The American-Dream-as-a-Service | Hacker News Reader

The American-Dream-as-a-Service

thepullrequest.com

24 pointsjger1522 comments

I'm feel very lucky to have gotten my first "programming job" without a technical interview (it was an unpaid high-school internship that I turned into a programming job, and eventually became full-time after I was old enough to be an employee). Interviews are still tough for me, I have experienced interview anxiety extreme enough that I went home instead of continuing a day of on-sites. The interview anxiety is totally unlike anything I deal with on the job, including during other "high stress" activities like presentations, or pair coding and debugging.

Starting my career I stepped into a totally different world. I have a lot of empathy for the situations Austen that mentions here, which are mostly even more stark than my own. I also have a ton of embarrassing stories and memories. Moving between totally different socio-economic contexts is difficult, and complicated.

I suggest practicing over and over again to reduce your anxiety. We all feel anxious when doing a whiteboard or now VC interview where they can ask you anything and you feel like you have to instantly answer.

Oh definitely! Doing high pressure practice in preparation for my last round of interviews definitely helped, and that round resulted in multiple FAANG offers.

VC interviews also seem very high pressure! I've met folks making funding decisions, but never been in the hot seat with them. It does seem closer to the "walk me through your portfolio/a project" interview than a whiteboard interview. Although obviously the stakes can be much higher.

> I suggest practicing over and over again

Anxiety isn't related to experience (or actual competence). When it's on the level mentioned, what works is CBT (if you're lucky). That may include practice, but it will certainly not be the only element.

I guess it will vary from person to person. For me, my anxiety is definitely reduced the more prepared I actually am, and the more I feel. Have I implemented all the basic algorithms in the last month in my test language, did I actually run them, do quick sort and other sorts whats the time complexity, then try a series of harder programming projects. Do some of the super common ones like design twitter. Binary search - can you avoid the overflow things when doing the divide by two...

And for experienced people, be ready to say what you left your most recent job, what you gained, what did't work well, is there a noticable arc to your career, if you want a new job type how are you prepared.

> As the number of programmers increases, the demand for programmers grows exponentially faster because we can create whatever widgets we want on our phone and sell them for whatever. It’s just infinite leverage at infinite scale for basically free.

Just because software doesn't have the same physical limitations, doesn't mean its usefulness and market value are unlimited. We use software to get physical output, even if only to draw pictures and make sounds. Said another way, there isn't infinite attention or need.

So pay to produce it will likely fall off as the market becomes saturated.

Agreed. If a barista can go from zero to full stack developer in six months and there’s no barrier to entry like lawyers/doctors have, salaries are going to crash. It’s only a matter of when.

Except that software developers mostly create problems for future developers to solve, increasing -- not decreasing -- demand. The barrier of entry has always been low, yet salaries have only gone up.

In that sense it can be a vicious cycle. Though for the higher salaries I find the lists of requirements sometimes staggering.

At least, salaries will crash for those whose skills don't set them apart from baristas who went through bootcamps.

People like Jeff Dean will always make big bucks.

I was about to comment on that same statement. The author seems to be confusing supply with demand.

Simply because you can create and distribute something doesn't mean there is a market for it. If you could, we would see a lot more professional poets.

There may be a limit to software demand but we are far from reaching it. So far the demand appears to be practically infinite. The more software we have, the more we want and the more we are willing to pay for it. (By "we" I mean the total worldwide software market, not just consumers.)

Possibly. But I don't think that trend can hold forever. There are only so many eyeballs and hours in the day per person.

There's still a third of the world left nearly digitally untransformed, though.

Most devs are really, really bad. It stands to reason the requirements and interview process will change - not the pay.

A percentage of future earnings is a good fee repayment structure. This incentivises the bootcamps to make grads employable.

A few bootcamps in the UK are being sued by former graduates who couldn't secure a guaranteed job after a year. Note that in the UK, university fees are £9k for a Master's whereas bootcamps cost £4k. Bootcamps still work out cost-effectively as they can be taken as evening classes and there's fewer months of living expenses to pay for (3 months for a bootcamp vs 12 months for a Master's)

I think people need to realize you’re getting a terrible deal when you give Lambda School x% of your earnings at your first job. Also as someone who went to college and paid for it myself these bootcamps are detracting from my American Dream because they’re empowering corporations to pay lower salaries to everyone because they have boot camp grads eager to be paid lower wages. Other specialized fields don’t allow this and for good reason, it’s really rather frustrating to those who went through the rigors of earning a degree to have to compete with someone who has an education that isn’t certified by the education system.

Is this a joke or are you being serious? The last thing we need is a mandatory certification program for software developers. If employers aren't willing to pay you extra for your degree then that's your problem. All that matters is ability to do the work.

No, it's not a joke. In fact, many developers agree: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-pro...

I believe tech is still largely a meritocracy. If you think you should be paid more than someone, you should prove it with impact. If the goal of your education was compensation and your education doesn’t enable you to have more impact than a boot camp grad, then you overpaid.

> I think people need to realize you’re getting a terrible deal when you give Lambda School x% of your earnings at your first job

To people who have other options, yes, it's a bad deal. But to those who have no way of navigating those options, like the people mentioned in the article, fundamentally changing your options landscape in exchange for a fixed percentage of an income bump you never would have realized otherwise is a fantastic deal.

I say this as a largely self-taught programmer who at one time considered giving away a huge chunk of 2 years of salary in exchange for a programming bootcamp + apprenticeship type of opportunity (this was a few years before bootcamps became a mainstream thing). It was extremely tempting and many times on my self-taught journey I second-guessed whether I could figure it out on my own and TBH, without an extremely high level of self-confidence in my intelligence and scrappiness, I probably wouldn't have figured it out on my own.

I think this is a great idea, if it can work out financially for the lender.

That is the real question -- the lender is taking on all the underwriting and credit analysis risk that the student will not get a job in their field of study, at which point the loan is discharged. There is a reason why banks have historically not done this, and it has nothing to do with them being unimaginative, but rather that the credit analysis is too difficult for them to do at anything like a reasonable rate of interest that people are willing to pay.

I don't care whether you call it equity or another type of liability, it still must be repaid and the books must balance, and I am skeptical that this is going to happen, nor do I think that the lenders are aware of the pit of liability they are wading into.

Here are some scenarios:

1. Moral hazard.

Lots of people sign up who simply lack the talent to do well in tech or decide they are bored with it. There is no cost to them, they can walk away from the obligation by quitting the program or by graduating and then looking for a job outside their field. How do you deal with that?

2. Difficulties of innovative credit analysis in the current environment.

As you are talking about education, it is a politically sensitive topic because if you find yourself charging different rates to people based on race/gender ex post (even though you do not take race/gender into account anywhere in your credit analysis) you are still opening yourself up to massive liability and charges of sexisam/racism. So major financial institutions are very heavily regulated as to their credit analysis inputs and algorithms and do not attempt to compete by being more efficient at credit analysis, as there is already a platoon of people ready to scream discrimination if any algorithm results in different outcomes for different groups. Thus no one gets creative the with algorithms.

What this means is that this start up cannot compete on credit analysis by trying to find a better algorithm. That means there isn't a lot of innovation possible in the credit analysis space right now. This means you will not be able to defend yourself against the moral hazard risk outlined in #1 above except by charging high interest.

3. Market weakness.

If students graduate in a recession, you will receive a lot less income than banks do on mortgages because there is no collateral or cost to defer. In a boom you will receive a lot more. You are taking on alot more volatility, and therefore must charge more.

4. Accusations of Usury/slavery.

Because of the above, the interest charged will need to be high and so you will get a lot people complaining about unfairness that they borrowed 10,000 but are repaying 100,000 to these sharks that are leeching off their income, and how fair is to have to repay so much. In the current climate, it is very important to seem fair. People will accuse of you taking advantage of them.

So while I do want them to succeed, I'm not sure if they can succeed in the current environment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com