Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I dropped out of college in 1998 to work in tech. The common knowledge at the time was that you got a job at a startup, and then in four years you retired, because they would IPO while you worked there and you'd coast your last two years while you vested in millions in stock options.

That obviously didn't happen for me, or most anyone else that started working in 1998.

But today doesn't feel like that. I don't see college kids being encouraged to drop out and make a fortune in tech. In fact what I do see are people being encouraged to graduate at the top of their class so they can get jobs at highly profitable FAANG companies.

It does feel a little frothy, especially with all of the non-profitable tech companies that are doing IPOs this year and next, but it feels more reserved this time.

Also, it feels like the VCs are the one taking the majority of the damage this time, not retail investors.

View on HN

"I don't see college kids being encouraged to drop out and make a fortune in tech. In fact what I do see are people being encouraged to graduate at the top of their class so they can get jobs at highly profitable FAANG companies."

Except for those encouraged to skip college entirely...

Which in fairness is probably less than 1% of the 2-3 million US college students out there!

Thiel and co. don't have the resources to fund that dream for so many individuals.

Have you seen any of the discussions here on HN?

I would say that's a less than 1% of the college aged population.

My alma mater, a small midwestern college in the last five years has had record enrollment. My two nieces just graduated and had to apply to close to a dozen schools. On all of their visits, the tour guide consistently reported enrollment numbers were at all time highs and how competitive it had become to get accepted.

These were not huge Big 10 or Ivy League schools. Most of them were small liberal arts colleges on the west coast and a handful of smaller midwestern state universities.

Despite the narrative that kids should opt out of college, it would appear the trend is more than likely kids are continuing to go to college and in record numbers.

> Despite the narrative that kids should opt out of college, it would appear the trend is more than likely kids are continuing to go to college and in record numbers.

It's very difficult to drag yourself out of the 'no credentials, no good job' hole, if you are 18 years old, don't have useful connections, luck, an incredible work ethic, or all of the above.

Most people don't have one or all of the above, and college solves this problem for the vast majority of enrolling students.

>consistently reported enrollment numbers were at all time highs and how competitive it had become to get accepted.

Sounds like a Ponzi scheme, but I don't deny it is true. Whoever can differentiate from the 99% i.e plumbers will be able to name their price when dealing with these sheeples, there will simply be too much demand and nearly no supply.

That's no surprise. More people are going on to college than ever before. Educating our population is a good thing, and you can easily angle your college experience to shake out opportunities that would have otherwise been impossible given your circumstances in life.

Dropping out was by far the best decision I ever made.

Maybe consider college is not a universal good.

Or start to consider education and college not being more related than field work and education.

That's not companies being overvalued, that's the education bubble showing cracks.

I mean shit, that's not a bad idea for non-CS majors (like myself), considering the ROI of those majors

> ...what I do see are people being encouraged to graduate at the top of their class so they can get jobs at highly profitable FAANG companies.

This has been true for India for a long time but the trend has been reversing since 2014 with the explosion of VC and in particular Angel investments that followed the Indian unicorn boom. Surprised that Europe is on a different trajectory.

> Also, it feels like the VCs are the one taking the majority of the damage this time, not retail investors.

Are majority investors who would have usually invested in the public markets now channeling capital to growth stage funds or are they calling bluff when these unicorns do float IPOs? If the former, not really sure if it's bad or good and for whom, but kind of makes for a very different proposition to the dot-com bubble of 2000s.

For instance, just today, paytm which long lost its market leader position in B2C/ P2P payments in India to Walmart's PhonePe, GooglePay, and WhatsApp, announced $1 billion in Series G funding that takes the total to $4.3 billion raised so far [0] with $500 million in losses just this past year. I really fail to understand the economics behind growth stage fund at all if it is clear that public markets aren't going to bail these investors out if the companies aren't making profits to justify valuation. Google India has openly complained abt the current P2P/B2C payments market as a loss leader with no path forward on generating revenue.

Either that, or like patio11 says, the amt of capital flowing through the markets is astounding [1]; and so I wonder if I am missing some key insights to be able to grasp the economics of it all, as an outsider?

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/24/paytm-1-billion/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19210703

Maybe people aren’t expecting riches, but I will say that all of my peers (late 20’s) looking for a career change are looking at coding boot camps as a way of achieving stability. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but there’s no free lunch in the long term.

Stability and retirement are two very different things. :)

Ain't that the truth! I guess where I'm trying to draw the parallel is that it's becoming somewhat of a "default" where people aren't critically thinking about whether it's right for them, they just see dollar signs. Maybe that is what strikes me as a little bubble-ish. (I'm young though and have not been through a downturn in my career, so what do I know)

I finished secondary school in 2004. So it's been a while. Most people from my school are on LinkedIn,so it's easy to see how's everyone doing. The ones that went to tech are doing fine,the rest are more or less fucked, regardless of how intelligent they were.

> I don't see college kids being encouraged to drop out and make a fortune in tech. In fact what I do see are people being encouraged to graduate at the top of their class so they can get jobs at highly profitable FAANG companies.

I've only worked at one FAANG company, but they actively encourage every good intern to drop out and start working full time.

This feels like the japanification of the whole western world plus China.

I don't even follow the valuations of the stock markets, I've been told they are high, but for tech I'm sure they are nowhere near those of 1998, so I don't think that tech will burst the bubble of everything.

I am however sure the party cannot go on for much longer, the negative interest rates and permanent increase of balance sheets of the FED and other central banks will either cause a stockmarket prolongued downturn, or fuck the whole financial system so profoundly that in 20 years time we won't be able to recognise it, nor be able to call our economies market-based or capitalistic.

What no one seems to be able to explain is why the rest of the world won't turn into Japan. Stagflation and QE by any means necessary (Bank of Japan propping up the Nikkei [1]). Unfortunately, interests are misaligned and it's unlikely we'll see true price discovery in assets instead of central bank "help" artificially inflating values.

[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Bank-of-Japan-to-be... (Bank of Japan to be top shareholder of Japan stocks)

Valuations are improbably high for a lot of companies. Look at the price for netflix 5 years ago. $50 stock. Today, it's $300 and change. In the same time range, AMD went from a $2 stock to close to $40 these days.

You hardly see that anywhere else in the market, like you'd never see Ford go up 2000% in 5 years without people screaming the sky is falling in every economic publication, but here we are with these tech evaluations. It's almost as if smart money dictating these headline narratives doesn't want retail to stop buying one off shares of FAANGs, and that is worrysome.

> I don't see college kids being encouraged to drop out and make a fortune in tech.

I consider this a common theme of this very site and its owner: Y Combinator. They encourage people to drop out of school for their companies, and celebrate their stories of success. At least investors are pushing this narrative.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com