first as
| my partner is also a nurse so there was a mutual
| understanding. However, it started to wear on me when I
| had kids. I'd come home and my kids would be asleep/at
| school/daycare, so I'd have missed out on a day's
| interaction. I realized that they're only little once and
| no job in the world is worth missing out on them.
| lordnacho wrote:
| A colleague of mine had a physics degree and decided to
| become an electrician. Took very little time to learn.
|
| That's not to condescend on electricians, they clearly have a
| useful skill. And being able to certify a house pays a good
| few hundred pounds a day, nothing to sniff at.
|
| But if you're used to looking at physical models, learning a
| few conventions and adding another model won't be terribly
| difficult.
|
| I think a lot of people are actually better off doing that
| kind of work. There's a tangible output that is much easier
| to connect to purposefulness than if your job is mainly in
| the ideas realm. A cousin of mine that I grew up with is a
| carpenter and seems to cheerful all the time, now that he
| knows what his thing is. I grew up with him and it wasn't
| always so.
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| > all the Grievance Studies major
|
| Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies (I'm
| assuming "Grievance Studies" falls under this category), at
| least in the US, have been in steady decline since 2008, and
| even at their peak only accounted for 0.5% of majors (now
| just 0.3%). Even if you want to add in humanities in general
| that has gone from 3% to just above 2%
|
| The idea that college campuses are ever more filled with
| people studying "useless" majors is a fiction. The largest
| areas of major concentration are business, biology, health
| professions, and engineering and all of these have been more
| or less growing for years.
|
| There is this pervasive myth that most students in undergrad
| are having trouble transitioning to industry because they
| wasted their time studying their non-practical passion, but
| the data[0] clearly shows that the trends for the last decade
| have been increasing focus on career oriented practical
| majors.
|
| [0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_322.1
| 0.a...
| hintymad wrote:
| I really appreciate this kind of discussion: data driven,
| narrative free. I'm very sad to see that giving up facts
| for narratives accelerates the decline of the US.
| WalterBright wrote:
| EE programs tend to focus on electronics, not electrical
| systems. But learning how house wiring works is a simple book
| away. But be careful - unlike electronics, house electrics
| can kill you.
|
| On the other hand, electricians have weird gaps in their
| knowledge. If I ask them to do something slightly out of the
| ordinary, this becomes apparent. For example, none of them
| understand inductive coupling, or even know what it is. When
| I ask them to do certain things to avoid inductive coupling,
| they give me this indulgent smile, and do what I ask,
| although it's clear they don't understand why.
|
| I eventually wound up doing the low voltage wiring myself,
| because I simply couldn't explain to them why you don't run
| low voltage wires through the same holes as the A/C wires.
| One of them tried to run a 12VDC wire in 25 feet of conduit
| with a 120VAC wire.
|
| They also simply did not understand how generators worked,
| and botched up the wiring for mine.
|
| It's the same with roofers. They have no idea what galvanic
| corrosion is, and will invariably use the wrong nails for
| anything metal.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| This is more an observation on the curriculum for a
| vocation in some locale than a general observation about
| vocational schools/training.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The same thing happened the next state over. At least
| this time, the electrician allowed me to explain it, and
| then did the low voltage wiring correctly.
|
| These are decades apart in time, too.
| j-bos wrote:
| I find this is why the trades work best under a competent
| contractor who, while not an expert in all fields, brings
| together the necessary skills and experience to avoid gap
| defects.
| blueblisters wrote:
| That's the thing with vocationals skills - they make you
| really good at understanding how something works or how to
| fix something without breaking something else, but beyond
| that range of problems and solutions, you need to talk to
| an engineer.
|
| Not that vocational jobs are not important - clearly they
| add value and create employment.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm not so sure they understand how it works, though.
|
| BTW, if you ever see an EE with a card that has printed
| on it: V = I*R I = V/R R =
| V/I
|
| it's a sure sign he's a formula-plugger, and has no idea
| how it works. He doesn't even understand algebra.
|
| https://testguy.net/content/266-Ohm-s-Law-Watt-s-Law-
| Cheat-S...
|
| A definite no-hire :-/
| pitched wrote:
| I'm not saying that most people aren't formula pluggers
| (and that's a big problem) but, my first impression of
| that kind of card would be that's it's meant to be
| branding, not a tool. Someone is carrying around a piece
| of what they love.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If you want to brand, print Maxwell's Equations on the
| card. Or put a simple amplifier circuit on it.
|
| P.S. Maxwell's Equations on a t-shirt are popular, I even
| sold one for a while.
| pitched wrote:
| Just out of curiosity (I don't mean this to be a dig and
| don't carry either cards), why are Maxwell's Equations
| good but Ohm's Law is an instant no-hire? How I remember
| the story is that, when Ohm published his equation, it
| came as a huge shock because no one was expecting it to
| be so simple. There's a lot of beauty in that simplicity.
| Maxwell's equations aren't that complex but they aren't
| exactly _linear_. Valuing complexity is an interesting
| hiring tactic but would probably be a great filter on
| younger engineers?
| WalterBright wrote:
| 1. Ohm's Law is taught the first day of 4 years of an EE
| degree. Ohm's Law should be part of your soul, not
| something a cheat sheet is needed for.
|
| 2. The 3 versions of the formula are obvious to anyone
| who remembers high school freshman math. It's barely even
| algebra.
|
| Carrying that cheat sheet signals you know neither
| electronics nor the most basic algebra.
|
| Maxwell's Equations, however, get introduced in 2nd or
| 3rd year in college. You'll need a year (probably two) of
| calculus to even understand the notation. The equations
| unify the theories of electric fields and magnetic
| fields.
|
| Only people who have studied Maxwell's Equations will
| even recognize them, so by putting them on a t-shirt
| you're signalling that you are an educated EE to other
| educated EEs. Other people won't even know what they are.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| There's a book called, Everytjing I should have learned
| in Engineering School, but didn't.
|
| I had no idea there were EE's walking around who were
| rusty with basic electrical formulas.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Shocking, isn't it!
| blippage wrote:
| Hopefully it's just a current trend.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| They just take the path of least resistance
| dempseye wrote:
| Go on. Take the upvote.
| geomark wrote:
| My kid accused me of that. I grounded him.
|
| Edit: Ah, come on! That's one of my best jokes and I got
| downvoted?!
| dotancohen wrote:
| Maybe the downvoters were not convinced that insulating
| your kid was a good idea.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Or perhaps they're concerned it will short-circuit his
| development
| wiredfool wrote:
| Yeah, it would be E=IR
| exporectomy wrote:
| Because proper EEs draw it in a triangle instead? https:/
| /upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Ohm%27s_...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Ohm's Law is the first lesson in an electronics set for
| kids.
|
| https://generalatomic.com/teil1/B.html
|
| Proper EEs don't need a cheat sheet for it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Downvote me all you like :-) but if you're an EE and
| carry such a cheat card, I'd keep it out of sight. I'm
| not the only one with that opinion.
| exporectomy wrote:
| Don't you have codes and license requirements for
| electricians and roofers? In my country, most of what makes
| electricianing harder than electronicsing is the rules.
| There are rules about how close you can put mains and low
| voltage wires, which your guy should have followed even if
| he didn't know why, rules about what parts of the house you
| can fix them to, or if they can be laid loosely or must be
| stapled to the framing, the spacing between the staples,
| how to pull a wire through a hole, where you can drill
| holes for wires, using a wrong colored wire with a sleeve
| on the end, etc. All the understanding of electrical
| engineering in the world won't have you knowing those
| rules.
| ghaff wrote:
| And then you have old houses with all sorts of weird
| wiring and constraints and the contractor/electrician
| works around those and does things mostly to current code
| the best they can.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Three different electricians I used, from 3 different
| companies and 2 states, did not know what inductive
| coupling was or knew how to avoid it.
|
| So I suspect it is not in the building codes. I don't
| think the codes say anything about about low voltage
| wires.
| j1dopeman wrote:
| The small subset of codes in my area that I personally
| looked at were significantly out of date and it was
| unlikely that they would be updated anytime soon. There
| are state codes which were out of date for a long time
| but they just recently updated. However there are also
| local codes which are not up to date. When they're not in
| direct conflict you need to follow both, if they are then
| technically the state should take precedence, but if you
| look into it then you'll find that the locality doesn't
| care and will fine you and it's up to you to defend it
| which will be expensive and you could still lose. The
| codes are only as good as the people maintaining them and
| it seems that the maintenance is not a priority. This was
| not for electrical - perhaps that one is given more
| attention.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I remember a conversation with a plumber in Cambridge, UK a
| few years ago. He was helping me pick out plastic pipes for
| a project. I asked "What material are these - are they
| HDPE? He gave me a weird look, and told me "They're plastic
| pipe!".
| hajile wrote:
| Here in the US, the NEC specifies a one-foot separation for
| low voltage unless crossing at a perpendicular angle. Low
| voltage is generally a specialty, so a lot of electricians
| don't know.
|
| The bigger issue is that there are tons of electricians
| that never went through apprenticeships and who never
| picked up and read a copy of the code (which has major
| changes every three years). The result is a lot of cargo
| cult installation which may or may not actually be correct.
| dkarp wrote:
| I find this with everything. You have to become an expert
| at everything if you want it done right. Maybe it's because
| the truly expert help is generally too expensive.
|
| Examples:
|
| - Taxes/Pensions - if you just rely on your accountant then
| they'll do the bare minimum and you'll miss out
|
| - Energy company - we're rolling out smart gas/elec meters
| in the UK. There is an old type (smets1) and a new type
| (smets2). You don't want to be stuck with the old type but
| the company had no idea which type they were installing. (I
| ended up with the old type)
|
| - Lawyers - We're constantly having to chase ours and
| highlight things to them to make progress
|
| - Doctors - If I haven't done my research then they
| invariably try to fob me off (maybe this is a UK
| nationalised healthcare thing)
|
| I could go on but the crux is that the average professional
| does the bare minimum to move you along. I'm not old enough
| to say if it's always been like this but it has been my
| observation over my decade of adulthood. If it's a new
| thing then maybe it is partly to blame for the anti-vax and
| lack of faith in experts.
| dboreham wrote:
| Having lived in the UK and USA: Drs are the exact same.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Building management, renovation and construction is such
| a wild west.
|
| I understand good vocational training (for example
| certified plumbers) in a country pays itself back very
| much.
| davidhunter wrote:
| This is an interesting observation and matches with my
| experience. I'd add:
|
| 1) There's a race to the bottom with services in terms of
| pricing. For example, NHS GPs have strict time limits
| within which to provide a particular service. These time
| limits have reduced over the years and so individual
| doctors are capable of providing a better service but are
| can't given the constraints. People rarely are willing to
| pay more for a service unless they know that the quality
| level will be higher. With services, it is not clear that
| a higher price will translate to higher quality.
|
| 2) Most services are not chosen based on quality. They
| are chosen based on perception, brand, reviews, pricing
| and a whole host of other things. Often the most
| profitable services are the ones who can manipulate these
| variables best rather than the ones who actually provide
| a great service. If there is a sole accountant who is
| fantastic at accounting but poor at marketing and review
| collection then they are going to struggle and may end up
| joining a firm who constrains their time such that can
| only provide the minimum viable service.
| [deleted]
| Frost1x wrote:
| I blame the extreme penetration of capitalism everywhere.
| We've created a culture where everyone thinks like a
| business and looks to do the minimal effort for the
| maximal compensation. If you don't do this, "you're dumb"
| (and, unfortunately, maybe there's some truth to this).
|
| In a culture obsessed with looking for exploitation
| opportunities at every corner, what do we expect?
| Everyone is running so "lean" and "efficiently" that
| anything beyond the lowest cost options can hinder you.
| Are you getting ROI, or diminishing returns and if you
| are getting diminishing returns, then that's now viewed
| as waste and a poor path to choose.
|
| Capitalism has been great at motivating people to
| innovate and create but the current state of capitalistic
| systems, I say, isn't healthy for humanity. We need to
| acknowledge this and fix perverse incentive structures
| across the board (that doesn't mean destroying the
| system, simply fixing it). Much of what you're seeing
| these days used to be used in arguments for capitalistic
| systems against socialist systems--what really seems to
| have happened is that we've just traded who we want to
| give power to. Instead of those who tower over government
| systems in an authoritarian manner in socialist systems,
| we seek business leadership who... tower over us in an
| authoritarian manner.
|
| One reason the US had been so fantastic is that we had a
| government and economic system that forced capitalistic
| ideals to compete with socialistic ideals. We had
| government services inspired by socialist systems that
| kept capitalistic drivers from going off the rails into
| too competitive of states with social safety nets to
| protect us. Meanwhile, to avoid the stagnant systems you
| see in prior socialist systems, we had capitalism provide
| incentives to motivate people to work, to do better for
| themselves and improve their lives and therefor those
| around them. Now, we seem to have mostly swept away
| socialist ideals (competition in policy simply isn't
| there anymore), capitalistic policy has won, and we're
| witnessing what unconstrained capitalism looks like. It's
| less value creation and more wealth extraction.
|
| If you're a capital holder, it looks pretty good. My
| investments that I simply threw money at have grown
| beyond belief--without any sort of effort on my behalf--
| it's astounding to think how much money I earned doing
| nothing. It's an interesting situation because I still
| work and get paid fairly well, but when I look at my
| investment portfolio I can't help but think I'm cheating
| because asset growth well beyond inflation just appear in
| my accounts, meanwhile, at my day job, everything has
| grown more and more demanding without equal compensation.
|
| It's an interesting time and I hope we course correct
| this nonsense before I get too old.
| nradov wrote:
| People living in communist cultures also looked to do the
| minimal effort. Sometimes less than minimal if they could
| get away with it. Human nature.
| cascom wrote:
| I agree totally agree on both points. I also think though
| there is an opacity element, If you can't see/will know
| if these service providers did a good "quality" job
| corners are habitually cut.
|
| E.g. if I have a new button that's been sewn on a jacket,
| or have my house painted, I can easily see if the right
| button was used, or if spots were missed while painting.
| However if I take my car in for an oil change, I don't
| really know if the right grade of oil and an OEM filter
| was used, nor do I really care to recheck my accountants
| work on my taxes (as long is it roughly pencils to what I
| expected).
| tnzm wrote:
| Well put.
|
| Personal story: moved into a EU country and tried to
| import my car tax-free as personal property. Went to a
| customs agency because apparently you don't talk to
| customs directly, you go through one of those. They had
| me collect all sorts of documents, which took me months
| before it became evident that this type of car cannot be
| imported tax-free in the first place.
|
| The stress from expecting people to take their
| responsibilities seriously has cost me many meaningful
| interpersonal relationships, not to mention innumerable
| brain cells. On the other hand, the work to achieve more
| self-sufficiency is alienating in its own right, and,
| depending on starting conditions, can twist a person into
| an unlikable mess.
|
| It's vicious cycles all the way down.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Well put. When you become medium-level at all areas where
| you like tinkering, it's hard not to get bitter about
| people who aren't doing it correctly for you...
| Dove wrote:
| It's true with software, too. Unless you _are_ a
| programmer, it 's impossible to tell if your programmers
| are doing a good job.
|
| Information asymmetry is a real problem, particularly
| when people are selling information.
| tchaffee wrote:
| If you're spending that much time doing all those things
| then maybe truly expert help is just expensive rather
| than too expensive.
|
| There is no doubt though that people do better work when
| supervised and knowing what questions to ask an expert
| helps sets expectations about what level of work you will
| settle for.
| the-dude wrote:
| I agree with sentiment, and I discovered early on in my
| adult life :
|
| _Iedereen doet maar wat_ ( Dutch )
|
| Loosely translated : _Everybody just fucks around_ ,
| wether it is car mechanics, doctors or laywers.
|
| Would love to hear a more canonical term for the
| phenomenon.
|
| edit: And if it is absolutely critical it is done right?
| Do it yourself.
| dempseye wrote:
| Is this a common expression in Dutch or something you
| made up yourself?
| the-dude wrote:
| _doet maar wat_ is common.
|
| _Je doet maar wat_ ( You )
|
| _Ze doen maar wat_ ( They )
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| In the US it's usually called "half-assing it" or doing
| it half-assed.
| mih wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why shouldn't one run low voltage wires
| through same holes as AC wires ?
| RubberbandSoul wrote:
| I'm guessing it's because the AC voltage will introduce
| noise on the DC low voltage current.
|
| But like everything else it depends. Is the DC feeding
| something like a lightbulb or a fan? Then it probably
| won't matter.
|
| Does the DC feed something that has a good low pass
| filter or is it an expensive AC cable with good
| shielding? Then it might also not matter.
|
| None of the above should be considered be professional
| advice and it's probably a good rule of thumb to never
| mix wires like that.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If you run, say, the telephone wires through the same
| holes, they'll pick up a maddening 60 Hz hummmmmmmmmmm.
| You're screwed because when this is discovered, the house
| is finished, and it gets very very expensive to rewrite
| it.
|
| The closer the low voltage wires are to the high voltage
| ones, and the longer the distance, the more hmmmmmmm
| they'll pick up.
| lhoff wrote:
| The AC voltage will induce noise onto the low voltage
| wire. That noise can be of a higher voltage then the low
| voltage and damage the equipment behind it.
|
| See also
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_induction
| orbifold wrote:
| That shouldn't happen if the cable is properly shielded,
| no?
| auxym wrote:
| In practice home LV wiring is rarely shielded, maybe with
| CAT6 as an exception. Things like speaker wire,
| doorbells, vacuum control wires, etc are not typically
| shielded.
|
| Also the shield needs a low impedance return path to be
| effective.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Electric fields are easy to shield against with a Faraday
| cage, but magnetic fields are a royal pain. You can use
| mu-metal shielding, but that's rather expensive and only
| reduces the magnetic field. Technically, if you wanted to
| entirely shield from magnetic fields, you'd need to
| surround the wire with a superconductor, but that
| requires liquid nitrogen/helium cooling that is out of
| the scope of most residential work.
| version_five wrote:
| Your observation about gaps in knowledge is true for all
| trades, and is at least conceptually what separates trades
| or job skills training university education.
|
| A good university program teaches very few hard skills, but
| you learn to reason about your field essentially from first
| principles. On the other hand, to do a mechanical job, you
| really need just the job skills, and the connection to
| cause and effect is almost irrelevant.
|
| This is typically why university education is held up as a
| better key to long term career prospects, because of the
| adaptability rather than rote memorization.
|
| In real life I realize it's a lot more messy.
| gumby wrote:
| I built my house with union labor (union shop) and found
| the level of competence higher than was typical with jo the
| random contractor (of course there are exceptions, and for
| some jobs it doesn't matter).
|
| Likewise with the machine shop a few jobs ago: although we
| weren't a union shop, for some jobs we hired contractors in
| for the union members produced better work, especially for
| the safety critical stuff.
|
| I have no experience with unions outside the skilled trades
| -- certainly there are many horror stories.
| pibechorro wrote:
| Every union I interacted with in NYC was a borderline
| scam. Slow, inneficient, overpriced and outright hostile.
| kortilla wrote:
| > built my house with union labor (union shop) and found
| the level of competence higher than was typical with jo
| the random contractor
|
| So you built two homes, one with a well researched union
| labor group and one with a well researched contractor? Or
| is this just some BS elaboration based on comparing
| contractors you hired for small time shit with the big
| house job?
| gumby wrote:
| Excellent epistemic inquiry. I've owned homes for over 30
| years, and have experience with hiring contractors for
| remodels. Also hired non-union contractors to do building
| work on offices over the years. And the company that had
| a machine shop? One of our channels was home construction
| and overall I was not impressed with the kind of work I
| encountered.
|
| But to really get to your question: I started my 3-year
| home construction odyssey with a non-union contractor who
| had to be fired due to poor execution. The replacement
| was a union shop. That's about as much A/B testing as one
| can get.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > However, that book-learnin' fell apart when confronted with
| troubleshooting a strangely wired room, and I got very polite
| while asking him over to bail me out.
|
| This feels very much like the "astronomy/telescope" argument.
| tchaffee wrote:
| Is it a "narrative" that college isn't it worth it anymore or
| is that largely based in fact in the US? Especially when it
| comes to specific degrees that don't have a demand in the
| workplace. The cost of higher education in the US has
| financially crippled millions. And trade jobs pay well for far
| less education costs. Doing a cost / benefit analysis would
| seem the wisest choice.
|
| The bigger problem to me is that with such a high cost for
| university education, our future electricians won't have one.
| Whereas in Europe they very possibly might. I know which
| society I prefer to live in and it's not the one where people
| are less educated.
|
| What narrative about uniform privilege? Can you give some
| sources?
|
| I've also never heard privilege explained as making life "just
| easy". I've heard just for example that life can still be hard
| but your skin color is not one of the things making your life
| hard.
|
| I'd be interested in reading these narratives that are so
| different from the narratives I've read about privilege.
| bluecalm wrote:
| I don't know. I think living in a society where most people
| don't do any meaningful work and are exposed to just
| theoretical academic style education till they are 24-25
| isn't good either. I don't think it's a good use of anyone's
| time to sit in a chair and look at the whiteboard for 15-16
| best years of your life.
| Zababa wrote:
| > Is it a "narrative" that college isn't it worth it anymore
| or is that largely based in fact in the US?
|
| It is. In France college is 400EUR a year.
| kace91 wrote:
| "Narrative" makes it sound like there's nothing behind. The
| extreme cost of college - and living in general, rents/home
| ownership, etc - and the decreasing edge it gives to owners of
| degrees isn't a fabrication by any stretch.
|
| It's easier to think people are being misled than to think
| people are taking different decisions because their reality is
| actually different.
| Arete314159 wrote:
| One guy they profiled is making $20 an hour in Toledo, Ohio. If
| he's working full time, that's 40k a year.
|
| Zillow has a _number_ of houses for sale in Toledo for under
| $40k. Like, they need some work, but a real house, under 40k.
|
| I think that guy is doing fine, he should just keep doing exactly
| what he's doing.
| piker wrote:
| This is only even close to true if this compensation includes a
| significant employer contribution to a health insurance policy
| and/or short term disability coverage. If not, this guy will be
| one broken leg away from a credit card death spiral.
| fukmbas wrote:
| Toledo is a shit hole and good luck buying a car on that
| salary.
| trainsplanes wrote:
| Are the houses in safe neighborhoods? If there are cheap houses
| in a city and nobody's buying, there's a good reason for that.
| Carefully taken pictures online may look okay, but people in
| many cities know to steer clear of specific areas.
|
| And regarding repairs, I've been to houses that have decent
| photos online, but upon entering, they're clearly rotting out.
| It'd be cheaper to knock the house down and start again.
| notesinthefield wrote:
| The houses OP pointed out are not. In fact im certain the
| first one they saw is actually a block away from a spot where
| regular shootings happen.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| There are plenty of decent houses in safe areas across the
| Midwest for $50-100k.
| throwcommonsns wrote:
| There's this unfortunately prevailing attitude that you aren't
| successful in America if you aren't living in New York or San
| Francisco. It's absolutely bonkers. There are many other great
| places in this country besides those two cities.
| Aunche wrote:
| These days, it's not enough to live in a world-class city,
| you _need_ to have your own kitchen, living room, and
| bathroom that barely get used. The people I know who complain
| about high cost of living refuse to live with other people.
| ausbah wrote:
| I think the issue is more when people are still having
| roommates when they're in their 30s and older. it's hard to
| have families when you still can only a afford a bedroom,
| driven mostly by debt and low wages if I had to guess
| humanrebar wrote:
| That works great until you get married and start a family.
|
| I mean, in theory there could be acceptable ways to let a
| couple with babies have roommates. But the design problems
| alone seem too complicated to attempt, let alone the
| cultural problems.
|
| Also, keep in mind that a young couple with kids might have
| only one income earner. And that couple is in the same
| apartment hunt with singles willing to share multi-tenant
| residences. Sometimes three or four of them!
|
| Point being, "get roommates" doesn't scale over time or
| over the entire population.
| Gollapalli wrote:
| God forbid you have your own place like the last three
| generations before you!
|
| No, just rent and share like a college student your whole
| life. That makes sense.
| Aunche wrote:
| Everyone has to make trade offs. You want to live in the
| cultural capital of the world or place where the average
| income is over six figures, but everyone else does as
| well. There's limited space in these cities, so you need
| to bid top dollar if you want to keep a place for
| yourself.
| Gollapalli wrote:
| Sorry man, I just don't buy it. Expensive housing is a
| solveable problem. Six figures isn't that much when
| you're still spending half your paycheck on rent.
|
| As for the cultural capital of the world? New York used
| to have a thriving art scene when it was cheap to live
| in. Now it just has an expensive art scene.
| Aunche wrote:
| I agree that housing policy is broken and has a lot of
| room for improvement. There's no way around supply and
| demand though. At best you'll have a situation like
| Singapore where housing is expensive, but still
| attainable.
| Arainach wrote:
| If you can make NYC/SF money and save/invest a portion of
| your income, you can retire and do significantly better
| elsewhere. You can't do the opposite.
|
| If you can have a decent lifestyle in Ohio on 40k (big if,
| when you factor in retirement planning) you can still
| fundamentally never leave Ohio.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| > you can still fundamentally never leave Ohio.
|
| God forbid. Think of all the _experiences_ you and your
| family will miss out on!
|
| Lately all I want is to get as far away from people as
| possible. The internet has negated every advantage of these
| regions and of money broadly. You cannot buy a nuclear
| family.
| blululu wrote:
| The risk of being tied to a small corner of the country
| is real and something any Ohioan ought to be sensitive
| to. Most of Ohio has suffered 50 years of economic back
| sliding. A lot of people thought that they had realized
| their modest and reasonable middle class dreams of a good
| quiet life doing honest work. Major structural changes
| compromised all of that and a lot of people were stuck
| holding the bag in places like Toledo, Akron, Youngstown.
| (Not trying to pick on Ohio, just making a point about
| risk (though Toledo is the least nice corner of the state
| and they would have been better of foisting it off on
| Michigan back when they had the chance))
| throwcommonsns wrote:
| > they would have been better of foisting it off on
| Michigan back when they had the chance
|
| This snide irrelevant addition makes it look like you are
| indeed picking on Ohio...
|
| My overall argument also includes other fine places such
| as Pittsburgh, Houston, and Cleveland (also in Ohio).
| adamrezich wrote:
| also, and this is personal taste of course, it can get to
| be pretty soul-crushing working with and being around
| mostly people that don't value a nuclear family, when you
| yourself do. this was a major reason for moving away from
| the video game industry and greater Seattle area and
| returning home to South Dakota a few years ago. it took a
| lot of mental and emotional effort to kill the lifelong
| dream I worked toward since elementary school (I turned
| 30 this year) and "settle for" a local government
| programmer job... but so far it's been 10000% worth it,
| I'm much happier than I've ever been, I'm going to start
| a family very soon, and I'm surrounded by people who have
| the same core values as I do. nobody in the greater
| Seattle area wanted to hire a white male with no degree
| but a frankly ridiculous amount of self-driven personal
| project experience (plus some team project experience
| from a few contract positions and an unfinished (stopped
| halfway when the college fund ran out--best decision of
| my life) degree) in the fields of game and web
| development, but my hometown was overjoyed to get someone
| exactly like myself to write SQL and learn all the ins
| and outs of the public education system and how it
| interfaces with state and federal requirements. it's not
| my first choice of work by a longshot but without having
| money to either finish a degree (like all my friends did)
| or make my own gamedev startup (in an increasingly
| flooded market to the point of ridiculousness), I've
| finally found happiness, and, more importantly, a very
| direct path to achieving the _actual_ lifelong goal I
| kind of always had but never knew it: starting a family.
| like you said, you can 't put a price on something like
| that.
|
| my best friend had a complicated career trajectory that
| began with a music education degree, until he found out
| he hated teaching music to middle schoolers, then he
| decided to get a two-year online CS degree. this put him
| in a fair bit of debt as he comes from a very poor
| upbringing. he got married and moved to the D.C. area a
| couple years ago to work for a CRM shop there and while
| he loves the work, he hates the crime and bullshit of the
| Big City Life, and while he and his wife have gone from
| enjoying it to tolerating it, they're moving back here to
| South Dakota at the end of this year before they have
| children.
|
| I wonder if, going forward, with the advent of remote
| work and the like, we're going to see less and less
| people who come from rural/suburban/otherwise
| sub-100k-population cities choosing to either move back
| to areas like those they grew up in (if not where they
| grew up specifically) instead of migrating to The Big
| City to Make It Big, for these exact reasons. there just
| doesn't seem to be much to gain from moving to The Big
| City anymore, if starting a family is your ultimate goal
| in life.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > don't value a nuclear family, when you yourself do
|
| When you say you value a 'nuclear family', instead of
| just 'family', the distinction means things like 'I do
| not want my parents to have more than a minimal role in
| their grandchildren's lives' and 'my siblings and their
| children are to be kept separate from my children'.
| That's what the 'nuclear' part means!
|
| Mom died and now Dad's dropping hints about moving into
| your furnished basement? Sorry, we're a nuclear family.
| Going halves with your sister on a duplex with her and
| her family living next to you and yours so all the
| cousins can grow up together? Absolutely not nuclear.
| hobbleabbas wrote:
| On the contrary - I'm not sure of the exact definition,
| but the meaning of a nuclear family, at least to me, has
| morphed into a traditional family structure with an at
| home mother and working father.
|
| If anything, a structure like this would facilitate and
| encourage visits from and to relatives. Seems like a much
| nicer life than a situation where both parents work.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| The internet has not negated every advantage of regions,
| unfortunately (Employers are still making folks come to
| the office) and it still costs money to move elsewhere.
|
| Folks in Ohio still have trouble leaving Ohio.
|
| And you _can_ , to an extent, buy a nuclear family. Mail
| order brides still exist (and the arrangement can be
| beneficial for both parties). You can do this with the
| expectation of children, which you will pay for in the
| US. Alternatively, you can check adoption as plenty of
| agencies will make you feel like you are buying a child.
| (20k upwards, plus travel).
| Arainach wrote:
| >God forbid. Think of all the experiences you and your
| family will miss out on!
|
| This is a snide remark, but it is absolutely a factor. I
| grew up in Michigan, and the number of people who never
| venture beyond their almost-entirely-white small town to
| see what other communities and cultures are like is a
| huge contributing factor to the amount of prejudice and
| judgmental nature that makes me never want to move back.
|
| Seeing people different from you and different places is
| broadening and gives you a much better perspective to be
| able to understand the world. This is important in life
| as well as in your career.
| silverpepsi wrote:
| Assuming the rest of the world doesn't exist, though. Can't
| honestly say I'm targeting having more retirement money
| than needed to get by in some combination of Ukraine,
| Thailand, and Colombia.
|
| Major life regret? Thinking other countries didn't exist
| when I was at the age to enter college and taking on
| massive loans to pay exorbitant US tuition for a school
| that wasn't anything special when I could have found
| overseas options at a fraction of the cost.
| [deleted]
| OJFord wrote:
| Until the city grows to encapsulate your neighbourhood, and
| you find yourself a 'boomer' who was so lucky to be able
| buy a house for 40k, whose children 'never will'?
| [deleted]
| zarkov99 wrote:
| The great reshuffling that is happening in front on our eyes
| might very well push those not in the cognitive elite away
| from all those great places as well. I am seeing it happen
| around my area, where housing costs have shot up by 20% in
| one year, mostly driven by out of state arrivals. I see it in
| our own family's economic status which has improved several
| fold, thanks to the remote opportunities brought about by the
| pandemic. Maybe this is good, maybe it is bad, but there is a
| profound change coming.
| hattmall wrote:
| Those aren't even that great of places so I think it's pretty
| regional on thinking that. But definitely there's an attitude
| of needing to be in a major city to be successful and it's
| not entirely false. The big difference is major urban area vs
| not.
|
| Sure, NYC/SF are super expensive, but almost every urban area
| is when compared to other smaller cities or rural areas.
|
| The issue is that for a lot of people they can only find an
| ok job in the major urban area, but it's not enough to live
| there so they get stuck in the suburban wastelands with 45+
| minute drives just to go work 8 hours.
|
| They make enough to get by, but not enough to save and move
| out to a more desirable living situation in a smaller city or
| rural area without a secure job lined up.
|
| Like $20 an hour is good in Toledo, but it's probably not
| what most people are making. That's probably a job you have
| to work up to for years. At $20 an hour in Toledo you very
| likely can have a higher quality of life then people making
| far more in the much larger metro areas. But at $10 an hour
| ($8.80/$7.25) in Toledo area you're probably worse off due to
| a lack of public support and opportunities for advancement.
| notesinthefield wrote:
| Before I left Toledo (grew up there), I made about $18
| driving busses with a lot of of overtime. Its not a
| terribly difficult place to make a living right up to the
| state median but almost everyone with potential leaves or
| works out of the city, simply because professional industry
| is incredibly lackluster.
|
| This is beside your point but HN is such a coastal bubble
| that I always feel the need to chime in with perspective
| when someone mentions my hometown.
| throwcommonsns wrote:
| I know people in the Bay Area who spent two or three hours
| a day commuting before moving back out to the mid-west
| again for remote work. This is a typical commute from SF to
| Mountain View, for example.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| > There's this unfortunately prevailing attitude that you
| aren't successful in America if you aren't living in New York
| or San Francisco.
|
| Even more unfortunate is the widespread acceptance of the
| idea that you need to be successful to be happy/fulfilled.
| dreen wrote:
| If you make anything a product you better make sure it is worth
| the money you are asking for it.
|
| Clearly, this is not the case with paid education in US, UK and
| some other developed countries.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| A lot of people in the comments here are spinning it as if boys
| are being systematically discriminated against when the article
| explicitly says the opposite:
|
| >>> "Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely," said
| Jennifer Delahunty, a college enrollment consultant
|
| And many aren't even putting in the proper diligence:
|
| >>> "Ms. Gereghty said she found that girls more closely attended
| to their college applications than boys, for instance making sure
| transcripts are delivered."
| Aerroon wrote:
| The issue isn't that college acceptance is discriminating
| against boys, it's that boys aren't as interested in education.
| The aftermath of this won't be felt for a while, but it does
| indicate some shift in society. Some of them might even view
| college as a hostile place.
| adolph wrote:
| Cue article in about ten to fifteen years saying women have a
| wealth gap because they waste a significant portion of a decade
| pursuing and not completing degrees that lead to productive
| careers.
| jsnider3 wrote:
| Did WSJ change their paywall again? I can't get around it.
| bawana wrote:
| Maybe we could have once justified the premium charged by US
| universities. But now you can get excellent education in most of
| the world FOR FREE. To see how this impacts our jobs at home,
| just look at the healthcare field. Most new physicians are
| imported from abroad. They can work for less because they do not
| have massive loans to repay.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Unless you're going to be a Professional Engineer or some other
| licensed individual, or you're getting a free ride, college isn't
| worth it any more.
|
| Going deep into debt for a credential that doesn't have a
| reasonably large future value is a huge mistake many are pushed
| into making.
| gscott wrote:
| Many positions require a degree to apply for them unless if
| your working for yourself or a very small business.
| pwthornton wrote:
| This is just not borne out by the data. The gap between high
| school grads and college grads pay is getting wider and wider.
|
| You shouldn't go to college if you aren't going to be a serious
| student and you'll be a legitimate risk for dropping out. But
| if you are willing to commit yourself and get decent grades,
| you'll be in much better shape than most people with just a
| high school diploma.
|
| Your advice is also sounds really out of touch with what
| various jobs pay. The average new college grad makes like 60k
| or so.
|
| I can only speak to my workplace and team, but we pay product
| designers with very little experience around 90k a year. I have
| no licenses and am not a professional engineer, and I make
| several times that.
|
| The issue is that far too many people are going into debt for
| college degrees and not getting the degrees. That's the
| biggest. The secondary issue is that college is becoming more
| and more expensive, but it is still paying off for the majority
| of bachelor degree holders.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| I went to college and I wasn't a "serious" student. Went on a
| half scholarship, got pretty good grades (most of the time),
| and majored in CS.
|
| Took on around 50k at around 5% interest. Wouldn't change a
| thing in the world about it. Easily paid it off over a few
| years.
| hattmall wrote:
| You make several times 90k?? So like how much? Several has to
| be at least 3 right, so $300k+?
|
| What degree do you have??
| trzy wrote:
| Software engineers with ~5 years of experience (and
| probably less) can earn $300k-$400k annually in the Bay
| Area or New York if working for a large tech company.
| ogwh wrote:
| This is a tiny fraction of software engineers. The vast
| majority in the wider Western world earn less than an
| average tradesman. The higher end of salaries in the UK
| is PS40-50k, most earning substantially less than that.
|
| The much higher salaries paid by the major US companies
| are so anomalous that they may as well be discarded in
| any comparisons.
| jen20 wrote:
| The higher end in London is substantially more than that
| across banking, insurance and foreign tech companies and
| contracting day rates were really rather good. Admittedly
| I've been out of the U.K. for long enough to see what
| impact Brexit has had, especially on contracting day
| rates.
|
| Still nothing like the US though, and the cost of living
| is not much different than New York City IME.
| imtringued wrote:
| No it is the international investor effect. People do not
| invest locally. The money goes to a few proven places
| rather than circulating throughout the entire country.
|
| You can call the investors kings and the workers are
| chasing the kings money.
| pwthornton wrote:
| While most software engineers in the U.S. don't make
| 300-400k, you will make above 100k pretty quickly. You
| can make 150k-ish total comp at tons of places in the
| United States. These places will usually offer very good
| benefits too.
| pwthornton wrote:
| Human-computer interaction. I'm not in my 20s, and I'm not
| an individual contributor, so that skews my pay, but I also
| don't think I've come close to my ceiling yet.
| notfromhere wrote:
| There are plenty of degrees that are worth the effort. This
| idea that college doesn't have a justifiable return seems to be
| pushed by people who already have degrees.
|
| Engineering or bust just isn't true.
| otoburb wrote:
| According to the article women still believe the trade-off to
| be worth paying for and attending college since their
| application numbers are still holding steady.
|
| Are most of them making a huge mistake? I guess it depends
| heavily in the credential(s), but I think there has to be a
| deeper reason for falling and unbalanced undergraduate
| enrollment amongst men.
| david38 wrote:
| Women are known to chase institutional accolades more than
| men when given the opportunity. It is in line with a general
| preference for more security.
|
| Will it work today? Probably. There are few women in the
| trades. If you can get a cheap degree, it is likely better
| than no degree.
| watwut wrote:
| I always assumed no one give me benefit of doubt if I don't
| have something actually in hand. Which meant for me, I
| would expect the degree to be necessary for me to get the
| first job.
| petre wrote:
| No, women are generally underpaid compared to men, so it's
| obvious that they'll try to get the appropriate degrees in
| order to be able to compete.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Women don't earn less for the same work. Never married
| women with no kids actually out earn never married men
| with no kids.
|
| Please read "why men earn more" by Warren Farrell or skim
| the table of contents for a list of some of the factors
| that influence earnings, such as working longer hours, in
| a different field, in unpleasant conditions, etc.
| tootahe45 wrote:
| Anecdotal but I've noticed that for a lot of women, achieving
| the degree seems to be the end goal and status symbol, while
| for men the degree is just a path to better financial
| outcomes. If the calculation for the latter has changed to
| where degree is no longer worth it compared to alternatives,
| that could explain it.
| mikewarot wrote:
| All Ponzi schemes collapse, the growth colleges experienced
| in the past led them to be overly optimistic and make
| promises they can no longer meet. The falling debris from the
| collapse is already happening, as the wave of unbreakable and
| unpayable student debt imprisons a generation.
| elil17 wrote:
| I'm not sure why you focus on the PE licensure - the vast
| majority of working engineers do not need this (but do need a
| college degree).
| mikewarot wrote:
| In many places, If you're not licensed, you can't call
| yourself an engineer.
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| Boilerplate job/career options for young men thinking about
| attending vs not attending college...
|
| 1) Enlist in the military. pay is sub-par, but your living
| expenses are well taken care of. picking a job that has a
| civilian equivalent is clutch here.. eg combat medic,
| electrician, plumber, various IT-related fields.
|
| 2) Skilled trades - eg plumber, electrician, HVAC-related. These
| pay from 50k to 150k depending on what type of work you do. The
| "high end" for example being a new-construction electrician,
| working for themselves, making $75/hr with overtime. All these
| fields have high job security - plumbing, electricity, and HVAC
| are not a 'fad', and are likely to increase in demand over time.
|
| 3) Own a "low tech" business, the sort you might already work for
| if you are a teenager. Eg...landscaping. You can make $15/hr
| running a weed eater, or with a small investment and some people
| skills - you can pay other people $15/hr to run a weed eater, and
| you run the business. This is more difficult than it seems on the
| surface (management and people skills), but it is not something
| you need a college education to succeed at.
|
| 4) Specialty/niche fields...these are more difficult to break
| into if you don't know someone already. Some examples are
| mosquito spraying(for a city), [water] well digging, or roadside
| assistance for a larger contract(like cell phone roadside
| assistance, AAA, or dealer contracts). These are easier to break
| into if you already know someone who owns that type of business,
| who will show you the ropes so you know what you are getting
| into.
|
| This isn't an exhaustive list by any means, but hopefully someone
| finds it stimulating enough to come up with some ideas about work
| options that do not involve a mountain of student debt.
| torstenvl wrote:
| https://archive.is/7NeJl
| jsnider3 wrote:
| Thanks.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I'm one of these men. Of course I chose nor to go at a time when
| the ratio was closer to 1:1. It's one of the best decisions I
| ever made, I stumbled into it and didn't even make a deliberate
| decision, I felt bad about it for a few years. A happy accident I
| guess.
|
| And I've done well for myself. I hear college graduates earn more
| over their lifetimes but anecdotally I don't see it. Financially
| I'm doing better than almost every person I know that went, the
| vast majority of my peers who went have a negative net worth due
| to student debt and own no property, so the bar is low, but I'm
| doing fantastic. I think the truth is, when credentials aren't
| rare, how well you do is more based on your mind and some quality
| you have than on credentials.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of studies seem to report on average income of
| graduates with various degrees compared to those who didn't
| finish university, but don't account for socioeconomic status.
|
| I'd be curious what the numbers looked like when controlling
| for all the other variables which influence someone's income.
| blippage wrote:
| Brit here, in my 50's. Everyone should - or ought - to receive a
| good general level of education at GCSEs (i.e. 14/15 year old).
| Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, English, etc.. You'll know a
| fair bit about these subjects if you study for them in school.
| Very few people actually "need" training beyond that; although I
| would of course expect my doctor to know rather more than what's
| in a biology GCSE.
|
| My former boss of the department learned enough chemistry through
| self-study. I heard Raspberry Pi was hiring guys to work as
| microchip design with little prior exposure.
|
| In my worldview, everyone gets their GCSEs and goes and gets a
| job. OR, they follow a trade route, and attend a technical
| college (in the UK meaning of the word) to learn a skill. OR, the
| really brainy ones take an academic route, get their A levels,
| then head off to university to become part of the intellectual
| elite. I'm thinking 5% of the population here. OR, you get your A
| levels and then go into a polytechnic for a highly-skilled
| vocational job.
|
| Polytechnics don't really exist anymore, they've all converted to
| universities.
|
| Basically, we should all just return to an educational system
| that we had in the 70's. It was a system that wasn't broken, but
| we decided to "fix" it anyway.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| It's basically hidden increase in standard of living - people
| used to join workforce at 18-19, now they do it a couple years
| later, after getting their degree. It means a couple years less
| of work and a couple more years of fun/partying. In the few
| countries (US, UK, anything else?) where Universities aren't
| nearly free, that's kind of a deal with the Devil (as J.
| Peterson called it), but everywhere else it's basically a free
| improvement in quality of life.
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| The proliferation of video games, especially online ones could
| also be a reason (besides the cost-benefit of attending college
| that is declining which other people already mentioned)
| rayiner wrote:
| My younger brother in law is in college at a flagship state
| school. He's doing it to check the box and show he can maintain a
| good gpa. But it's unclear to me what the point is outside
| helping employers screen potential candidates.
| alexitorg wrote:
| I figured that this was more of less rational. In Australia, men
| have more options for decent traditional jobs without a degree.
| Construction, Manufacture, Mining, Agriculture, fisheries,
| warehousing, transport, utilities are all male dominated sectors,
| mostly not requiring a degree. Retail, food and accommodation
| services only just skew female. The big area where women are
| employed in much greater numbers than men is nursing/social work
| and teaching. All of which are increasingly becoming bachelor
| degrees. Historically these didn't require a bachelor's degree,
| just one year diploma or a two year or certificate. There is a
| trend for these work forces to become more qualified, take more
| responsibility and get paid more. Industry stats:
| https://lmip.gov.au/default.aspx?LMIP/LFR_SAFOUR/LFR_Industr...
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This is because in our society, it's more acceptable for men to
| drop out and get into some skilled trade, like plumbing or
| climbing telephone poles. People just won't accept that women can
| also do that. So there's a lot of pressure to make sure your
| female children go to college and get a degree.
| pharmakom wrote:
| It's actually the safety / creepiness risk of having to work in
| people's homes.
| spaceflunky wrote:
| > like plumbing or climbing telephone poles. People just won't
| accept that women can also do that.
|
| You sure about that? Or is it that the majority of women don't
| see themselves unclogging toilets for a living? I have never
| seen it, but I would suspect list of female applications to
| plumbing or electrician school is very very short.
| temp10298385 wrote:
| I do not necessarily agree with the original post's statement
| but this response seems confused to me.
|
| Few female applicants to trade schools is consistent with the
| original statement. If it is societally unacceptable for a
| woman to be a plumber then I would expect women to act as any
| rational agent and factor this in when planning their future
| career.
| spaceflunky wrote:
| You're just infantilizing women by blaming every outcome on
| "society". I fully believe women are capable of making
| their own decisions and there's no "cabal of men" holding
| them back from unclogging toilets.
| temp10298385 wrote:
| I would argue that I'm neither infantilizing women nor
| blaming every outcome on society. I never mentioned a
| cabal of men. It seems you are reading in many themes
| that are not present in my comment.
|
| I believe that norms shape behaviour, that is the extent
| of my claim.
| adamrezich wrote:
| "societal unacceptability" is only one factor. personal
| choice is another. there's no reason to assume that gender
| disparities in a given field or trade are solely the result
| of the existence of the former.
| temp10298385 wrote:
| I'm in agreement here.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| It's socially unacceptable for a lot of men to be in trades
| as well, especially if you factor in family background. Let
| me know what school promotes trades as a good alternative
| to traditional education? It's almost always looked at as
| the options for "stupid" people. I don't think your
| anecdote holds up at all. It seems fare more likely that
| women in general just do not want physical labor jobs.
| temp10298385 wrote:
| I don't know what anecdote you are referring to, I did
| not mention one. I did not even make a statement of
| agreement or disagreement with the original comment. I
| just pointed out that I did not see a logical
| inconsistency.
|
| As for your claim that higher class males avoid trades:
| yes of course. That is actually a great example of what I
| mean. People factor in social norms in their decision
| making, be it male or female.
| watwut wrote:
| You are sort of skimming over actual need for actual physical
| strength in those field. But yes, these are assumed to be
| boys occupation - including when presented to children.
|
| But like, given they require physical strength, it is hard to
| make a big deal about it.
| chuckee wrote:
| I see. And there's no non-college educated professions where
| women are prevalent? It's plumbing or bust?
|
| Of course clearly when women were under-represented in college,
| that was due to misogyny. And now that they are over-
| represented, it's also due to misogyny. No matter what the
| facts are, the conclusion is the same.
|
| There's a word for that.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Good luck getting anyone on hn to consider that just maybe
| colleges being often openly hoatile towards men might drive
| them elsewhere
| mrbadideas wrote:
| Systemic misogyny?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Do you think that when women were under-represented it was
| because they were plumbers or climbing telephone poles?
| Because that's the only way your suggestion makes sense.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| They weren't working at all.
| watwut wrote:
| That is not actually true. The all women are stay at home
| thing was never true. Society always had women who
| worked, because they are unmarried, husband is alcoholic,
| husband died, husband does not earn all that much.
| frankbreetz wrote:
| I am having trouble coming up with a single high paying, no
| degree required job that is majority female. Please let me
| know if I am missing some.
| sumgocko wrote:
| Pornstar :)
| inkblotuniverse wrote:
| Really just a specialist type of plumber
| babesh wrote:
| OnlyFans, models, successful real estate agents, certain
| categories of social influencers
| chuckee wrote:
| It does not need to be majority female - I'd say 30% female
| is more than enough to consider a job being accepting of
| women. But okay:
|
| "The average Plumber salary in the United States is
| $58,659" -
| https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/plumber-
| sal...
|
| "The national average salary for Human Resources is $65,314
| per year in United States." -
| https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/human-resources-salary-
| SR...
|
| "Forbes cited HR Manager as a "best paying job for women"
| in 2011, with over 70 percent of the profession dominated
| by females." -
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2012/07/11/why-human-
| res...
|
| "At the administrative level, 30 percent of human resources
| assistants had an associate degree as of 2013, 26 percent
| had a high school diploma and 21 percent had at least one
| year of college experience" -
| https://work.chron.com/education-requirements-human-
| resource...
| pwthornton wrote:
| Does the average HR manager not have a college degree?
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| Do you have any evidence for this implausible sounding claim
| that you're passing off as fact?
| CountDrewku wrote:
| >People just won't accept that women can also do that.
|
| Most women just don't want to do that. I don't think it has
| much to do with acceptance. Women that want to become plumbers
| are few an far between.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I suspect it also has something to do with the vast majority
| of women having weaker wrists/forearms than men.
| pwthornton wrote:
| People have to keep in mind that the trades have generally been
| pretty sexist and not all that professionally run. I would not
| want my daughters to go into most trades because of this.
|
| It's a lot easier for men to find a decent paying job that
| doesn't require a college degree and where you won't get
| regularly harassed.
| _Nat_ wrote:
| That's an interesting figure they've got!
|
| Observations (based on the figure alone):
|
| 1. White-Males had the lowest college-enrollment-rates across all
| categories. They got the lowest in the two lowest income-
| brackets; basically a three-way tie in the next income-bracket;
| and just a little higher than Hispanic-Males in the highest
| income-bracket.
|
| 2. Asians had the highest enrollment-rates across all income-
| brackets.
|
| 3. Asians were relatively constant in their enrollment-rates,
| regardless of income or gender, always above 70%. (Always above
| ~83%, if excluding the lowest income-bracket.) The gender-gap
| still leaned toward Asian-Females over Asian-Males, but not by
| much.
|
| 4. Blacks varied heavily by income. Blacks had pretty low
| enrollment-rates in the lowest income-bracket, but got some of
| the highest enrollment-rates in the higher income-brackets (after
| Asians).
|
| 5. Black-Females had an odd pattern-deviation: like Black-Males,
| their enrollment-rates increased dramatically with family-income,
| getting the highest non-Asian enrollment-rate by the second-
| highest income-bracket. But then, oddly, their enrollment-rate
| fell by ~8% from the second-highest to the highest income-
| bracket.
|
| 6. Hispanics were pretty consistent with Whites, especially for
| Males. For Females, Whites had higher rates in the lowest income-
| bracket, while Hispanics had somewhat higher rates in all other
| income-brackets.
|
| 7. Ignoring race, enrollment-rates increased significantly with
| family-income.
|
| 8. Ignoring race, enrollment-rates were much higher for Females
| than Males across all income-brackets.
| nabla9 wrote:
| What is missing is dividing all that by field of study. When
| white males give up college, what exactly do they give up?
|
| https://scholar.harvard.edu/goldin/publications/homecoming-a...
|
| >Once barriers to female careers were lowered and their access
| to higher education was expanded, two key factors may have
| played a role in the female college advantage: relatively
| greater economic benefits of college for females and relatively
| higher effort costs of college going and prepara- tion for
| males. (girls exceeded boys in secondary school performance and
| attainment)
| babesh wrote:
| The same is occurring in some Scandinavian countries.
| paulcole wrote:
| There's no idea that rich white people love to push more than the
| idea that college is unnecessary (yet nearly all of them went to
| college and you won't find their kids going to trade school).
|
| It's part gatekeeping and part wishful thinking.
| teekert wrote:
| I can understand this. I think my parents never questioned the
| usefulness of a formal education. But I am starting to.
|
| My brother tried several different educational paths, pushed by
| my parents. In the end he got a sort of burnout. After years now
| he is picking up some work, mainly helping elderly still living
| alone on any tasks (from computer related to doing groceries). He
| seems happy, finally.
|
| My other brother hated all his schools, got bullied a lot, he
| specialized in agriculture in the end. Now he's a truck driver
| (with one of those super big ones), he likes it. He can still
| give nice advice on what to plant in my garden, so there's that.
|
| I see that my son is also really interested in many things, but
| school is not so much "his thing". Sitting still, listening, it's
| not making him happy. If he has any aspiration of building a life
| without formal schooling I'd support it. There is so much to
| learn online. He can be an entrepreneur and we can help him get
| there. In fact, I'd enjoy it.
|
| Who knows with the insane cost of education, this generation of
| men may end up self-taught, happy and (in the US important) debt
| free. Maybe we should worry about the people missing out on this
| opportunity?
| prawn wrote:
| The article made mention of what the example males were doing
| and what they were earning. There was mention of the average
| graduate's earnings vs non-graduate, but otherwise they're
| judging a person skipping a first year of college while they
| would otherwise have been _spending_ money in the equivalent
| year. As you and others have implied, these individuals could
| earn, buy modest property in a quiet state /town, then live a
| decent life debt free - there are far worse things to achieve.
|
| My brother was a professional basketball player up until his
| mid-30s. I remember when he was about the same age as the males
| of the story, he was deciding between a four-year scholarship
| at an American college, or a four-year contract in the
| Australian professional league. The pitch from the college was
| that he could return to Australia in year five and earn x. The
| pitch from the local team was that he could earn x by year
| five, but have been earning for each of the first four years;
| the pro team offered university payments, car, and so on. Pros
| and cons either way.
|
| He eventually got his degree studying remotely in the later
| years of his basketball career and transitioned to a desk job.
| There's always a sense of what might've been, but I think
| things worked out well enough.
| [deleted]
| dqpb wrote:
| There is a small window of opportunity here to replace these
| institutes with something better before our society goes into
| full auto-immune disorder.
| gigatexal wrote:
| More folks should be given the option for vocational training in
| blue collar roles that pay really really well. Ever had a decent
| electrician or plumber come to your house to fix something? They
| make bank/hr. Or even a welder or carpenter etc etc not the whole
| world needs to be tech service workers, the economy is more
| nuanced than that.
|
| But social stigma stemms from everything from dating to parents
| to friends etc if one does not complete a 4-year degree.
|
| Most tech firms are lifitng the requirement for such a degree as
| in tech if you can do the work you can do the work and can (I'd
| say should) be hired. (In a sense, most coding/programming work
| is blue collar in that sense -- you don't need rocket science to
| center a div ;)
| notfromhere wrote:
| There's a lot of anti-intellectualism that floats around in male
| culture, and a pernicious attitude that you can make it without a
| degree (despite the reality that a lack of credentials locks you
| out of most high paying or leadership roles).
|
| Tech likes to pretend credentials don't matter, but that's
| entirely not true.
|
| Not surprising that enrollment is down when too many men think
| learning things is for nerds.
|
| Source: am an American male
| noduerme wrote:
| I didn't go to college, and I'm one of the techs you're
| referring to. But techs also think on-job experience and self-
| motivated projects are equivalent to or better than college,
| and both of those are necessary.
|
| There are tons of high paying jobs available to people who
| learn trades, either in trade schools or on the job. Much of
| tech is like a trade - as a software engineer, I certainly have
| more in common with a car mechanic working on custom builds
| than I do with an accountant, lawyer, doctor or CEO. A lot of
| Americans were sold the false idea that college would help them
| know what they wanted to do, and make money. But it's not a
| magic beansprout you just ride up to the heights of society...
| definitely not when everyone else is doing it and everyone else
| is in debt. You have to actually be motivated. And if you're
| motivated... well it's kike George Carlin said about self help
| books: You went to the bookstore to go find a self help book,
| you're motivated, what do you need the book for?
| [deleted]
| happythen wrote:
| I don't have a degree and am from US as well. In most my jobs,
| I am usually the only one without it. In Europe, it's even more
| rare, (majority of colleagues have PhDs). When people find out
| I am not educated, they are not happy about it, initially.
|
| People can be really mean, especially when you aren't "smart".
| I had to read a lot about a lot of things just so I could go to
| lunch and participate in the chatter with coworkers.
|
| But, not getting a degree never blocked me from getting great
| money or any position, I just had to work hard for it, always
| had to prove myself, earn trust. It's life on hard mode for
| sure, but not a blocker.
| SixDouble5321 wrote:
| No degree-having, white, American male with software job
| reporting in.
| throwcommonsns wrote:
| Even people with degrees are locked out of those high paying or
| leadership roles. Meanwhile, others can make it just fine by
| learning a trade. As a junior engineer, I was making the same
| amount as my degree less counterparts working in the oil
| industry were.
| known wrote:
| College may not be leading to
| http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/maslow/
| draw_down wrote:
| I'm sure we'll be hearing about the injustice of this gender
| imbalance any day now.......
| [deleted]
| albntomat0 wrote:
| "Over the course of their working lives, American college
| graduates earn more than a million dollars beyond those with only
| a high-school diploma, and a university diploma is required for
| many jobs as well as most professions, technical work and
| positions of influence."
|
| From the article.
|
| There are folks getting useless degrees and/or taking on too much
| debt, but getting a college degree on the whole is worthwhile.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Far too many variables to draw any clear conclusions, in my
| opinion. Have there been any of these studies that show the
| effect holding constant when controlling for high school GPA,
| SAT/ACT, and IQ?
| pwthornton wrote:
| A huge chunk of well paying jobs literally require at least a
| bachelors degree, and you can't submit your SAT scores
| instead.
|
| I think we can say it is in fact causal that on average a
| college degree earns more money than not having one just by
| this fact alone.
| zsmi wrote:
| What is the experiment you're proposing? I didn't follow.
|
| What about just measuring the ROI of the degree?
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/your-money/college-
| degree...
|
| "All of the largest programs in electrical and communications
| engineering, for instance, allowed most of their graduates to
| recoup their educational investment in five years or less.
| But many programs in some fields, like drama and dance, show
| no return on investment, the report found, meaning most of
| their graduates are earning less than a typical high school
| graduate."
|
| So this study more or less backs claim that some degrees
| offer a positive ROI while others do not. As to whether or
| not a given degree is "worthwhile," I'd leave that as an
| exercise for the reader. :)
| tfehring wrote:
| Not the parent commenter but I think they're suggesting
| that the degree may not be the cause of the increase in
| earnings, but rather that the people who get college
| degrees have attributes (e.g. intelligence, work ethic,
| good K12 education, wealthy parents) that would lead them
| to out-earn their peers even without a degree.
|
| To be clear, I don't buy that argument. Obviously those
| factors explain some of the difference, but I think most of
| the highest-paying jobs in STEM and many of the highest-
| paying jobs in other fields (e.g. business/finance) require
| skills that would be hard to reliably obtain without a
| college degree or something similar.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Yes, that was my angle. And while I share your intuition
| to some extent, I maintain that it's difficult to get a
| scientifically sound conclusion without controlling for
| those variables.
|
| Specifically, to refer to an average of $1,000,000 as a
| specific effect size, without controlling for the fact
| that many people with only a high school diploma would
| not earn more even if they had a college degree, seems
| suspect.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Earned* . These statistics should always come with caution that
| past performance does not guarantee future returns.
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