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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".

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.

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.

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.

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%

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

Mind if I ask what generation you are in?

born in the 1980s

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.