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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

The education system provides fairly clear and predictable paths to affirmation, success, and a sort of grade based people ranking system.

Life outside that system often very much does not.

Everyone has to come to terms with it at some point.

I can understand how for someone who school makes a strong impression on them it can be a real struggle without what was such a clear and predictable system.

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I have a hypothesis that at least in the US smart people that want to continue with the same sort of “do the work you are assigned and be rewarded” become doctors. There are entrepreneurial paths in medicine but an excellent student that wants to can go from medical school to a residency, followship, and then a hospital position and earn enough to be in the 1% without ever needing to fight for it in the office politics / networking / job hopping sense. There are few or no other professions where that’s true, certainly not any that are so large in terms of numbers.

As someone who is very close to two doctors, I can tell you that networking and elbows matters just about as much as any other career.

Second this, you need to be political to make partner in your practice or move up the ladder to manager/professor even as a Dr. unless you go into private practice or start your own thing

Absolutely. A couple that my wife and I are dear friends with are both in the medical profession. Nuclear medicine and pediatrics. They spent the first 8 years of their careers in NYC, establishing themselves / their careers. He's now in SoCal and she's in NorCal. They have 2 kids. They anticipate that they'll be split up for a couple of years in this manner because of their work situations. He's flying back and forth to be with his family. He's tried to get positions near their new home but he's either over-qualified or he's not getting bites.

They have to play networking and social games with their careers to a level that is well and truly beyond anything my wife and I have ever had to deal with as software engineers.

My wife and I have board game nights and that qualifies as networking. We're playing board games with folks from FAANG companies, triple A video game developers, interesting start-ups, etc... who I've met through this group. Our friends in the medical profession can't get away with something like that.

That path will barely get you to 1% income, and definitely not in all areas. Just another working stiff.

The Dr. who runs the LASIK place near me drives a Lambo, and he probably has 10 Drs working for him.

It’s rare to strike it rich on your own labor.

My heart bleeds for “barely 1% working stiff”.

That sounds like a serious medical condition, you should contact your doctor.

Preferably one with a Lambo.

He might not earn an obscene amount of money: there was an article here recently about spending habits, and doctors seemed to be the worst.

A number of my friends are recent med school graduates, and from what they tell me that politics is very much a factor not just for advancement, but even things like placement in a medical specialty.

"Become doctors" is just saying that they graduated medical school; even C students become doctors, but the politicking really starts once you try to join a specific practice, like cardiology, emergency medicine, pediatrics, etc. Every speciality has its gatekeepers who they need to schmooze if they want that seal of approval.

It’s true that they need to get residencies and then fellowships but my understanding is that these processes are closer to “get admitted to medical school” then they are to “become partner at a law firm”. Could be wrong, but that’s my impression.

The majority of US doctors have huge student loan debts for many years, they either must go into a specialty to pay them off quickly, or remain middle-class for years as primary care, pediatrics, geriatrics, and many other needed specialties are under-remunerated.

This is a popular story, but really they stop taking on debt at about 30 and pay it off, easily, by 45.

Around here you can live a nice lifestyle for ~$40,000. Early career primary care physicians have a gross of something like $120,000...

Agreed.

Education has two complementary goals:

1. content curriculum (body of knowledge)

2. learning curriculum (how to learn)

The latter is more subtle, and IMHO doesn't receive the attention it deserves.

School absolutely fails on the second one. You are forced to study on someone else's schedule which is terrible for learning.

And don't get me started on group work (because it's 'pedagogically useful'). You get a team of 4-5, 2 hours and a task that can be done alone in ~10 minutes, 20 if you try and integrate the whole team.

And then you're in the real world, and you don't have enough people and time, and you need specialists for the different subtasks.. thanks, school.

But that's the reality of life and part of learning as well. Most of us don't get the luxury of doing things on our own schedule or terms. Usually the schedule is decided by someone else, like the customer or the boss or whoever is paying you.

Maybe the reason you don't have the luxury is because the school never gave you the luxury so you didn't have the opportunity to work out something to retain it.

all I am saying is, the ability to do something with constraints that are out of your control, is a skill that needs to be learned.

Sure but school constraints you too much. There needs to be a time when you can explore things, when should this time be if not during school.

I'd like to add a 3rd thing, which is learning how to start something and try to do whatever it takes to finish it with constraints decided by someone else. Most likely you will be doing the similar thing for your entire life after getting out of college like starting some project or a task at work and trying to finish it whether you like it or not.

> Life outside that system often very much does not.

Unless you become a teacher. That might be why the system doesn't change - the people running it have never lived another way.

Yeah the folks who stay in the education systems often (not always) tend to like that sort of structure / participating in it. It feels a bit like a feedback loop.

> The education system provides fairly clear and predictable paths to affirmation, success, and a sort of grade based people ranking system.

> Life outside that system often very much does not.

Work does. There are salaries, titles, a hierarchical structure. Plenty of people get sucked into the cycle of wanting "just a little more" salary, recognition, promotions, reports. Not very different from a videogame addiction, where as soon as you level up you start feeling the desire if reaching the next step.

Yes, but salaries, titles, etc. do not necessarily correlate with performance. Nepotism, "CEO is friends with my dad", and other factors completely unrelated to performance are often the source of those things.

Good grades, generally speaking, are immune to any such influence.

Have you heard about the US college admissions scandal? Surely academia must be flawless, pristine in regard for the moral high ground based on your assumption, and surely they don't have all the pitfalls that every other walk of life has.

Homework has been known to be done by others students, or parents even. In higher academia, how many people on a project really lean in to contribute? Maybe 2 out of 5.

Graduate school may be slightly more immune to this, but the barrier to entry is also much much higher monetarily for most.

In school everyone gets the same assignments and has to take the same test. At work there's a subjective element to performance, where everyone has different assignments, and everybody has different ideas about how hard everybody else's assignments are. In school you don't have to report all the things you've done and how valuable and difficult they are.

Succeeding at work is often way more nebulous than succeeding in school. School is entirely based on tests and homework with transparent grading systems and syllabi.

Work is so much more relationship-based. It's not just about doing what your told, but also about collaborating and communicating and leveraging a network, mentoring peers, and generally getting things done for which there is no clear path.

I always felt "leadership" was a meaningless buzzword in school (especially since it had no impact on grades), but now that I'm working I can see it's a real valuable skill and essential to motivating others to do good work.

Word certainly does for some people although being one of the "gifted" types at work seems to provide fewer chances to be that. Teacher's can give out As left and right and even if they give them to everyone, people feel pretty good about it.

Also the scale of affirmation at work can vary wildly.

Granted every workplace is different.

Great comment. Reminds me of "The Organization Kid" but much pithier https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-org...

The first two lines, wow—You very clearly wrote what I've struggled to think of how to convey. Thank you.

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