Comment by Teknoman117 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Teknoman117 | Hacker News Reader

I wish I understood the community college path when I went to school - as in get all your GEs and intro courses out of the way then finish at a 4 year university. It’d be a lie to say I hadn’t heard of it, but the high school I went to told all students that taking such a path would damage their career. Most of the trouble I had with college was me being a stupid 18/19 year old, and I wish I’d done in a place that wasn’t so expensive.

Thankfully I got a fantastic job that lets me pay it off rather quickly, but it feels weird to be living more or less paycheck to paycheck working at a tech giant (‘emergency fund’ is mainly not spending any bonus money). I realize I’m damn lucky, and I worked (and still do work) damn hard, but I just can’t help but feel something is a bit wrong with the whole situation.

My parents both went to college, but they were able to leave school, my dad being the only one to get a job of the two of them (at low pay for the time) in the economic recession of the early 90’s, and they managed to pay off their student loans and buy a house within two years of graduating. Yet here I am, nearly 3 years after graduating living paycheck to paycheck with my cat in my little studio apartment.

Part of it is my choice, I didn’t have to elect to pay off my loans in 5 years, could’ve taken a longer note, but I hate being in debt. I hate the concept. Owing more money than I could reasonably produce at any given moment bothers the hell out of me.

The secret no one tells anyone: the name on the piece of paper at the end is all that matters, and even then, 98% of employers really don't give a damn about the school you went to, especially after you get that first post-graduation job.

This seems incredibly hard to shake. Whenever the discussion of affording college comes up I bring up the affordable schools I know of, which I count as anything with less than $10k of tuition and fees a year. The response is usually that you will never get a good job if you attend one of those schools. It's as if somewhere it gets into peoples minds that if you don't spend $40k on tuition a year then your education was worthless.

this has been my experience has well. most of the recruiters that have contacted me have at some point admitted they specifically targeted top 10 schools only

That's because (some) recruiters are lazy. If you came from a top 10, then of course the recruiters calling you would be restricting to that list. That's confirmation bias.

Perhaps if you think success is only working at a FAANG or a unicorn in SF, this may be true, but there's way too many people making great incomes to disprove that.

True. I'm a dropout that's making great income, but not at a FAANG or a unicorn. Honestly i'm tempted to get a job at one of those just to be sure I could do it.

> I wish I understood the community college path when I went to school

Same here. If you can't afford full 4 year tuition, it literally makes 0.0% sense to go to a university for 4 years, when you can go to a CC for 2, work, save some money, blow through your courses then transfer to a university.

If I could do my collegiate career over again this would be my move.

Most of the trouble I had with college was me being a stupid 18/19 year old, and I wish I’d done in a place that wasn’t so expensive.

This is a large part of the problem: it's typically quite difficult or impossible to take on that level of debt without some kind of asset to secure it. And if someone lends that kind of money to someone who cannot make payments, bankruptcy is an alternative.

Student loans can't be discharged through bankruptcy; universities and banks have no skin in the game; students, especially young people, are left holding the bag.

On the other hand, young people don't vote: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/millennial-voters-201... so this basic dynamic may continue indefinitely.

What major/minor did you get? What type of work do you do now? (I'm still envious you can get a degree and hold down a job. I believe I have enough intelligence to learn a lot at a school, but I have a tough time concentrating and dealing with topics past a certain level of abstraction. So I could never finish past the first year and the usual 101 courses.)

I dual majored in computer science and computer engineering.

For me, the latter was far more interesting. I got myself an internship at a large tech company between my junior and senior year of college. Let’s just say it went extremely well. Was offered a job six weeks in. The team dynamic is amazing, basically everyone in the group are friends and hang out outside work as well. Their offer was also fantastic, so it wasn’t a hard choice.

I’m still working there today on their hardware and systems engineering team. We design all of the systems for our products’ backbone, some of which contain custom hardware. I can find myself working on research efforts for future products, contributing to open source projects which we benefit from, working on Linux drivers for custom hardware, working on storage systems, or working on any random application which runs our backbone. It’s never boring.

How is the hardware manufactured? You send the designs and specifications to another company overseas?

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