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Comment by _5yps | Hacker News Reader

16-year-old here. My experience is probably markedly different from most teenagers in the US (I'm an immigrant who goes to a competitive school full of other immigrants) but I find that, for the most part, this article hits the nail on the head. High School is nothing like the usual media portrayal - I've never heard anyone even talk about a party, nobody's doing anything stronger than weed, nobody's fucking or even dating at all.

Smartphone use definitely has a negative effect. I'm in some APs, some Honors, and some regular classes and the #1 difference I've observed between the kids in each cohort is how often they're on their phones. The CP kids leave their phones on their desks and are making out with the damn things whenever they can, sometimes even when the teacher is trying to lecture them. The Honors kids have them under their desks and only use them when they have nothing more pressing to do. The AP kids have them on mute in their backpacks. (I leave mine in my locker, and only use it to listen to music.)

Most of the anxiety is over college admissions - not necessarily to the Ivy League (everyone knows that's just luck of the draw), but the "second-tier" schools (Carnegie-Mellon, Rensselaer, Duke, Cornell, etc.) where over-achieving can still net you a good chance of admission. There's a lot of focus on "building your brand" and trying to "stand out" (make your life more "interesting" in the narrow ways that look good on a college application). The more technically-oriented kids are balls-deep in resume-driven development; they follow the tutorial for every trendy tech buzzword possible (mostly data-science and ML stuff) so that they can blog about it on their Squarespace-generated portfolios. I'm a member of the FIRST Robotics Team and, like everyone else there, I do absolutely nothing, because the team has 5 times more people than it actually needs. I once witnessed the entire programming subteam (about 20 people) spend 3 hours trying to flash an SD card.

The main thing I notice among my peers is an obsessive (borderline autistic) focus on "getting in" and having good credentials. Enjoying your life and doing things that you take pride in are secondary to the all-encompassing drive to impress people who know nothing about you. I wish I could say I'm above it all, but I've certainly internalized it to some extent - I feel a nagging sense of guilt when playing video games, or reading books that don't imply intellectual clout, or anything else that's internally rewarding but "non-bloggable". If I had to characterize my generation with a pathology, it would be exhibitionism.

View on HN

I wish adults understood the realities of being young in 2020. Even when I graduated HS in 2007 I could tell my experience and the academic expectations I needed to live up to were much higher than it was for my mom. After I graduated I saw younger friends take more AP classes than I did and do more leadership activities than I did. Expectations are always ramping up. It is no party.

Our laws and bureaucracies haven’t caught up to life from 50 years ago, and that is something young people today have to deal with too. There are a lot of incongruities in programs offered. One example is Federal Work Study. In college I qualified, it was a benefit, and my attitude was to not leave anything on the table. In reality the money I made was not enough to make a difference and the time I spent working could have been spent taking another class. If I didn’t do work study I could have graduated a semester sooner and that would have been much more valuable financially. The only reason to work in college would be at a job that is directly related to your field.

And of course the adults don’t get it. Every once in a while you’ll hear about a congress person or a business leader say that college students aren’t pulling their own weight in society. The friends of your parents will ask you how you like going to college parties. Reality is you have a deep backlog of work from 6 classes, which are related but have very different concepts and you need to master them all in four months.

FWIW, this isn't so much a story of "being young in 2020" as it is "being young in 2020 in the hyper-competitive culture of major coastal metro areas of the US". This phenomenon is actually pretty unique to a handful of metro areas, which happen to be over-represented on HN. In most of the country, bright high school students are focused on getting into their state's flagship public university, and exceptionally successful ones might be focused on getting into the honors programs at those universities. Those students might buff their resume by participating in the "National Honor Society", but they're not doing anywhere near the amount of credential-buffing described above.

Unfortunately, if you live somewhere where this is the culture, it's very difficult to opt-out. Parents don't have full control, because students absorb expectations from their peers and their peers' parents as well. Everyone agrees that the situation is out of control, but no one can "unilaterally disarm".

Absolutely disagree. This was the case for me at average high school and college in the midwest. I'd say ~50% of the populations had those pressures.

Going to a upper tier college for grad school showed me that only the percentage changes, going from maybe ~50% to ~75%

This is the segment of every part of the country that aspires to those costal metro areas. The driving motivation is "get me the hell out of this godforsaken place."

The personal cost was immense, but I'm glad I did. I got to do fun and high-impact work at a fast-rising startup while my title and TC leapt up by $50-$100k each year. I got to meet friends from all over the world, travel, hike, run outdoors year-round, never shovel snow again, walk to everything I need from my high-rise apartment.

At home I'd be lucky to have made Help Desk Technician II for $17/hour, lucky to have a car that starts, lucky to know a single personal socially who had ever voluntarily read a book. Most of my classmates who stayed aren't working at all. The only ones really thriving had guaranteed slots at family businesses.

It's not a poor place. Everyone's parents made a decent living. But the firms at which they did so were in either stasis or decline, not desperate to hire 22-year-olds.

The delayed gratification story is very much real.

NYC, SF, Silicon Valley, Seattle, LA, etc. are all full of successful people who went to public universities that didn’t require crazy high school credentials to get into.

If you want to be an engineer and deal with tech culture, sure. We can be a little myopic about that here on HN. Engineering is not "status" oriented, and going to a nice school doesn't have the weight it does, if you want to be doctor and heal people, for example. School still matters. We can't all start startups.

Hell, I'm a software developer and don't even have a CS degree. Did I feel like the bar was higher for me than it may have been if I did have one? Sure, but I was still able to overcome it. Granted I'm not in an environment like the Valley (out of choice as much as anything), but I am an actual, real software dev.

On the other hand, in my past life I was a lawyer. I worked my ass off in high school to get into a top journalism school, worked hard in college and studied my ass off for the LSAT to get into a top-20 law school, and that STILL wasn't enough for me to get anywhere close to a high powered legal job.

The worlds are very much different. I obviously prefer the more merit-based environment that's still found in tech, where "can you do the job" still trumps most things. But things are much much different in other environments.

Long before this comment, I've believed software engineering is becoming more like law. There's been a noticeable uptick in credential-obsession, more of a "tracked" career, just eveything about it is heading in a more high-comp / professionalized / careerist direction.

Probably inevitable given devs are making "real money" (biglaw or higher) in Silicon Valley, and having real influence, but still, I agree something may have been lost.

A state school in any state can get you into any public or private medical school. Hit your marks on grades, kill the mcat (by far the most important thing you do), shadow a doctor and wash literally any campus labs glassware for a few months to get your letter of recommendation, and you can go to any med school you want.

This is true!

However, it ignores a few things. There is always an advantage to being ahead, even at state schools.

Come in with more AP credits or college credit plus? - Get priority scheduling over your peers

Get priority scheduling - More likely to be able to graduate in 4 years

Come in with more credits, take less gen ed requirements and get into a major earlier - Build relationships with faculty in your major sooner, more opportunities come your way, internships, etc.

It's compounding, but instead of for interest in your bank account, it's your life.

...Or go to a small four-year college and get into your major right away, with a PhD advisor in your field, as a freshman.

My early-2000s experience in mid-size-city Texas - not even Dallas or Houston - was getting closer to the OP. It wasn't that extreme, but the bright students were in magnet programs (or private schools, if $$$$), and were loading up on APs, SAT IIs, and all that crap. And the goal - accomplished by a handful of my class - was Harvard, Rice, Columbia, Duke, etc.

I think there's still things that ring out to me as true even though I didn't have that experience (Grew up in Iowa). So I'll agree that it's not always the hyper-competitive aspect of it, but it's the need to have a personal brand and to push that out on social media. And the desire to escape from our current economic conditions by credentialing is still there, even though it's not nearly as intense, and not all people here feel it equally.

> being young in 2020 in the hyper-competitive culture of major coastal metro areas of the US

I think you'd be surprised how many 8th graders across the country are already stressing about SAT/ACT scores in places like southeast Ohio or Branson, MO.

I just pulled Branson out of a hat and here's their recommendations for ACT/SAT testingv[0]. I've seen a lot of schools across the U.S. This schedule matches up with offical recs, but it's half the story.

Goodhart's Law is in effect here. Those who are ahead will try to cement their leads. So official recs are ACT/SAT round 1 junior year. Those at the head of the pack find ways to test as early as middle school. These students know the game and feel the pressure, even when their families aren't pushing that hard.

This culture is institutionalized in places well beyond the coasts and major metros.

[0] https://www.branson.k12.mo.us/Page/3011

If you look at the bigger picture it's hard to imagine this wouldn't be the case.

Not trying to start a generational food fight but realistically the world has changed since the boomers grew up. The US is facing major great power rivalry from China, we're much more internationalized (I read in the economist that only ~5% of US citizens had passports around 1990), and probably something almost nobody is talking about, the financial condition of the country is vastly different today -- our national debt just passed 100% of GDP, our state and local governments are financially stretched, GDP growth has slowed down, and environmental causes are consuming more attention, and money.

It'a almost unfathomable how much debt the US piled up at every level, from households to state and local to federal, over the past 50 years. It's a double-whammy: they weren't properly funding pensions/infrastructure/etc then, and now we have to both keep these things in good repair, AND make up for all the debt that's been accumulated (both financial and otherwise) by them not doing it over last generation.

The decline of manufacturing EMPLOYMENT (not value created) is also a big part of this. There used to be this demand for high school graduates where you could just walk into a place and get a job. Nowadays, that's a lot harder to do. Just look at how many hours of work is required to afford the basic necessities of life (food, healthcare, shelter), it's gone up a lot. Not going to pontificate on why that is, but I think it's worth acknowledging as being true.

Kind of hard to see how things wouldn't be more stressed, and stressful, today than 40-50 years ago.

> The decline of manufacturing EMPLOYMENT (not value created) is also a big part of this.

I read a paper that said value created down everywhere except computer equipment. And even then that's probably an accounting fiction. The US is employing less people in manufacturing and we're making less stuff across the board.

The US makes me think of a description by a GI of a German Army surrendering at the end of WWII. First there was the top echelons, generals, their staff. Along with their wives and mistresses. Followed by the troops and equipment assigned to protect HQ. All in a state of perfect order. Followed by a rump army of totally broken men. And then nothing.

If you occupy the right position in US society you can believe everything is fine. If your a smart kid from a formerly working class family in Ohio, you know by the age of 12 that you need to escape.

"If you occupy the right position in US society you can believe everything is fine. If your a smart kid from a formerly working class family in Ohio, you know by the age of 12 that you need to escape."

But that's... common sense for ambitious people to dream then (at least attempt to) "escape" to a greener pasture. That's how things rolled since the dawn of humanity. What's really different here/now?

Nothing,the same way than current teenagers are not better or worse than any previous generation. All of this is just a healthy mix of recency bias and narcissism.

I think the difference between you and I is I was teenager in the 1970's

So 10 years, modern humans are 200k years old.

> hyper-competitive culture of major coastal metro areas of the US

I agree with the rest of your comment so I don't want to generally detract, but I think the qualification of major coastal metro areas includes a lot of places where your comment doesn't apply and excludes a lot of others (e.g. the upper Midwest).

I think there are aspects where major coastal metros are outliers, but grade school and public university quality isn't one of them.

Yeah, it was a short-hand way to convey the categorization and could have been more more precise. In reality, every region has its own culture that is somewhere along this spectrum.

I’d also note that I think “school/university quality” != “a high pressure environment”. There are plenty of places that have one but not the other. In particular, there are lots of places where high schools are providing excellent education and public university options are good, but students don’t feel like they are in a pressure cooker.

Typically in the past I have recommended that anyone without a high school diploma or G.E.D. not read The Underachiever's Manifesto. After reading about your experience and how things are today, maybe if every high school senior read it then things might generally cool off a bit. Sure there will still be those that don't but there will always be a few.

There was a time when I looked "down" on tiers of schools, differently.

It was like what I was qualified for was better, Ivy League was a pipe dream and unnecessary, and everything else was a joke.

Around my sophomore year, I was interning in a Federal Work Study program, pushing pencils right next to someone studying a Princeton. When I realized this fate was still intertwined, I immediately transferred to a cheaper school with a less coveted reputation, and also took summer and winter community college courses to get a few extra credits to just get out of there faster and cheaper.

My current thoughts are that Ivy League is a world of its own (along with a few others like Stanford), and then everything else. Nobody cares about how good your state school is at Journalism/Business/Finance/Econ/Computer Science, at that level you either have the degree or not. At Ivy League, the network and opportunities are totally different, and the association is more important since you just go there to drop out anyway and say you went. The faster you drop out the cooler.

All I can say is that the cards I had available to play became very clear.

Right. People who go to the world's top universities are in the position where they don't HAVE to work for a big company. I went to one of the listed "second-tier universities" and work at FANG (and to be clear, not Amazon), and I don't think I have a single coworker from Harvard or Stanford. I have one coworker from Oxford who considers himself the "failure" of his graduating class because he only works at a big tech company.

Big tech companies are sweat shops, offering just enough pay to have the TOP end of an upper-middle class lifestyle (after sufficient robbery by the tax man, since you're not quite rich enough for any of the Trump-esque tax loopholes to apply), in exchange for the expected 60-80 hour weeks. You still have to work for a living, and you're competing in Stack Ranking with the majority of employees who are visa workers (hiring visa workers is a PLUS for these companies) that will happily sacrifice their family life and weekends to avoid deportation by being slotted into the "bottom 10%" during the bi-annual performance review (which means you get fired). Sure, it's a local optimum for a lot of people (work insanely hard and sacrifice your health to drive a Porsche/Tesla and own a house/luxury condo in a top-tier city), but make no mistake, it is a second-tier lifestyle.

On the other hand, people from Harvard and Yale are UPPER class -- not upper-MIDDLE class. This means they have last names like Bush or Clinton, get ushered into upper management or C-level at their father's companies, go "work" for cushy jobs at rentseekers like PE/VC/real estate with corporate credit cards, run for office, repeatedly start failed companies, or go indefinitely "exploring" or "finding the next thing to do" (courtesy of their trust fund).

Meanwhile, the vast majority of my graduating class is slaving away as entry-level rat racers at FANG, investment banks, legal, Big 4, medical residencies, etc.

> being slotted into the "bottom 10%" during the bi-annual performance review (which means you get fired)

Jeez - that is awful. Since you're anonymous, will you say which FANG this was? I don't always hear great things about FANGs but sacking the bottom 10% of employees every 6 months does raise some eyebrows.

The only FANG that doesn't do this is Google (annual review only, no Stack Ranking, Needs Improvement rating is only for 1-4% of the company). Also, Google is the only one without an "up or out" policy limiting your maximum time between promotions to four years (i.e. you get canned for not meeting your expectations for career growth). This forced attrition policy is why FANG companies are always rapidly hiring (even during COVID-19), have tons of open positions, and the average tenure for software engineers is only 2.5 years. The mentality is that these companies hire the best of the best, pay the best, and as a result, expect your very best performance in return.

Okay that's shitty. I've only ever worked Google (outside of retail + occasional side work) so I completely lack perspective on the wider tech industry. Generally I get the feeling I can balance work life pretty well here, though maybe at cost to career since there's always going to be people who don't, but I don't feel immediate pressure beyond that.

What's the situation like in smaller companies?

Smaller companies generally can't "pretend to be FANG" because the very best people don't want to work there, they want to work at FANG where they can get paid 90th percentile compensation (you already know this; check levels.fyi -- it's pretty staggering how high senior engineers get paid in all-cash liquid total compensation at these companies). If you are a top software engineer, why would you sacrifice 60-80 hours per week of your time and not get duly compensated for it?

> I went to one of the listed "second-tier universities" and work at FANG (and to be clear, not Amazon),

And in what way exactly is Amazon different?

Not the same reputation and prestige.

Why?That is rampant and naive credentialism.And in the wider world (even in in the tech world) a run of the mill grunt worker bee at Amazon is the same than her peers at Google et al.If the company gives the prestige to YOU and not the opposite, then either you are not that good or your drank the whole Kool Aid jar.

Okay boomer. Just stating my Kool Aid opinion.

Lifespan productivity, from teens upward, has increased, but rewards haven’t kept up. And why should those rewards keep up, when the status quo already creates an environment of increased competition with small financial reward changes. This does create a set of negative externalities though, which one can begin to observe in increasing stress, lower sex drive among 20 year olds, deteriorating social safety nets of retirement for future generations, increased levels of student debt coupled with lower first-time home buyers, entrepreneur rates that haven’t kept up and greater number of companies consolidating. There has been a lot of costs to the centralized gains born from social and material pressures that have been the boon of previous decades/generations. The bill is overdue.

First, I am relatively familiar with the admission process at Cambridge and noone gives a crap whether you were on a robotics team at high school + the rest of the extra-curricular jazz. Personal statements mostly just get ignored. Have no idea about the US thouigh, maybe its very different over there.

Second, I know several people from a generation born it the 50s and 60s whose parents either directly forbade them going to the university (rural France, woman's place it at home) or had to put up with conditions unfathomable to most of undergraduates today. The last 2-3 generations are historically unbelievable privileged. But sure, 'It is no party'.

Mind if I ask what generation you are in?

born in the 1980s

So, these days, women are not expected to stay at home. Instead, they're expected to go to work, and invest in their careers, and raise their kids, and service their (often one-parent) family unit's debt, and also be content and well-balanced.

Not sure I'd want to go back to the 1970s, but - yes, it is definitely no party, and "privilege" is a skewed way to look at it.

Every generation has told the generation younger than them that they are not pulling their weight. I am Gen X, and I genuinely feel the Millenials and Gen Z, are getting the short end of the stick. Fuck the boomers,they shat on everything.

Wow, how things have change from when I was a teen in HS in the early 90s. I was a 'responsible' one because I had a job. Few people thought about 'getting in' (IIRC the valedictorian went to the AF academy), but otherwise we all just wanted to graduate and go to one of the 2 big state schools or the local college. I was smart enough, i.e. paid attention in class, that I never had to study (that caught up with me in college). Weekends were spent hanging out at the beach and trying to find someone to buy us beer. Parties were common and there were the occasional fist fights, but nothing too serious. It was definitely a simpler time.

I think the documentation of a persons entire life from birth has removed the opportunity for kids to make mistakes and learn while they are young. It's unfortunate because I did a lot of dumb things as a kid, and while none of it was too serious, I was able to learn lessons without having it necessarily follow me around the rest of my life. Now they are all just entertaining stories.

I would guess that more of this difference is explained by class/social factors than by the passage of time.

Entirely possible, but there's also potential selection bias.

I was a teen in the late 90s, and was friends with a lot of the druggie/stoner/party crowd. By and large, these people do not have kids, because they can't afford to. A good many of them are dead now, either from overdoses, or drug-related accidents (like crashing their car while going 100 mph while high), or suicide.

The 55 years of American history post-WW2 was a bubble, where people could get away with a number of not-very-adaptive behaviors because the whole country was on top of the world. The last 20 years has rapidly exposed this as a bubble, and the folks who were swimming naked when the tide ran out didn't leave offspring to be part of the next generation.

The post 9/11 period has markedly less tolerance for rebellious behaviour (anti-sociaL or otherwise) than prior to that. I feel like there are things we did back in the 90s with warehouse and squat parties and underground raves and political occupations and mass blatant MDMA use that could result in far more serious treatment by law enforcement in this era than prior to it.

Kind of reminds me of the kids I grew up around in San Jose back in the 1960's and 70's. A lot of them thought they could party, skate through school and then go work for FMC or some such just like their dads. If I had to guess 75% of them have long ago left California because they couldn't cut it.

At least in the Bay Area teens appear to be way more buttoned down and smart than my generation. Don't get me started on the boomer generation. My teachers said my and even more my younger sisters generation were a very welcome relief from those guys.

I've always felt that this is a misconception. My friends did a ton of drugs, had parties and participated in hobbies, especially in college. Now they're all Engineers, PhDs, Doctor's and Entrepreneurs. They just happened to work hard at school too. They don't have kids cause they're busy, so it might be as bad.

But no, it's because they're rowdy kids doing 'bad things'.

That's anecdotally interesting, but the numbers don't bear it out: there's a consistent negative correlation between degree of educational attainment and number of offspring.

That negative correlation exists only between social groups, not within social groups:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3449224/

If you look at only populations who were likely to go to college in the first place - say, white (formerly) middle-class two-parent households, which is what the bulk of my high-school friends were, there's a positive correlation between educational attainment and fertility. Simpson's Paradox strikes again...

No, things have gotten much harder for those who are not born to the very rich. I know, I went decades ago to highly-ranked high school, and it is amazing to me, and sad, how much harder students who want to get ahead have to study.

And then there is the other 2/3 of society, who have been going downhill economically for decades.

I went to HS at the #1 school in my state in the early 2000s, and my experience was like GP's, not yours. Nothing s/he said was surprising to me.

I have never really heard high schools referred to by a ranking event though I went to high school at the same timeframe you did.

Is this common? What's the measurement? State testing methods? Seems nebulous.

Yes, any ranking on subjective criteria is nebulous. But it's definitely not uncommon to rank school performance. State testing is the easiest data to use because it's typically public information.

Now what's the matter buddy, ain't you heard of my school? It's #1 in the state!

People have been true to their schools since at least 1963.

At the time I went to the school, there was a national ranking that used a variety of factors, including number of IB/AB courses per student, (P)SAT/ACT scores, and GPA.

I absolutely don't think the ranking was meaningful, but it at least says something about how many of my classmates had affluent parents who put a lot of pressure on them to succeed.

Things haven't changed that much since the 90s, you were just belonged to a very different demographic than the parent commenter.

No, that's not true. Decades ago I went to a high school that included a large number of that demographic, and things were far easier.

Based on what I heard from other folks (I am an immigrant and have no first hand experience) your experience seems pretty typical in early 90s. There were of course different setups, but I do not think it is primarily based on class or income. They were schools that pushed kids, but they were statistically rare. In 1990, being up until 2AM several times a week doing school projects would be considered insane. Now, while not universal, it is not unheard of.

But I think you hit the nail on the head mentioning the current "your life is on file, no mistakes allowed" setup. To me, it is critical to let kids try things, including stupid things, and learn from their mistakes without having those mistakes affect every job search 20 years later.

I think the pendulum will eventually swing back, but the generation growing up in the current setup will have to try the same stupidities and learn similar things as adults, at a much higher cost. My 2c.

In the 1990s, being up at 2AM to do a school project would have gotten most kids punished, because they weren't allowed to be up that late on school nights, and doing so for a project meant you hadn't been keeping up with your homework and were cramming it in at the last minute, because you'd been slacking.

As I mentioned in a reply to a peer comment, the environment you describe is still the norm in most of the US. By contrast, there's a very high-pressure atmosphere in many of the "superstar" metro areas of the US. Many of us here on HN grew up in other places and moved to these "superstar" metro areas, so the contrast appears even starker that it would be if we were comparing the same places over time.

Hah I'd say that my experience was more in line with yours than anything close to the OP. Went to HS from 2008-12', couldn't have given 2 shits about school and was just trying to get some weed and get laid. Similar mindset with all my friend since we all just wanted to go to the state school.

High school (and I'd argue undergrad) for 80% of people is a joke and a waste of time and for me was a time to learn how to network without networking. Always felt kinda funny sitting next to people in my hs,college, and now workplaces who had 'done everything right' their whole life but lo and behold were in the same place doing the same thing for the same pay. But thats probably just me being a douchebag more than anything

I think you're right. Back when I was in high school(not too long ago, I'm only 23 now), you could screw up and maybe become the joke at your school, but you can simply move somewhere else and become someone else. Or you'd graduate and move on from all of that.

Now kids grow up in an environment where much of their lives take place online, where dumb things you've said or done are available somewhere, forever, to be used against you. Is it any surprise kids are the way they are when they are shown that even something they said 10 years ago can be brought back and used against them to destroy their lives?

Teen in the 00s here. It happened befor the documentation - really I think to a degree it was the related intersection of "juvennile delinquient" moral panics, crackdowns, zero tolerance, and general frankly batshit paranoia where the definition of being a "good guardian" amounts to operating a panopticon which ignores life traumatizing bullying and blames the victim yet freaks out at anything which goes against their precious norms even if perfectly legal. Granted the latter bullshit has a long legacy in American culture.

> I've never heard anyone even talk about a party, nobody's doing anything stronger than weed, nobody's fucking or even dating at all.

That's easy to explain: You don't have to talk about these things anymore, because of IM & co.. It's all still happening, but it's easier to hide it from the "dweebs". I've seen both sides, and it's really surprising how well this unwritten system works. At best you realize a few years or decades later.

> I've seen both sides, and it's really surprising how well this unwritten system works.

Mind giving more details for someone who was last a teen more than a decade ago? :-)

Don't talk about it to outsiders, it's really nothing new, just easier to not accidentally slip that you were at a party someone else wasn't invited to.

My twin brother was much more popular than I was in high school. I was one of the nerds working hard to get into a good school. I never heard anything about the parties, drugs, sex, etc. going on until my senior year. My own brother rarely talked to me about what was going on.

Exactly. I think the parent comment may be a little misled about who's fucking and who's doing what drugs.

Though judging by peer-reviewed research [1] and falling teen pregnancy rates [2], s/he's probably right.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/trends/2015_u...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/teenpregnancy/about/index.htm

Recent studies have been consistent with the result that teenagers are having less sex today than they used to.

Ok, there's been more education on STDs and teen pregnancy, but even still, because of WhatsApp/Facebook messenger, a lot of what used to happen in the hallways (or at least how Hollywood depicts it) can how be "virtually" hidden.

Less than being worried about the 'why', I'm just stating the facts. These studies usually collect information via anonymous surveys, and generally there's reason to believe that these surveys are reliable.

Saying "it just happens virtually now" doesn't change the results of the studies. We aren't measuring by listening to hallway conversations, we are measuring by directly asking teens "are you sexually active?", in a safe, anonymous environment.

http://recapp.etr.org/recapp/index.cfm?fuseaction=pages.Stat...

I totally agree, for whatever reason it's decreasing. The reason I mention hallway conversations is that that's the way OP or any non-statistician would perceive these things. That's why he says

> nobody's f*ing or even dating at all.

while your link claims

> In 2015, 41% of high school students reported having sexual intercourse.

The partying portrayed in the media is more representative of student life in universities.

There's not much going on in high schools, 15 years old kids living at their parents who can't even buy alcohol.

I think that very much depends on where you grew up. I grew up middle of nowhere Wisconsin and we were definitely drinking and throwing parties (even with parents home) at 15. All it takes is "cool" parents that accept kids are going to drink and want to provide a safe spot for it (especially taking all the car keys), or someone's older brother who will buy the alcohol and drinking after the parents go to sleep.

As someone from a coastal city, can confirm that the same things happen back where I'm from. There's always the friend with the chill parent and the college-aged sibling who can buy. Uber, Lyft, and/or a DD make it easy enough for the kids to make sure everyone can get home safely.

So laws and parents are stopping teenagers from drinking and having sex? When did that happen?

Plenty of people sneaking out to get drinks or get high when I was 16 years old and in highschool (8 years ago).

>There's not much going on in high schools, 15 years old kids living at their parents who can't even buy alcohol.

I was doing hard drugs in house parties at 15 and I was one of the older ones. I had a friend who had to have his kidneys replaced by the time he was 16 and knew of 5 girls who had abortions before they were 18.

There is plenty going on in high schools.

It was WAY easier to hide from everyone 30 years ago. I had friends who would outrun the police in their cars. A large percentage of young folks had fake ids. When the drinking age was 18 (or lower), kids had to just be cool to get into bars. The penalties for bars and kids were diminished and the police were not as efficient. Kids brought knives to school, and some brought guns to school. Heck, kids learned how to shoot in school. (I'm not talking about inner city scenarios, I took riflery in school). girls and boys got together. Pregnancy was the visible symptom. Kids were horrible to each other. Fights were common. Bullying even more common. It generally went unchecked.

The stuff I didn't realize until decades later -- there was lots of dark stuff, but one surprising thing in front of my eyes every day was one teacher had been habitually drunk in class and I never knew.

Honestly this doesn’t sound that different from my own competitive high school experiences almost 30 years ago. The fact that you and your peers bin Duke and Cornell into the second tier bargain bin suggests that your subset of peers may not be a representative sample of the student universe.

My HS was competitive but in the 90s you didn't have to build your global brand on social media or maintain a blog. The things we were measured by were largely private, like your grades, SAT scores, and application essays. Now you have to become a mini-celebrity and survive the onslaught of millions trying to knock you down. Every HS kid in the US is only a couple steps removed on social media.

Do you really need to do that? What evidence is there? (Serious question)

I know of a young person who felt compelled to obtain a patent in high school as part of buffing their brand.

Do you need to do this? No. Is that the perception? In some places.

I also did this lol. What a misguided, neurotic person I was.

Yes, and this is why it is hard for those (like me, HS student, 16yo) who avoid social media as a matter of privacy. I personally get left out of friend groups, etc. and when I was applying for an internship, one of the questions was "Please list your social media handles/accounts here"... I'm pretty sure I know why I didn't get that internship :) They probably thought I was hiding something...

Was waiting for someone to add that.

My friend is a high school principle in Washington state. He tells of fist fights between girls over a “diss” on Snap, girls (minors mind you) using social media to sell themselves (prostitution). I don’t know whether you’d call that more hedonistic or not but these are new twists on old problems.

Likely none of these kids at his school have much chance of getting into a T2 school.

Thanks for sharing your perspective. What's interesting is your experience doesn't follow the historical stereotype of HS, but absolutely nails an alternative one of driven immigrants, tiger moms, pressure to get into a prestigious university, the idea of a Cornell as your "safety school" - and the biggie - the extension of the perfect you on display for strangers that social media has worked hard to ingrain.

One thing that has not seemed to change: people are entirely focused on doing well at the same game, usually the one where the winners were decided long ago. This is funny/weird because often the idols they seek to emulate rejected the main game of their time, pursued something different and were the successful survivors in a completely new field. We seem to miss this point.

You self-realization and understanding of the crazy aspects of your situation is something that sets you apart from the masses; don't lose this perspective.

If there was something I could impart to this generation, it would be this. I deeply admire your commitment to entrepreneurialism and to taking a bit of ownership over what you can learn in terms of "return on investment." However, I would caution you to remember still what is the most rewarding in life. Too often I see a never-ending status tournament for those in the elite schools (all of those mentioned), and it can tear apart those involved.

Not too long ago, my company sent out teams to interview students from Stanford. Without fail, all of them mentioned some feeling of alienation from their peers due to the ridiculous status games. One foreign student who was relatively poor talked about dorm-mates who would fly first class back to LA or NY for the weekend and boast about it. It was a kind of revolting illustration.

Helping your fellow human beings and living a life of service to them is what is ultimately important. I think this generation may actually be primed to give us a lot of hope in this regard, but I hope that you can listen to it. And if I may be so bold, I believe that many would be well-served by realizing that out there beyond the cosmos above us is something that deeply loves each of us.

> And if I may be so bold, I believe that many would be well-served by realizing that out there beyond the cosmos above us is something that deeply loves each of us.

Unfalsifiable claims like this one tend to have a bit of baggage like eternal punishment. IMO that's one thing plaguing plenty of teens in rural parts of the US. They need fewer overseeing eyes, not more.

> Unfalsifiable claims like this one tend to have a bit of baggage like eternal punishment.

Here's something that is falsifiable and true: the teen suicide rates in the oppressive and orthodox 1950s were much lower than they are in the "liberated" times today. I cannot and will not claim that this can be reduced to belief in a higher power (I would tend to be skeptical of such a just-so argument that fits my worldview without additional data). And in fact, my main point in the GP was not that people should believe in a higher power (though I do think that), but that I hope the younger generation can learn to reject these destructive status games that undeniably cause immense suffering and deprive children of their childhoods.

Furthermore, our culture today routinely indulges in unfalsifiable claims that carry heaps of baggage. What is worse: eternal punishment that you are quite certain is not real, or the very real temporal punishment that can and has ruined lives in response to even inadvertent stumbling through cultural minefields?

> IMO [baggage like eternal punishment is] one thing plaguing plenty of teens in rural parts of the US. They need fewer overseeing eyes, not more.

This may be true as a trend, and insofar as it is, it is lamentable. But it is not nor has it ever been my way. I am here to show love and mercy, to serve and to desire justice; I am not here to pass judgment or hector. And part of that is speaking to what I believe and what I have experienced.

>> Unfalsifiable claims like this one tend to have a bit of baggage like eternal punishment.

> Here's something that is falsifiable and true: the teen suicide rates in the oppressive and orthodox 1950s were much lower than they are in the "liberated" times today. I cannot and will not claim that this can be reduced to belief in a higher power

You don't need to. Whether or not a result can be attributed to a belief has no bearing on whether the belief itself is true.

To expand on your point - I am starting to believe that the political correctness oozing out of teens and those in the early 20s today is actually compensation for a new form of selfishness that comes from being measured in real time on a global scale, and drives the non-stop status games you described.

I could not agree more. This hit me hard during the interviews on the Stanford campus that I mentioned. I see the embrace of PC culture amount the younger cohort a result of the intense status competition, the resultant shallowness and lack of meaning associated with accomplishments rewarded by gains to status and prestige (even when the accomplishment is real and beneficial), and a paucity of explanations for why the status problem exists beyond repackaged Marxism wrapped in relatively strange philosophical ideas from the 60s and 70s. It's easy to judge young people, so I force myself to feel a great deal of compassion for them.

There are always poseur idiots in any movement (see the "Blockchain!" zombies and "Raw Water") but the political correctness is a result of actual moral standards based upon harm and could be called a successor or an usurper backlash to the hypocritical "morality" that was utterly obsesses with sexual norms while ignoring every other aspect of it. It isn't spoken of in such terms usually but what "political correctness" generally is referred to as detractors is essentially "new morals".

They were judged unfairly by a broken, hypocrital and insane system and now they flip the table and judge it back harshly. The failure of the previous generation's systems of morality is literally a meme "Ok boomer" - and it certainly wasn't the first to judge back.

There is still plenty of status shit in various forms going on top which matters to varying degrees subculturally if they give a shit or not but there is still a recognized objective moral "line in the sand" roughly where excuses aren't tolerated. "Everyone was doing it" as an excuse only further indites a complete lack of morals. A standard which evidently terrifies many who were alivr during the judged segment part of the everyone given the jump to embracing moral relativism.

> [...] political correctness is a result of actual moral standards based upon harm and could be called a successor or an usurper backlash to the hypocritical "morality" that was utterly obsesses with sexual norms while ignoring every other aspect of it. It isn't spoken of in such terms usually but what "political correctness" generally is referred to as detractors is essentially "new morals". > > They were judged unfairly by a broken, hypocrital and insane system and now they flip the table and judge it back harshly.

Interesting that you admit that PC culture (or "new morals") is explicitly reactionary.

> The failure of the previous generation's systems of morality is literally a meme "Ok boomer" - and it certainly wasn't the first to judge back.

Also, the existence of a meme is hardly dispositive, unless 4chan and reddit are really our moral overlords (perish the thought).

> There is still plenty of status shit in various forms going on top which matters to varying degrees subculturally if they give a shit or not but there is still a recognized objective moral "line in the sand" roughly where excuses aren't tolerated. "Everyone was doing it" as an excuse only further indites a complete lack of morals. A standard which evidently terrifies many who were alivr during the judged segment part of the everyone given the jump to embracing moral relativism.

This is not quite right. If there really was an objective "line in the sand," then presumably we'd all know what that line in the sand was. The problem, of course, is that there is no objective line in the sand. A couple years ago after the heat of #MeToo had turned up, did the line in the sand say that Sen. Al Franken should go or stay? Were his unwanted advances less or more harmful than losing a reliable progressive in politics? Different people within PC culture came to different conclusions.[1][2] The same thing is happening right now with this slow-rolling story about Joe Biden. The media writers and personalities who have been extremely eager to create a frenzy in this #MeToo era and were very eager to #BelieveAllWomen during previous scandals (with 'R's after the name instead of 'D's) are now very reluctant to even acknowledge that Biden has been accused and that his accuser has indirect contemporaneous evidence of her claims. What's the objective rule that determines who is right or wrong? There is none: the "objective rule" depends on the consensus of those in the culture. The consensus can (and does) change moment to moment. Thus, the "new morals" are no more objective than the ones they're replacing. Rather, they are the exact same as those you claim they are reacting to.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/1... [2] https://www.vox.com/2018/5/21/17352230/al-franken-accusation...

>And if I may be so bold, I believe that many would be well-served by realizing that out there beyond the cosmos above us is something that deeply loves each of us.

If I may be so bold, could I interest you in hearing the good word of dialectical materialism as interpreted through category-theory according to Robert Harper Thought?

How many times can Hegel, Marx & Co. be repackaged and cause immense destruction (such as we are seeing at this very moment) till otherwise intelligent people will finally let it go?

I would have thought the references to category theory and Robert Harper Thought (he's a homotopy type theory researcher) would have made the humor clear.

> The main thing I notice among my peers is an obsessive (borderline autistic) focus on "getting in" and having good credentials

I wouldn't describe this as exibitionist or even pathological; it's not something that kids are simply choosing to do in a vacuum, but something that they've been encouraged to do all their lives. And it's not an unusual situation historically either. Without careful attention, it's easy for the education system to devolve into something like the Imperial Chinese system, where careful memorization of a fixed set of beautiful but useless classical poetry forms would be required to qualify as a provincial administrator in a system in which the social mobility of adults was almost zero.

Dear trend-following worrier,

For all the effort you're making know this: you'll eventually be evaluated by a Gen-X or Millennial hiring manager. We largely don't care where you went to college. We've learned that name recognition means very little. It'll get you a job, but if you're one of those kids who "does nothing" on an extracurricular team, it'll show through on the job. You won't get promoted. We fucking hate micromanaging Ivy League grads who are too scared to take initiative and possibly make mistakes.

Sincerely,

An engineering manager who went to one of the "second-tier" schools you listed.

I mean, you might not care but where they went to school, but the Goldmans and McKinseys and Cravaths of the world still do.

Those places do care about school name to the same extent. You'll get a junior position there, if you have a Harvard/Yale/Princeton degree, but you're not advancing unless you come from a well-connected (and likely wealthy) family. Attending a top-tier school is often just a proxy for wealth and connectedness. The companies you mentioned keep the prestige of the company high by hiring from the Ivy League, but the unconnected hoi polloi end up doing shit work for a decade until they figure out they're in a dead end.

That's really not true at all and I don't know why you've convinced yourself that it is. Obviously having connections can give you a leg up but most successful people in these industries don't have family in high places and it's not a prerequisite to ascend through the ranks. Why would so many people enter finance and consulting if they thought it was a dead end? Are you arrogant enough to believe that it's because they are dumber and less enlightened than you, and unlike you they don't know what they are doing with their lives?

I think your comment has good intentions by trying to let parent comment know their hiring prospects may not being as daunting as it currently seems, but the immediate social and parental pressures are going to make it hard to see the forest through the trees... I feel for these kids.

Parent worrier has some funny notions, to boot. Like, Cornell _is_ an Ivy League school by definition. It just isn't Harvard or Yale.

On the hiring front, undergrad school can sometimes tell you a bit about who a person thought they were in high school, and about their penchant for overachievement. Some schools might help instill different perspectives on engineering and the role of technology. But if you're not hiring right out of school, I'm with you on focusing on demonstrated ability to get things done.

> you'll eventually be evaluated by a Gen-X or Millennial hiring manager

This is actually a really amusing thought. Yeah I could be a manager in 5-10 years hiring current high school kids when they're older. I barely made it through school(failed out at my first shot at engineering) I could realistically be hiring at one of the companies New grads stress out about getting into. I couldn't tell you about ivy league schools without looking it up lol

I think this is what Thiel would call peak “indeterminate optimism”.

You don’t seem to be afflicted by the indeterminate side, which is good, but it also means this dissonance is not going away anytime soon: the majority of most of the institutions (read: 75% of <school>) that you’re trying to get in to are equally as determinate and character-forming as the one you find yourself in now.

They won’t challenge you to commit or reward you for vertical growth. Their communities will encourage you to seek out internships that will not challenge you or make you rounded, but are rather designed to “keep your options open”. When postsecondary graduation comes around, they will encourage you to pick a career path that matches those internships. It is very hard to escape those social pressures.

You have a good head on your shoulders and you should feel proud of that. Don’t let others’ anxieties be your own.

> I've never heard anyone even talk about a party

And the stuff about sexual intercourse - really? Such a far cry from my own high school years (in the seventies), I can hardly believe it. Sounds more like the stuff I would try to convince my mother, with mixed success.

Otherwise, kudos for such mastery of language at 16.

This depends extremely strongly on the high school, I have found. Mine was fairly boring in that sense (the description given above would apply fairly well to it) and I had an interesting time listening to other people’s high school experiences when I came to college. (Though, it’s not like I spiced things up when I was there, either. I just heard about more stuff from people I actually knew who were involved in that kind of stuff, whereas in high school I couldn’t point to anyone I knew personally who might have gone to a party.)

It's not true that nobody's fucking. The LGBT kids fuck to an extent, as do some of the lower achievers, but even then it's nowhere near as much as I expected.

I'm surprised to hear you compliment my writing style. I always thought it was subpar - too many clauses, a slew of unnecessary qualifiers and weasel words, no shortage of kludges for things I can't express very well. I tend to be better at it after I've been reading a book for a while and have "effective rhetoric" somewhere in my brain's cache line.

> I'm surprised to hear you compliment my writing style.

Your comment had me on the edge of my seat, like a report from the trenches.

Just some advice, since you said you're 16. When you get a compliment, I know it's tempting to downplay yourself and seem humble, but a "thank you" is almost more appropriate. Stand by yourself :)

Sometimes I agree: In this case, I read it more as telling us how much he appreciates the compliment because of the fact he generally feels subpar.

I am the same when I speak Norwegian: When I get a compliment, I feel as he does.

I read it as somewhat insulting to the complimenter. "You think this is good? My own standards are much higher."

Maybe that's unfair, but in the context of the author's prior description of being involved in trying to achieve, or join, or do things to stand out, the interpretation I gave feels more plausible.

It seems much more polite and appropriate to me to not react that way.

Your very articulate derision - of your own ability to articulate yourself - gave me a good laugh.

> The LGBT kids fuck to an extent, as do some of the lower achievers, but even then it's nowhere near as much as I expected.

I'm trying to be charitable and not over-interpret the juxtaposition of "LGBT" and "lower achievers". I'm surprised you have so much time to study who is having sex. Quite remarkable.

Those are orthogonal concepts anyway

I know that.

It might actually reflect your own prejudice a bit that you're interpreting it that way. Speaking as a rainbow myself over here, it's...not unlikely? Throw a bunch of teenagers or young adults in support groups together with the subtext that they all have the same sexual orientation with no chance of being shamed for making advances for what's effectively the first time in most of their lives, and it doesn't take a fortune teller to figure out what's probably going to be happening in greater rates for those kids.

And there's definitely evidence that lower academic investment is correlated with higher sexual activity; I've been up for dozens of hours now so forgive me for not throwing some papers in your direction, but they shouldn't be hard to find.

I don't think it's healthy for anyone to really analyze this stuff for any demographic, but acting like what he said was so awful was really out of line, and pretty clearly breaking HN's guidelines.

The way it was written makes out they have hard evidence of who is having sex broken down by grade and orientation. I don't believe that for a second.

I guess you just need to write assertively and nobody will question it.

It might surprise you to know (/s) that people in high school talk about sex. A lot. It's not unreasonable to assert that he does know roughly what's going on.

There isn't any way to accurately track how many people in a high school are having sex. We used to talk about sex a lot when I was in high school too, but I really have no idea how much actual sex was going on.

> Throw a bunch of teenagers or young adults in support groups together with the subtext that they all have the same sexual orientation with no chance of being shamed for making advances for what's effectively the first time in most of their lives, and it doesn't take a fortune teller to figure out what's probably going to be happening in greater rates for those kids.

Honestly, I think the bigger reason is that there's no chance of pregnancy in gay relationships, so one big barrier is just gone.

>Speaking as a rainbow myself over here, it's...not unlikely? Throw a bunch of teenagers or young adults in support groups together with the subtext that they all have the same sexual orientation with no chance of being shamed for making advances for what's effectively the first time in most of their lives, and it doesn't take a fortune teller to figure out what's probably going to be happening in greater rates for those kids.

Also rainbow, but I don't quite see that. The straight kids are already thrown together in all kinds of ways and for the most part know that each other are straight. On top of that, there's the issue of numbers. If there are, say, 20 out gay kids of a given gender in a high school, it's quite likely that there are no mutual attractions between any of them.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Mind sharing the title of the book?

The fact that you know more brevity would improve your style puts you ahead of some English majors I went to University with.

I'm sure you're sick of hearing it, but your generation does give me optimism for the future. I believe you'll have to do more with less than your predecessors, and for my own failures in mitigating that you have my apologies. But you do make it plausible that we might just muddle through the upcoming troubles.

High school can be many things. And it's not just binned into stereotypes.

For me high school was full of sex and parties. And by far the most sex and partying was via robotics club, believe it or not. Which is also where I learned the most about engineering and really developed a hunger to go to university.

For my kids I want high school to be a whole experience. Equal measures social, sports, and academics. Maybe less sex.

As is mentioned elsewhere a lot of that might be the case of just no one talking about it publicly. I went to high school in the era when smartphones just started to be a thing. No one was really talking about sex out loud, people would get caught with drugs occasionally (a lot of xanax and weed), but why would anyone talk to the person who sat at the lunch table with the kid who wore a tail everyday.

I was also in one of the first schools that issued laptops to all students. The use of them was similar to how the parent post described smart phones. The honors/ap kids would either type notes or just not use them. The CP kids would be on... whatever the unblocked site of the day was (people figured out pretty early on that google docs/google wave were good ways to chat). The weirdos like me were playing cat and mouse with the tech people hosting proxies, imageboards, and meebo (IM client) repeaters. I'll never forget the day we went to the stupid url we used for it, and it redirected to barney.com. We also had a rather robust sneakernet set up for distributing giant packs of flash games and early versions of minecraft.

I graduated HS 10 years ago and it was pretty similar in my experience, maybe a bit less extreme. There were some "stereotypical teens" at my school but they were a minority. Everyone I was surrounded by was trying to squeeze in as many AP courses as they could, as many officer positions in different extracurricular organizations (NHS, band/choir/orchestra, yearbook, athletics, etc) as they could. Our valedictorian actually managed to hack the system to take an extra class period each semester just to jack up her GPA. I remember when I told my parents, children of the 70s and 80s, that the "popular kids" at school were the overachievers, not the jocks (though there was overlap). They were bewildered by the concept.

We didn't all have websites or talk about buzzwords or "branding" ourselves, but we definitely were branding ourselves for colleges even if we didn't call it that. It was incredibly stressful, TBH. More than college itself. Sounds like it's only gotten even more intense.

It's funny: the tech gold-rush didn't start until a couple years later, so our computer science class was actually a small, tight-knit group mostly free of people who were just trying to boost their college credentials. Everybody who was there wanted to be there, and we'd do extracurricular projects and even road-tripped to a programming competition once. It was really great.

> the "popular kids" at school were the overachievers, not the jocks

This may be a silver lining in an otherwise very gloomy comment page? When I was in HS (though not in the US), popularity was highly correlated with wealth and/or political activism.

Yes and no. It's not great that people start the rat race so young now. Especially since it doesn't actually make that much of a difference: extra "accomplishments" in HS are only loosely associated with better colleges, and the college you go to is only loosely associated with how well your life actually goes afterward. The things that really end up mattering are a) choosing a field that the economy happens to want at that point in time, b) developing a good network, and c) being able to think for yourself and problem-solve (this doesn't only apply to STEM). But instead people burn themselves out chasing accolades that aren't actually all that important, sometimes neglecting these more important factors.

It reflects a failing to teach these things. You spelled it out ABC and I agree that it's as easy as that, but all kids here are extracurriculars and APs and this and that, since that is what their high school teacher is telling them them, not someone in the wider economy-based workforce.

There were some extremely smart people in my high school that ended up being sold that siren song of humanities major in small expensive new england private school, only to end up in an an irrelevant career due to a lack of networking opportunities. Those that made it out alive had a fund in their name set up at birth.

My advice is to take active steps to improve your chances. You want an opportunity, so go where there is more of them for you to chase at a large school in a large city to increase your odds of running into one of these opportunities, both within the school or in the local economy. It also makes it easier to pivot into another field if you really don't like where you started. Chances are, that niche liberal arts school in rural Maine might only be really strong in that one department, but the state school will be decent in 10 because larger state schools have an easier time securing funding for more departments (unless the private school is Harvard).

Yeah. The other thing is, if you do decide to pursue that liberal arts degree - we need some people who do! - know that you are shooting for academia and plan accordingly. It's cutthroat, but it's possible. But only if you make a concerted effort. Don't just get a degree in something you like and assume a job is going to fall into your lap afterward. Have a plan.

I hate to come at it from this angle because I'm so exasperated by the parents who write off all degrees without a clear economic angle as worthless. Passion matters. But so does prudence. Choose your path carefully, and then figure out what you need to do to make it happen. The vast majority of degrees aren't get-a-job-for-free cards.

That wasn't my point though.

> but the "second-tier" schools (Carnegie-Mellon, Rensselaer, Duke, Cornell, etc.)

Odd how the perception among high schoolers differs from that of industry.

In the software engineering industry, CMU is considered top-tier, along with a few others probably not on this group’s radar like University of Washington.

Also, fwiw, Cornell is Ivy League too, and afaik Duke is considered effectively same tier as Ivy League.

CMU is arguably top tier only for CS (where it is basically the top college tied with 3 others), the ivies generally are highly ranked in sciences and liberal arts, and also in other areas. The industry knows what's the best for subjects relevant to them, the school kids are just going by a general quality perception (which may or may not match with the industry perception).

Carnegie-Mellon and U of Washington (UW) are both top 10 for CS programs, so that's not surprising. I imagine high schoolers who are CS applicants are well aware of this fact.

I'm getting to 35 now and I had an experience that felt very similar to yours in my coastal magnet school. Lots of academics, lots of extracurricular stress, kids of immigrants who pushed for more, more, more. The guy who sat next to me in German committed suicide.

As the years have gone by I've realized two things:

1. The other behaviors are there, but they get filtered and harder to notice. Many of the situations you see in dramas are just...less dramatic, and more ordinary in real life. People don't want to bring it up, they want to stay in their routine, and when you have a ton of structure(as is the case in these schools) things move on too quickly to reflect on anything or become self-directed, so it gets repressed. The media version goes out of its way to highlight it, in contrast.

Many years after I graduated, the popular physics teacher at my high school was caught fooling around with the girls and doing favors for them. Apparently this had been going on for many years. You never would have known. He was a good teacher.

2. At a young age, even if you've encountered these things, you aren't necessarily sensitive enough to accurately judge what is happening to you or to others. Since teenagers struggle with this they start looking for easy ways to provide themselves with an identity - and media is happy to supply you with a stock identity that is, in rough approximation, true to you. But of course, they are all a mismatch on some level. And when young people socialize they are often prone to projecting on each other in an unhealthy way, drawing boundaries and defining characters out of thin air.

Which, if I were to turn that into advice, it would be: Stay focused on the ordinary stuff. Keep a diary so that when you notice something, it gets recorded and you can reflect on it and challenge it. It's the one thing that is most missing when you get caught up in feelings of urgency.

I doubt that’s the general experience of high schoolers.

I was in honors and AP programs in high school in the 90s and I’d have described a similar dynamic at my school, until one year my ADHD got the better of me and I failed english and had to go to summer school. It turns out a whole lot of kids in my high school were doing drugs and having parties and having sex. They just aren’t in your classes at your school.

That was the best summer of my high school experience, FWIW.

Strange, I finished HS in '95 and was taking mostly honors and AP throughout. We partied plenty. Drugs weren't rampant, but pot, X, and assorted pills were common. College choices were generally strong - most of us landed at UVA, VT, or W&M (hard to go wrong in VA) but a some landed at the Ivies, Chapel Hill, Duke, etc.

As far as I can tell, the big difference between then and today, at least here in metro DC, is the competitiveness of admissions to the top-tier state schools. UVA, VT, and W&M used to be sure things for anybody with a B+ GPA, some AP coursework, and 4 years of consistent extracurriculars. These days, everybody has a better-than-perfect GPA (due to AP bonuses) and a lifetime of hyper-focus on one or two extracurriculars. Doesn't seem to be any time for exploration and just having fun any more.

Ah yes, the second tier of Carnegie Mellon and Cornell. Lol.

Second-tier compared to the world's top universities; that is, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and their ilk. I've seen posts on this website[0] how some big tech companies almost exclusively skim off the top.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15543371

CMU is definitely "top five" for CS, though (at least in the US, which is mostly where the big tech companies recruit from anyway). And while going to a top school might be an advantage at somewhere like Google, you have good odds of getting in even if you don't. There are other ways of differentiating yourself that are more effective.

There is plenty of work, why focus so much about the big tech companies? The notion that you have to jump through hoops to get a tech job is pretty ridiculous. If you know your stuff you’ll have no trouble to find a job even without a degree from a fancy school.

because the bug tech companies are more likely to pay big $$. There's a huge gap in salary potential between FAANG and the rest. There's always outliers among the rest, but that's generally the case. So if you're optimizing for $$ and prestige, you optimize for getting into FAANG.

Sure if money is what you want to optimize for, that's the route to take. For me it was always more about the passion in building things, money is nice but IMHO other things are more important.

I'm pretty confident that most of the young people optimizing to get into the very top schools, are optimizing for $$.

Perhaps to some extent some are optimizing for social class (staying in the one they grew up in).

I've worked at two of "FAANG" and know enough people at two of the others (all but Netflix). The vast majority of Americans at all those companies went to mediocre public universities. (I don't know enough about foreign educational credentials to judge whether that's true of non-Americans).

The notion that FB/Amazon hire primarily from the top 5 universities is so totally unrelated to reality that I feel like I'm watching people discuss the consequences of the fact that the earth is flat.

> "There is plenty of work, why focus so much about the big tech companies?"

Big tech companies tend to have interesting work. Why would anybody jump through the hoops to go to a top university to get an ordinary coding job?

That's bs. I work for a big tech company, and do interviews for them as well. Most people went either to a state school, a normal university in another country, or a small liberal arts college. Very few big tech employees have degrees from the "elite" class of universities. The same is true for interviews, the vast majority of interviews are not given to the so-called "elite" class, and the new grads I've interviewed from said class are no better or worse on average than people who attended less prestigious schools.

True. But there are more prestigious companies than the big tech firms which do this.

The poster said "big tech companies". Presumably this means Amazon, FB, Google, Microsoft, etc.

But that's because most people don't go to elite institutions. The only way to know this would be to build as data set of all the hires at FAANGs, for example, and then compare students from elite institutions to non elites. I would imagine these companies are not keen on sharing this data though.

It is simply not true that big tech companies hire almost exclusively from world top 5 schools.

Going to a university that's top in your field is perfectly fine for anyone who intends to go to a FAANG, take it from me. Tech employers care about what you can do with your education, not where it came from.

While CMU is huge in computing, it's lacking in prestige. Cornell is most-frequently referred to as a 'fake Ivy' everywhere college discussion can be found, and has been since the 1980s. I direct the audience's attention to the results of the search query "fake ivy university":

https://www.google.com/search?q=fake+ivy+university

Never seen that before.

There’s definitely a hierarchy to Ivy League schools, but it varies depending on which one you went to.

(Source, one of 3 in my immediate family who went to an Ivy.)

This is actually accurate. The main product of the Ivy League is prestige by association in the general populace, and it requires mass marketing to try to keep their brand of prestige scarce. The fact that the studentry and faculty are as able and smart at the state universities is irrelevant to the product.

I thought UChicago had that laurel

Speaking as someone who went to CMU myself, this joke is even funnier.

A common "feeling" among many of my classmates at the time, was that most of us went to CMU because we couldn't get into MIT.

>The main thing I notice among my peers is an obsessive (borderline autistic) focus on "getting in" and having good credentials. Enjoying your life and doing things that you take pride in are secondary to the all-encompassing drive to impress people who know nothing about you.

This sickness was around a decade ago when I was in HS but it sounds like its gotten worse.

> If I had to characterize my generation with a pathology, it would be exhibitionism.

I'm not sure it's about exhibitionism, or some ego-driven motivation, but rather a profound fear about being left out of the group.

We know humans have biological social behaviors like cooperation but until social media we didn't really have ways to measure how others reacted to us. Seeing a number of likes, shares, upvotes, etc, is the ultimate drug for the social animal.

> not necessarily to the Ivy League (everyone knows that's just luck of the draw), but the "second-tier" schools (Carnegie-Mellon, Rensselaer, Duke, Cornell, etc.)

Cornell is an ivy league school, and calling the likes of cmu and Duke "second tier" schools?? by any metric they're on par or. better with ivy league schools

The value of an Ivy is the prestige that comes with it. CMU is only prestigious in computing. Academically Duke is better than most Ivies, and it's got some pretty nice name recognition because of its outreach programs, but it doesn't really have the prestige of most Ivies.

I'm mostly just entertained that in a discussion like this, MIT is completely absent. For obvious reasons, granted, but it's still funny.

It makes sense that MIT is absent as large donations can’t guarantee your kid gets into MIT.

I don't think that's exactly fair. There are plenty of other great ways to look good to MIT that are primarily available to people in higher income brackets; it's not controversial that MIT caters more to the middle-class than most universities, but the middle class is small now, and the upper class has learned to emulate it over the years.

It still has many of the same flaws the rest of them do.

Oh really? They can't?

CMU has a tremendous reputation in fields other than CS--engineering, fine art, psychology. However, it may be that those fields themselves are less prestigious than law, finance, and politics.

As a CMU undergrad in the 90s, most of us in technical majors talked and thought about the school as a deliberate act of self-flagellation. I don't imagine Harvard students fell into similar ways of thinking.

This seems to be a direct outcome of globalism on digital steroids. Globalism increases the pool of people everyone uses for social comparison. Small scale achievements become negligible as they provide no sense of social status.

You just suggested that a lot of ivy-league schools are second tier. I'm not sure you're very representative of the vast majority of people.

In Texas, there's stuff like Stanford and Cornell, which is ivy league -- 1-2 kids might do that. Then we have 2 top tier state schools, then it's the other stuff.

Everyone else I work with got some degree from an Ivy League. Half have PhDs. It carries some weight and I think we get better VC funding and it's easier to get customers, but I don't think the degrees do much beyond that.

The point of the degree is to have it and then pretend it doesn't matter.

When I read these threads I feel like I'm reading an ethnography of life on another planet.

I did an IB magnet program in high school, graduating ~2008, and I don't know anyone from even that self-selected sample of people who went to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. One girl went to MIT.

The overwhelming majority of these people, who again, were a much brighter sample than the average teenager, ended up at either the U. of A. or ASU (A=Arizona).

Do you have your own blog? I am impressed with the prose and content (and perspective! seems incredibly self-aware) of this comment, _especially_ considering your age. Since you say you too are playing the exhibition game, do you have a personal website? If not, I'm sure people would read what you have to write. It's interesting.

Truly ironic that the first comment is a request for a blog post.

It is not ironic; it is in direct response to what he wrote. He mentions extensively the importance of building one's brand, and that even he is a victim of that mindset. Therefore I am curious IF he has a blog, and I am curious what that blog contains in case that it exists.

Social media is more important for building a brand than a blog

No, I don't have a blog. There aren't many things I'd like to write about, and pretty much all of the things I would like to write about have been written about more eloquently by others. There's a lot of subpar and garbage information in this world, especially on the internet, and I'd rather not contribute to the pile if I can help it.

> pretty much all of the things I would like to write about have been written about more eloquently by others

You may want to blog anyway https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/you-should-write-b...

And it is kind of funny that I'm linking to another blog to make my point since "it has been written about have been written about more eloquently by others"

That is a wonderful post. I would also add these points:

- effective async networking with entire internet

- you'll think deeper about the things you care about learning/studying/achieving

- you can express ideas more reliably

- you can open source your knowledge

https://twitter.com/jborichevskiy/status/1252652698614198272...

> ...I'd rather not contribute to the pile if I can help it.

Predictively on point[1]:

> We fucking hate micromanaging Ivy League grads who are too scared to take initiative and possibly make mistakes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22987935

>the Ivy League (everyone knows that's just luck of the draw

> the "second-tier" schools (Carnegie-Mellon, Rensselaer, Duke, Cornell, etc.)

I love this. And I'm not putting you down, I didn't know Cornell was an Ivy until I was 22. It reminds of the funny jokes at Andy Bernard's expense on The Office.

This is actually a very accurate depiction of what is happening to the industry. Not too many problems left to solve, so the investors are desperate to fund anyone who can put up a great show and sound convincing. Now a part of this great show would be hiring a great team without actually having a problem to solve, so here you go. The credentials in most cases simply make a difference between doing close to nothing for $300K/year vs. doing the same thing at a less fancy company for $80K/year. Since what you do isn't actually important anymore, your skill or intellectual abilities aren't valued as high.

If you don't want to be a part of the bullshit show, you've got to learn to distinguish between problem-driven projects and show-driven projects. The former are scarce, and the latter are intentionally disguised to pass for the real thing, but unless you learn to see the difference, you'll be stuck in a rather depressive loop of being a prized trophy sitting on a shelf.

My bet is that the COVID-19 pandemic will bring enormous attention to biomedical research, vaccine development, immunology, etc. New discoveries will be made, that would also apply to many less critical conditions. Of course, there will be a fair share of Theranos-like scams, so have your bullshit detector up and running.

This is so sad... I cannot even begin to contemplate. When I was young blogging was something exciting and new. You could share your thoughts and interests with complete strangers and make connections to people you didn't even know -- albeit not very deep ones. Never once was it about status or signalling -- I mean surely there were people for whom this was important, but they were playing their status games with each other and didn't bother the people that wouldn't care about such nonsense.

It is a horrifying notion that you are only valued based on the output of your blog / FB / twitter account. I used to think that for every cultural movement there is a counter-movement that tries to invert the values of a previous generation. Are there people in your circle that explicitly reject this notion of self commodification and exhibitionism?

When I was young computers and taking computer programming in high school (gasp!) was for nerds and losers. The only thing that shielded me from ridicule and worse was my physical size and playing varsity sports. University combined a lot of us computer-lovers, regardless of whether we were obvious nerds or hid behind something else in our previous lives - it was great to be special and on top.

Now everyone feels obligated to "learn computers" and pursue the academic path after HS. Sadly as a whole we're not being successful; we're essentially customers of both.

I sure hope some kids are rejecting the current culture and creating something new that will up-end the current path...

Our generation did have a bit more of a 'happy go lucky' attitude, towards authority and the whims of circumstance both. To some degree I see the determination to buckle down and play a flawed system better than their eldars as the current generation's mode of rebellion against our 'anything goes' ethic.

I think you are on to something in your second sentence. To what extent do you perceive these social effects being a result of the cultural character of those places that your classmates or their parents have emigrated from? It seems that affluent (or at least professional class) immigrants of the past three decades are very attuned to status/conformity, and so your experience may well be outside the 'norm' of the US. Keep your mind open as you grow up and meet people from across this country, there is an exciting amount of thought/values diversity if one looks for it in good faith. Focus on the upsides in the hyper-competitive nature of your current peers, they will hopefully mellow with age and wisdom (and will be extremely capable!).

Is this your env or you? Chances are you are a Silicon Valley native, and you have at least 4-5x the reaources and advantages of kids on average in the us. Many don’t or can’t go to college, not because they wouldn’t if they were you, but because they can’t because they aren’t you.

You write very well.

But this: "Enjoying your life and doing things that you take pride in are secondary to the all-encompassing drive to impress people who know nothing about you. "

I'm sorry to say is a vicious new Anglo/American trend that used to be only for specific groups 30 years ago and has metastasized ... sadly into everything.

Please don't let it steal your youth.

Consider that most of it doesn't work, that people have pretty good subconscious BS filters. Just be yourself. At the office, obviously a little more than that, but even then worry less about 'personal brand' there is nothing to gain.

I went to a school with similar dynamics, and if it's any comfort, I can assure you that the bullshit doesn't pay off. Those of us that pursued our interests deeply had our pick of college, those obsessed with simple metrics like AP count and SAT score got to what you call second-tiers if they were lucky, and those chasing leadership positions in do-nothing clubs got sweeping rejections. The system is not fair by any means, but it's not stupid, it can recognize people trying to game it.

You read much more mature than your age. Not sure if this comment is some sort of humblebrag or a 40-something pretending some alter-ego.

Taken at face value I’d say stay steady, ‘tis a good path you’re on

> I wish I could say I'm above it all, but I've certainly internalized it to some extent

IMO, you are well above it all, or may be you will get there in a couple of years. You are doing fantastic for someone who is 16. Most people do not achieve this level of self-awareness even when they are 60. But there is a dark side to this precociousness. You are not ignorant, and that will often drive you to despair when you observe the simians around you. Like they say ignorance is bliss.

And I think that the major cause of this is parents' pressure. I experience it myself (also 16yo) and I see my classmates experience it to. Example: A group of us are doing a CAS project (required for the IB diploma) and we'd formed a group of boys. Before we finalised our group, one of the guys said (I kid you not) that his parents told him that having a girl on the group would help him on college apps. I wasn't opposed to the idea, but the motivation was clear: he didn't want to do it for diversity of opinion, he wanted to do it because his parents said so. And the attitude of the kids extends to how they perceive others. There's almost a hierarchy of students in my school: the ones that aspire to first-tier, second-tier, and so forth, to community college at the lowest step on the ladder. Students in the higher steps have internalised what they've been told about the college apps process, and scoff when someone suggests that maybe the community college or state college route is best, so that you're not saddled with student loan debt.

With regards to smartphones, I find that I have almost the opposite experience. My high school has the same three tiers as yours: IB/AP, Honors, regular classes. I find that smartphone use is generally the same across classes, yet it is done more openly in regular classes, under the table in Honors, and in the IB/AP classes, they resort to using their smartwatches to type (generally because the IB/AP kids are richer, another bad part of high schools in the US).

Also, wow. Your school doesn't have anyone dating? In my school there are many carnal relationships among students who take the regular classes.

I graduated from High School in 2008 and in my small area, it was only just becoming possible to take college classes (dual enrollment) with the local community college. The next year, most of the AP and Honors kids were taking several classes to at least knock out all the non-relevant classes you have to take for any degree. This likely saved them time and money in college since if they went into something like physics, they already had credit for psychology, history, English, calculus, chemistry...etc.

Louisiana has this amazing program called TOPS that pays 100% tuition for any in-state college, so most people take advantage of that and go to LA Tech, ULL, or LSU. Because of that, I had no admissions problems because even though those schools have incredibly good engineering programs (stupid hard course load and small classes with a high student to teacher ratio and very good chance of jobs and internships), the barrier to entry is pretty low and you just need a pretty average ACT score. The hardest barrier for most students (like most colleges) is room and board.

Like you mentioned, I think maybe 8% of my class was dating, only 2% probably smoked weed, a lot of people were into sports, music, and academics. However, STEM programs only showed up in my area a few years later (FIRST, Arduino stuff... etc). The schools which already had STEM programs had students which made great grades freshman year as they already had learned basic programming, electric circuits, and other engineering basics without having to learn everything from scratch like the rest of us.

I'm sure it's even more competitive now. Being a teenager in 2020 must be rough. I mean, in some ways it's a lot better (no WW2 or Vietnam clouding over you), but there are also no easy jobs leading to a house and car with 1 income.

> if they went into something like physics, they already had credit for psychology, history, English, calculus, chemistry...etc.

Calculus and chemistry are very relevant to physics!

Hey Walter, I should've phrased that differently.

With less time used taking classes like Psych 101 (which is generally a waste of time for engineering and science majors) you have more time to study and complete assignments in your core classes. The university says it wants you to take these classes to be "well rounded", but honestly, they just want more money from students.

Regarding Calculus and Chemistry (all important to physics of course);There were several students I knew that clipped out of all of the freshman/sophomore chemistry and calculus classes and just started with organic chemistry and differential equations. This meant freshman year was a little rougher, but they were done with all of their non-major courses by sophomore year, so they were able to take a lower course load in their next three years and better absorb the core classes. I majored in electrical engineering, and still really struggled with all my calculus classes despite taking AP Calculus in high school. So instead of just focusing on circuits, coding, control systems...etc, I had to split my time with stuff like chemistry/calculus/random classes like Psych, so there was a lot less time to use for homework, projects, and harder subjects (assembly and microprocessors aren't too bad by themselves, but when you're mentally sharing that same space with a bunch of other classes it is brutal). Of course, most colleges are like this, but I think I'd rather have less required subjects, but time to go into them in additional depth.

AP stem classes are great for easing the transition to college level work, but they are no substitute for college stem classes. If you're a physics major, for example, you need to be taking honors calculus as a freshman, not the weeder classes, and AP calculus is just a warmup.

In my experience, every STEM class in college is just paint over a math class. The stronger your math skills are, the more you can concentrate on the paint rather than struggling with the math.

I agree it's a good plan, however, to take AP courses outside of your major so in college you can take more stem classes. My college offered so many exciting stem classes I was a bit frustrated to have to take some non-stem classes to satisfy the degree requirements. No, I don't think that requirement was to make more money, it was genuinely believed that those were needed for a well-rounded education. That idea isn't entirely without merit.

It's kinda ironic that you don't really know what classes you'll need until you are in industry (or whatever).

For example, I really wish I could've only taken EE classes relevant to power systems + public speaking + several comp sci electives (programming, databases, etc) and as much statistics as I possibly can. The standard major was still good though and set me up to learn on my on.

I tried to select classes that would give me the most flexibility so I could pivot as needed. Though one of the most fun classes was Jet Engine Cycle Analysis. I finally learned how they really work, other than that hand-wavy nonsense that was ultimately unsatisfying. Got a job offer from Pratt&Whitney and almost took it.

That's an interesting point and can help you go anywhere when starting off.

With what you've done over the past couple of decades (I assume you're the guy that has written one of the first C++ compilers and invented D), would it not have been better for you to take more classes on compiler design or other computer science/computer engineering related courses? Did jet engine analysis (I assume you're a mechE) ever help you once you found your niche?

Btw...you've seemed to accomplish far more (technically speaking) in your life than me :), so I'm genuinely asking and not trying to lecture you.

Edit: I think pretty much all knowledge I've learned has had some use, but surely the applicability would've been higher for you with more computer hardware, compiler, and algorithms related coursework?

I took a compiler construction extension course offered by Stanford in the summer of 1982. That covered all I needed to know. Modern compiler technology is just more of the the same.

My experience at Boeing has been surprisingly useful in writing software.

Besides, perhaps you don't realize how cool jet engines are? :-) Taking that class was very satisfying for me.

Haha. I recall watching a video of one of your D talks when you talk about your car. Was it a mustang, charger, or challenger? I guess I can see where a love of jet engines would come from.

TOPS is a subsidy to the middle class at the expense of those who really need it. Let me assure you as a graduate student at a Louisiana institution (not LSU) I am not impressed by their pouring fuel on the fire of rising college tuition with oil money

Not going to argue with it being funded from oil money. I've never looked into it, but assume it's true as it makes sense.

I will say that I left Louisiana and all of my coworkers have $50k-$100k in school loan debt that I don't have to worry a about, so I definitely benefited from the program and would be paying another house note without the program.

The state has scholarships funded from offshore oil royalty trust funds for grad students. I don’t have a problem with that. I have a problem with Patrick Taylor subsidizing the middle class rather than the poor.

Isn't TOPS available to all that graduate highschool with 4 years of math, English, and 2 years of foreign language (i.e. everyone)? It seems pretty egalatarian to me. Granted, the rich can afford to study and hire tutors, so getting a 32 on the ACT is far easier for them, than someone that is poor. That's more of a problem with our failing public schools though.

Credentials used to be a shortcut to less work.

Do a little more work up front, and you can do less/easier work for the same pay down the line. It was mainly a test of deferred gratification.

Now if you are lucky enough to get a good credential, your skids are still greased to some extent.

However I say that credentials used to be a shortcut because now the amount of work it takes to get a decent credential is way higher than it used to be. Is it really a shortcut if getting to the shortcut takes more work than just taking the more common path?

You can look at it from a supply-demand perspective. The easier path is the one with the same demand and less supply. Thirty years ago most people had still not caught on that credentials were the easier path. Now they have so credentials are no longer the easier path.

There is nothing intrinsic about any line of work that makes it always a better option than another. You have to weigh your personal preferences and the supply and demand for each job.

I remember in high school how powerful peer pressure was, but once you reach your late twenties none of that matters anymore.

So absurd that college admissions care about your hobbies etc. If they want to receive public funding they should have to only consider academic performance, maybe with some weighting for life circumstances. Are we missing out on the most qualified mathematicians and doctors because they didn't attend volunteer programs and play sports?

I think it's because at the top level, everyone already has perfect grades so schools need additional criteria to limit their selection pool.

They have perfect grades because of grade inflation. It's cruel that because the boundaries of what is tested have narrowed, those who wish to prove themselves must focus on perfection rather than mastery.

Then the grading system should be changed so it's not as easy to get perfect scores and a bunch of people aren't clustering at the top.

Somehow this is made to work in other countries. Many of them have competitive university entrance exams where people are ranked in order, and nobody or nearly nobody gets a perfect score.

> The main thing I notice among my peers is an obsessive (borderline autistic) focus on "getting in" and having good credentials.

This was college for me. I went to a tech university, not MIT but a good one. It was all about simultaneously impressing your professors and scoring internships with big-name tech companies. And the most driven, type-A of the whole lot? Women (of which there were few) and minorities (of which there were a lot). Don't mess with a Jersey kid from the 'hood when they have their eye on a job at Microsoft or Intel. Their lack of privilege only makes them hungrier.

I got tired of it -- and poor -- and eventually dropped out. Went to state school. There, the professors taught. I seemed to do much better, both academically and spiritually.

Thank you for sharing this.

Having read it, I feel kinda stupid. My teens were all about just getting through HS, parties, bonfires and generally all sorts of stupid things you do as a kid. I did not think thoughts on the level of 'my generation'. That level of abstraction did not even occur to me.

I was just very lucky to have cohort full of very smart kids, so even with all HS drama, I managed to learn a lot.

I dunno. In a sense, we had it easier. Mistakes were not live streamed. At worst, they were remembered.

I do not envy the pressure teens feel today. Not participating in this at all risks missing out on a chance to 'stand out'.

Geez, your writing voice does not sound 16.

Most of my exposure to the written word has been through the internet, and most of my time on the Internet has been spent on sites full of people who are much older than I am. You are what you eat, I guess.

I wonder how many of you are out there, I bet is a non-trivial number. Going into management or early financial independence are my only hope when your friends arrive.

Carnegie-Mellon is second tier? I always pictured my oldest going there and learning with some real radical change-the-world scientists and professors. I was under the impression these people were the leaders in forward thinking technological progression.

You have IBM, Package Bell labs, Microsoft, Google - doing tech in general.

And then way out there researching neurolink fungi-based mesh materials: Carnegie-Mellon.

Social media has made it all about narcissism, display your talents 24/7, failing which you are assumed to have a total lack of talent or interest. You are following your instincts and running counter to the herd, which in itself makes you a free-thinker. Trust me, you don't want to wake up one day, and not feel like you did not "live" your life.

Your comment gives anecdotal support for the argument that much of the change mentioned in the article comes down to demographics.

Tbh. this sounds super dystopian.

> nobody's doing anything stronger than weed, nobody's fucking or even dating at all

Doesn't align with my high school experience at all, where there were several pregnant girls and coke was commonplace.

Maybe each high school is just different?

very well articulated. it seems that the implicit obligation to be your own PR agency has frustrated your generation with most of fame's burdens, but few of its rewards.

You are really well spoken.

2 things: Don’t be fooled by the price of attendance, Rensselaer is a mid tier school.

Well said about exhibitionism as a pathology.

Why does the school allow anyone to keep their phones on their desks, much less tolerate use during class time?

Many don’t; students will find a way to use them anyways.

Without agreeing with it or endorsing it's thesis, that is a beautifully written piece. Cheers.

Waiting for the lawyers to launch a class action lawsuit against the smart phone industry.

That hardly worked against Big Tobacco. It isn't gonna do jack shit against an adversary that is nowhere near as transparently evil.

My girlfriend didn't k omw what we'd was until 18, didn't try it until college.

I on the other hand was a total loser by age of 13.

Key takeaway one experience of no drugs no body fucking etc. . Can't appear to be total reality to one person and not others.

You're a great writer, thanks for the account!

What's AP CP Honors? for non american readers

I'm not sure about CP, but AP is "advanced placement". You get college credit for it if you do well on a standardized test at the end.

CP stands for "College Placement" and is the baseline, AP is regulated by the College Board and considered the most prestigious, and Honors is somewhere in between.

You live in a bubble.

As current college student who went to a competitive (but not the most competitive) Silicon Valley high school a few years ahead of you, your story rings true. I thought I'd share my story to show my post-graduation perspective.

In my high school class the students who got into Ivy Leagues were either legacy students or the ones that took as many AP classes as possible and had other activities to boost their resumes. (Without legacy, this was not a recipe for admission, but if you didn't do it then you wouldn't get in except in the most exceptional circumstances.)

Since band (and marching band) were not considered AP or Honors, some students had parents that would forbid them from taking these, as it would lower their weighted GPA.

I was a straight-A student for all four years in high school, but focused on the AP/Honors/community-college classes I was genuinely interested in (physics, math, computer science, etc.). Unlike many of my most competitive peers, I also made time for things I enjoyed that may not be the most appealing thing to colleges, like marching band and the computer programming club. I had a deep interest in computer programming, and had numerous side-projects to show for it. I also got a 36 on the ACT. I did not get accepted into any private school I applied to, but had my pick of top UC schools.

Would I do anything differently (perhaps take those extra APs, drop out of band, or focus more on artificially building up my resume) for that chance I might get into a more prestigious college?

I don't think so. My peers struggled with anxiety and depression, and school morale in general was laughably low. From my contact with friends who graduated after me, it appears the situation is only getting worse. Activities like marching band were the only things that kept me sane and their enrollment numbers are becoming anemic. Despite my attempt at having a balanced life, there were countless long nights filled with anxiety and stress as I worked to keep my GPA spotless.

My first semester in college was a relative breeze compared to high school, and many of my peers from high school agreed. But college can be as hard as you make it, so the next semester I doubled up on technicals and am on track to double major. I also got some great internship opportunities and a chance to do research. My high school math teacher would often tell worried students that college is what you make of it, and where you get in (or not) need not define who you are.

As for my future career, college names do mean a lot on resumes, but not getting into an Ivy League is not the end of the world. Recruiters still come to campus, and my friends at lower-ranked colleges have gotten internships at FAANG companies. I think the college name just dictates how much harder you have to work to be noticed by a recruiter.

But what exactly is the end goal in all this? A life in an insanely expensive area working long hours to stay to competitive? Is there another path? These are still questions I ask myself, and I don't think I have the answers. I suppose this is where each person needs to look deeply within and figure out what is best for them, and thank goodness I didn't lose sight of my real self in high school in order to build up an artificial resume. Some of my peers did, and immediately enrolled in the CS program despite having barely touched a computer program before college. I really hope they find what makes them happy, and don't get stuck in a career they hate. Perhaps someone a few years ahead of me can share some wisdom.

> but had my pick of top UC schools.

It's not an Ivy but I would think a UC Berkley diploma would get you practically as much access as any of them. UCLA and maybe UCSB to a great extent as well.

All that building your brand and trying to convince people of your identity in place of actually having one is not exhibitionism but narcissism. There used to be a very good blog about this being the root of cultural and social rot we see around us.

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/

Dude, you're responding to a 16 year old. At that age, they are literally inventing their identity. As for the "building your brand", everyone is doing that even when they don't know it (consciously or unconsciously). Doing it consciously is because teens are by and large shit scared that they aren't or won't be "good enough", and often they're steered into "standing out" in some way (for nerds, often through academic excellence "with a twist"). They are exhibiting standard behaviour for an envioronment in which there's much more (perceived) demand for "good careers" than (perceived) supply.

> academic excellence "with a twist"

Nailed it better than I ever could.

Building your identity should not be tied to building your brand when you are 16. I’ve grown up in Europe but lived in the US for some time. What I noticed is a distinct lack of subculture in young people (college), everyone seems to be very homogenized and this is in stark contrast to what I perceived in Europe. Of course this is anecdotal but I wonder if this is a result of this crazy system that doesn’t allow missteps, doesn’t allow building your own identity, but instead forces you to be focused on security and your brand from an early age onwards as not to be crushed by college debts.

Isn't "building your personal brand" just a synonym for "building your resume" or "building your reputation"? At least, unless you're planning to become an Instagram influencer with their own line of cosmetics?

I can assure you, kids have been doing extracurriculars that look good on college applications for longer than most of us have been alive.

Well that’s a bit my point. This isn’t really a thing where I grew up, but has become very normalized in the US. Building your resume certainly wasn’t on my or any of my friends mind when we were 16. To me this is insanity. Maybe it’s awesome though, what do I know.

My resume when I was 16 (in the UK) was "passed high school exams, did paper round". That was perfectly normal, and I wasn't worried about it how it compared to my peers'.

True, but a lot of people on this thread have not been alive that long. The difference now is that extracurriculars are done in order to look good on applications.

This pseudopsychological explanation for an rational response is really ridiculous. These 16-year-olds are developing their resumes not because they're narcissistic. They're doing so because everyone's very plausibly saying that being middle-income is getting harder and harder to live as, and they're anxious to get into a good university to help their career prospects.

> All that building your brand and trying to convince people of your identity in place of actually having one

Well, that's because college admissions value seem to value identities like robotics / programming club president more than identities like having fun with friends and trying different things together (secondarily to the friendship), which seems to be a more mentally healthy pursuit and better for cultivating a healthy identity but not what admissions are looking for.

You should have said you were 12.

Please tidy up your foul language. It makes your otherwise good writing hard to read.

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