Hacker News Reader

Comment by swagasaurus-rex | Hacker News Reader

We tell college kids, “follow your dreams,” but do not give them hard facts about job salaries, opportunities, risks, number of job positions open, or the nature and day to day work they will do while on the job, or how much extra education they will need before being qualified to start a career.

View on HN

Even worse, in college you get hit with a survivorship bias, as you're mostly exposed to the professors who "made it" in these fields and managed to find a career.

This.

Plus you don't see the countless other faculty who are trying to "make it" by hoping to adjunct their way into a fulltime position. Living hand to mouth in hopes of just earning a stable paycheck - nevermind at a particularly prestigious institution (those roles are reserved for those who "made it" and attended an equally prestigious intitution).

The information is out there. I certainly had no trouble finding it when I was 18. And nobody told me that blindly following my dreams was a good idea either. In high school and college we used to joke about majoring in English being good practice for asking “do you want fries with that?” after graduation. We all knew that STEM degrees were where the money was after college.

I was talking with someone who went STEM.

He said:

I really liked philosophy and history and would have done that but they showed that I needed a degree I could make a living with.

I was told in highschool that the major with the most job opportunities was petroleum engineer. I'd be hesitant to have kids make career defining choices based on data that can change on a whim.

A lot of people are thinking like you, and far fewer people are studying petroleum engineering (there is also a negative social stigma), which is leading to a shortage. It will probably lead to even better job prospects for at least another generation.

https://energyfuse.org/petroleum-engineering-enrollment-is-i...

I am about the biggest advocate for moving away from fossil fuels as there is, but it certainly isn't going away in our lifetimes. And even in a world where 0% of fuel comes from fossil fuels, we'll still need petroleum for other uses.

My freshman year I was aiming to enter the engineering program, so I could be a petroleum engineer, for the reasons above.

I took an intro CS, and that changed everything.

I don't think I ever heard the expression 'follow your dreams' in high school in the '90s.

Even as a teen it sounded too pie-in-the-sky.

But I will say that in the last 10 years the idea of the young billionaire dropout has certainly been glorified. An idea which can be every bit as harmful as to just 'follow your dream'.

All that information will be out of date by the time they graduate. 8 years is a long time —- colleague talk starts as a freshman in high school.

In junior year of HS (US) my teachers forced us to sit down and actually write out a budget for our expected wages and then run some years of expenses month by month. That was very eye opening and I think would still be relevant in 8 years.

Actually during high school they did tell us salaries and perspectives. That was al part of a course called "choice study". This just reaffirmed my choice for CS. This was around 2000 and in the Netherlands.

I was fine with being called nerd by people going into commerce. Now it's us they need for their next SaaS.

We definitely didn't tell our kids that, more like "make sure you get a business minor if you pursue something with low earning potential". I think kids do still hear that but not from any of the parents I know.

I always tell people who are looking for a career path to look at the BLS website. They have great data about the demand, job numbers, earnings potential, for just about every job.

it all starts at middle/high school. if young person does not get good high school education and rigor with AP classes in stem - they wont be able to get into STEM program, even if they do they would struggle.

Another thing is software/automation is eating many jobs, and jobs occupied by humanities are first to get automated/outsourced. Jobs like marketing, communication, HR, Sales - everything is becoming data-first, data analysis driven - and for that you need STEM skills

It is worse than that. We tell kids that at age 18 they are supposed to have some lofty dreams to follow.. which results in them picking whatever THING that is popular around them, but mostly just getting drunk daily in college.

The most worthless garbage degrees are studies that people go to "help" people. Critical thinking: regurgitate The Message, paint hair purple, get a Communist party pin and spew some trash about boycot/divesting from Israel? Of course any mention of opposing ideas is a trigger and actual violence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com