For 20-Somethings, Ambition at a Cost
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The job market is weak, but there are jobs out there. Not just programming. Nursing, accounting, etc. Tons of baby boomers getting ready to retire means opportunities for young people. But those opportunities are not in oversubscribed professions like media and music.
Before we had our daughter, my wife, being from the west coast, was like 'oh, you shouldn't put too much pressure on kids--they should be what they want.' I, being Asian, thought exactly the opposite. But now that the baby is here, my wife has done a total 180. "Penn undergrad then med school" is her new plan. Like a good little half-Asian.
"The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, usually fail to do so."
"The people who don't think they can change the world, sometimes do anyway."
No idea how any of this is relevant to the OP.
The answer to that question was a definite no, some 20 years back. And no, some 10 years back. Now, the answer is yes. And in some 20 years it will be resounding yes. Why? First, because medicine gets less and less 'shaman based' and more and more evidence based. Some 20 years back you could't scan a region of your DNA and figure out that you have a particular versions of couple of proteins that wrecking havoc in your particular case. Now you can. Second, there've been improvements in statistical models and natural language processing. To the level that computers can actually outperform humans in these murky areas. An IBM success with Jeopardy is a good example. Combine these two, take into account that computers are less likely to overlook hard evidence (like DNA data, incopatibilities with medications, etc), and you would also want an expert system to look at your health data, diagnose, recommend treatments and monitor the progress.
Either way. I still think that a "med school is probably Ok" could be a good advice to a kid.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an aerospace engineer. I read books in the 80's talking about how we'd have manned Mars missions in 25 years. I actually went to engineering school for aerospace, but by then I had realized humans wouldn't go into space in a real way within my career.
Is it possible that some derivative of Watson is going to replace doctors? Maybe. Or maybe it'll just change what doctors do for a living in the same way auto-pilot changed what pilots do for a living.
My bet is that 20 years from now isn't going to look that dramatically different from 20 years ago, in a fundamental way. I remember 1993 (a year before President Clinton's first term and a year before Amazon was founded) and it wasn't all that different. We made phone calls and sent faxes instead of using e-mails, there was no Twitter, Facebook, or smart phones, but life was pretty similar.
In 1993, your circle of friends was pretty much limited to the people in your town. Maybe you had a pen pal, but that was considered to be a rare novelty and took real work to maintain. Now, I have friends all over the world, that I keep up on their day-to-day lives. When an earthquake hit SF in 1989, my reaction was "Oh, that's too bad, I feel bad for anyone who died. I'm sure we'll be talking about this in school today." When an earthquake hit Japan in 2011, my reaction was "Has anyone heard from Jennifer yet? Is she okay? I know she was in Sendai..." And I had friends all over the globe - India, Colombia, DC, Boston, Morocco, LA - asking the same thing.
In 1993, if you were meeting a friend for an event at an unfamiliar place, you called them up beforehand, specified an exact time and place that you would be, wrote down the directions or brought along a road map, and prayed they would be there when they said they would. If you got lost, you had to pull over until you could look at the map and memorize new directions. If you couldn't find each other in the crowd, you were out of luck. If you hit traffic on the way in, you'd hope they didn't think they were being stood up and apologize profusely. Now, your calendar pops open a notification when it's time to leave, taking into account traffic. You hit a button, and your cell phone navigates to the destination, automatically rerouting you if you take a wrong turn. You can't find your friend, you call or text them. You don't know what they look like, you call them and see whose phone rings.
In 1993, if you wanted to start a company, you worked your butt off for a big employer to learn the ropes of your industry. You spread your network as far as it could go. You sought out mentors. You begged for funding. And then you hired lots of people to make your dreams come true, and if your dreams were wrong, they all got laid off a couple years later. Now, you Google [startup]. You read a bunch of blogs. You download lots of open-source software. You build something, you launch it, you post it on Hacker News and a bunch of blogs, and if your dreams were wrong, you've wasted maybe a year of your life.
If your life isn't all that different from 1993, it's more likely because you're still living in the past than because the world is the same as 1993. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." For some people, the world is wildly different from what they expected 20 years ago.
Not trying to be a downer here. I'd rather the world have more aspiring doctors than talent agents, but let's also respect the march of progress, and acknowledge the cruel fate of all that stands in its way.
As an aside, being a rural doctor is amazing. They're in very short supply, and therefore the salaries are correspondingly quite high.
Watson is not AI. It can't reason. It's a very big, very fast search engine with access to a ton of documents. It's not based on any theoretical breakthroughs, just the natural advancements in computing power. It's very useful, but something that can't reason isn't going to create the sea-change people think will come out of AI, and Watson doesn't get us any closer to that goal than we were decades ago.
I'll give an example. Google's search engine has been a hugely successful application of certain AI concepts. But it is not AI. It can use the link structure of the web to help you find documents, but it could not, for example, recreate the link structure between a set of documents.
One day, of course, it'll be amazing and safe. But AI has a history of its promising advances being perpetually pushed to the future.
Population aging and people will always abuse their body and create a need for medical care delivered by a human. And as people live to older ages the base individual becomes more likely to need medical care (wish I had a better way to put this) whereas in years past that person would have died at an earlier age and not required any medical care at all.
There is indeed a glut of JD's and MBA's, but even within that supply and demand plays a role. There is no glut of say Harvard JD's or Wharton MBA's. You can tell, for the price of taking the LSAT or GMAT, what you odds of getting a job after graduation will be. No such assurances in fields like media or advertising, where luck plays a huge role in getting a job and no just pedigree.
This is true to an extent - the shortage is in primary care, but at the moment there are two issues with the field: the huge costs of medical training in the US and the fact that the cost of healthcare in the US is twice that of the rest of the OECD nations, tendency rising. Something will have to be done, but it's impossible to predict what is going to give.
Combined with the fact that medical training lasts ten years, it is an uncertain proposition.
Medicine is probably one of the more stressful work environment to be in, often with work/life balance suffering, so while positions may pay well, it may not actually lead to a happy life.
Politics and luck play a part in practically every career field. Having parents who can help support and bankroll you into a high-end medical or law school is lucky in and of itself.
It's true there is no shortage of doctors wanting to live in Manhattan or San Francisco, but most of the country lives in smaller cities and rural areas. Even parts of Chicago have doctor shortages: http://www.uchospitals.edu/news/2013/20130227-doctor-shortag...
See: http://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/notes/looming-d...
Parents should probably shift from just saying their child is going to be a doctor or a lawyer, and focus on what kind of doctor or lawyer their child is going to be, as that could influence their salary and quality of life many times over.
It will make you less than an ideal cog, so you probably won't make as much money as you could in other professions, and you'll probably struggle at first rather than being recruited. You might struggle a great deal, in fact. But if your aim is not riches and you can squeeze to put food on the table, so what?
I hope that consideration was your reason for skipping the lecture on fellatio, and not mere propriety.
Medicine is great and interesting, but I'd be lying if I said I don't obsessively regret exploring my other interests on a daily basis. I'm now $200k in the hole and trying desperately to incorporate my current medical education with my other self taught skills that I wish I'd gone to school to study. And lately I've been stressed out beyond belief as I need to make the decision whether to fully commit to this career and dedicate another 5 years of my life to grueling medical training that'll yield a comfortable living, or to jump ship after graduation to follow a dream that might very likely leave me broke, and maybe happier. All because my folks had a plan.
In general, many people complain of high med school debt, but if one looks closely the reason is that they choose private over public and not with their choice to go into medicine per se.
My wife (is younger than I am) graduated within the last 8 years from PUBLIC medical school and has roughly 200k in debt when we got married although I'm not certain what that debt is from or how much was already paid off etc.
State University of New York Undergrad including all expenses is about $22K per year (just checked) or about $90K
The NY State Med School Tuition is about $30K per year or $120K + living expenses.
So for around $250K one can get both Undergrad and Medical Education.
A number of people graduating from medical school have large debt precisely because they do not choose to go to both public undergrad AND public medical school.
4 years undergrad private school can be about $250 K for tuition and living costs. Thus, by choosing to attend public undergrad and medical school can cost the same as private undergrad alone.
Still, $250k is a shitload of debt. Putting back a solid $2k/month towards the principal (not even counting interest here) would still take a little over ten years to pay it off.
Anyway. So while we're all giving out examples and anecdotes, here's mine: I'm from an Asian family of 5, I was the only one who was given the 'follow your dreams!' advice out of the 5 (there's a long/funny story behind this). I did end up being the only one who went to school for a non-STEM field (literature/music).
Guess who's the only one unemployed out of the 5. Guess who wishes who was forced to stick to a STEM field? If I have children, damn right I'll force them toward STEM field, enroll them to a school with reputable robotics programs, expose them to folks who're in engineering/medical fields, etc.
Do read qzxt's relevant post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5308799
And lastly, because the idea of censorship doesn't sit well with me, here is what rayiner posted:
My parents had a plan for me and my brother growing up: I'd be an engineer and he'd be a doctor. At some point when we were old enough, we asserted yourselves, and I went into law and he went into banking. But in retrospect I'm glad my parents didn't just tell me "follow your dreams!" If it were up to me as a teenager, I'd just sit around all day masturbating and eating Cheetos. Kids need more direction than that.
Here is the thing about kids: they're not very smart. And they don't know it. My infant is convinced that if she sucks hard enough on my arm milk will come out. At 17 I was no less misguided just about different things.
You can always quit your professional job that puts food on the table to follow a more capricious path. But when your teenage dreams collapse against the hard ground of reality, you can't usually do the opposite.
My sister and I are both good little half-Asians. My (white) mom eventually won the childrearing battle, so we were raised under the "Follow your dreams, we just want you to be happy" advice. Guess what? We both ended up in high-paying STEM careers anyway. Why? Because we both liked science anyway, and we were aware of (but not beholden to) average career salaries for the various fields we were looking at.
Now, there were a lot of times this could have gone otherwise. My sister almost double-majored in anthropology; I almost majored in philosophy or sociology. Oh, and I almost dropped/flunked out of college twice. But we didn't, because we had this background knowledge of what the real world was like and were somehow able to make smart decisions anyway.
There seems to be this assumption in this thread that teenagers are stupid. I reject that - I certainly wasn't stupid as a teenager. Of my teenage friends that were stupid, it was usually because their parents were stupid, and so the parents wouldn't be able to make better decisions than them anyway. Rather, teenagers are ignorant - they lack life experience, so they often don't have the full picture. The cure for that is to provide all the relevant information and then let your kid make their decision, it's not to make the decision for them.
Still, these parents' hearts are in the right place. "Follow your bliss" is a great plan when you don't have to pay for it. A more responsible plan, if you don't want a profession like medicine or law, is "Develop a useful trade for income and pursue your passions on the side." If your trade involves things like computers, sales, or marketing, it can often contribute to success in your passion projects as well.
It wasn't 12 years ago...
I think they're mostly told "follow your dreams," "do what you love," etc. Those are good messages, too, in a different way, but they need to be given a realistic balance with what skills are marketable.
Personally, I learned that painful lesson by getting a post-college journalism job that paid exactly what my pre-college summer factory job had paid. "Yay for an education," I thought. And that was before the recession. For mostly unrelated reasons, I ended up in programming, but I don't want my kids to have to learn the same lesson for themselves.
I became a professional programmer for mostly pragmatic reasons (though I've always had an interest in programming), but I believe the lessons I learned as a programmer will serve me well when I eventually take another serious shot at arts/entertainment (if you can even call my first attempt serious). A lot of the hard work that goes into arts and entertainment are intentionally kept away from us, in part because it would strip away some of the "magic" and in part because a lot of people don't care how things work. As a younger person I would read books or watch movies and think I could write or direct works like that because I'm clever and entertaining and a good writer. After a few years hacking I know that being clever is worthless without great habits. I believe having that sort of mentality will take you a long way in most fields.
Doing what you love is nice. But let's talk about the reality, which is often, "Doing what you love as you sink into bankruptcy and having to take multiple jobs that exploit you so you can eke out some hours per week doing that hypothetical loved job". I heard a joke lately: a successful musician is one that only has to have a part-time job. (I have known multiple people in this situation).
Let's say you want to marry and have kids, or own a house, or travel to Africa/Asia/etc. How do you accomplish this by paying the student loans every month which eat up your savings? (They aren't wiped out via bankruptcy in the US). Do you defer your life? That's no good. Do you subject your family to poverty to fulfil your dreams? Do you just hope that your family doesn't wind up with a chronic medical condition(s)? In my opinion - and I admit, I'm a STEM person - it's irresponsible to not examine your desires and determine if you can pay the bills with this career at 35-40 years of age, with the usual responsibilities.
I'd rather see more people being plumbers, electricians, etc, and doing their dance, music, etc in the evenings than see yet another art/humanities major working three jobs and wishing their career would get started. I am all for education in the humanities, but it needs to be pushed back into high school more so that everyone gets a liberal (free person) arts education and has the freedom to pursue some 'higher' eduction or not without feeling as if they lost out on learning the 'soft & creative side' of things. At least that's my opinion!
I am truly blessed in that I can do something I moderately enjoy (programming) and get paid relatively well for it. That's a rare position to be in.
There is a high probability that at some point you wife will have to choose whether she wants a relationship with her daughter or she wants a daughter physician. I don't know how to characterize it but its especially hard on mothers and daughters in my observations. Of course your daughter could fall in love with the idea of being a doctor and poof, problem solved. Not to worry there is a lot of runway between now and then. Just keep your eyes open.
That said, there has always been an amazing amount of externalization (not sure if that is a thing) with kids who seem to go through the process of picking a future that would translate them into the person they want to be, for reasons that they may or may not accurately perceive. I did a Big Brothers thing in the early 80's with young men trying to find their way. They often aspired to being professional athletes. Some truly loved the game, they thought up strategies, they figured out shots they missed or things they could do better, some were focused on how many hot chicks really would just sleep with you because you were like, famous or something. Clearly, young men in the latter category weren't going to succeed against the guys in the first group.
To summarize my point, passion in a highly contested field, gives you the strength to reach your potential in spite of the setbacks. And when your kids start talking about what they want to be when they grow up, its always good to double check how they arrived at that answer.
Your daughter will have dreams, and passions, and misconceptions. As her parent your goal should be to let her find her passions, see through the misconceptions and realize her dreams. Doing that in the teen years is especially tough.
And what's the deal with the weird Asian stereotype obsession.
Things change, by the time your daughter is of work age there will likely be new field opened up that don't exist today at all and perhaps some that exist now will have disappeared, shrunk or become much less lucrative.
I think there's wisdom to encouraging kids to really think about their choices though in more detail than "this sounds cool!".
A good rule of thumb is to ask "what job would you want to get from studying this, and if that doesn't pan out what is the backup plan?" If the backup plan is "I will teach" then proceed with caution.
I'm a young Asian guy with very white-washed parents. Many statements below are generalizations.
Two lessons from my parents: (1) money is very important and (2) you must be excellent in your career (in that order).
Chinese, specifically, are all about wishing wealth onto one another. Although too much focus on wealth accumulation can be a bad thing, it is at least a "good problem". Many of my peers have the intelligence and ambition but villainize the concept of doing something for the money. The article itself implies that these 20somethings are the victims to their wealth-accumulating bosses (who, from the description of it, are entrepreneurs who run very high risk operations). Too many upper-middle children brought up in the early 90s have seen money's ugly side: divorce, Wall-Street, Jim Carrey's Liar Liar etc. These 90s kids are brought up by overworked parents, anti-money tenured teachers and non-profit workers. The media and the occupy movement have made it worse by victimizing these 20somethings encouraging more people to villainize wealth.
It's also important to note that the parents are out of touch with today's job market. Parents of today's 20-somethings feel like it was ONLY their hard work that got them there and consequently that their children are entitled to pursue their dreams. They forget that their generation had unions, pensions, government jobs, low interest rates and most importantly the creation of dual income. Today's 20somethings face those debts, specialized jobs, dying industries, outsourcing and lots of competition.
That being said, I think parenting for the next generation (or even re-educating 20somethings now) it's all about a balance. I don't think you have to push your daughter to be a physician necessarily. Young people just have to understand and appreciate the value of money which means teaching them about taxes, the value of health benefits, financing, leasing and investing. With that in mind, they can find a good solution or at least a compromise.
EXAMPLE USING ABOVE RANT: Daughter wants to be a ballerina. Explain to her that the prima ballerina (#1 dancer) earns less than $140,000 per year and that her career is very short. The expected pay for a ballerina falls short of $10,000/yr. If she wants to do ballet, she can find her another career that has better earning potential and dance as a hobby.
My advice to my kids would be: if you want to pursue something like art, dance, writing, music, etc., get a practical no-nonsense job. Look for something with sane work hours and that's a seller's market labor-wise. "Boring" fields like accounting are a good bet. Then live below your means, save, and pursue your art seriously. Make a commitment to it above other things. Then, if someday you advance to the point that you can support yourself via your art, you can dump the day job. But even if that never happens you didn't sacrifice your happiness.
Keep in mind that it's rather difficult to predict the job market (and payscale) 25 to 30 years in advance (assuming "baby" now, undergrad, then medical school, residency, intern etc, loans, then employment).
As an aside, back when I went to Wharton (undergrad) which was a long long time ago entrepreneurship (my major) wasn't exactly viewed as a serious path to take. And Wharton at the time had the number 1 UG business program.
Someone is a spectacular failure at hardball negotiating.
Ad hominem much? What a useless statement.
(edited because grammar)
My intent was that it's skeevy as hell to blackmail someone for growing cannabis. If there were very specific extenuating circumstances then I'd take that into account, yes. Still, federal prosecution of drug crimes often results in long periods of incarceration. I don't think that's justified for anything less than violent crimes.
HN readers might be advised to watch the new documentary called The House I Live In - it has footage from 20 states documenting the ineffectiveness, hypocrisy, and profiteering inherent in the War on (some) Drugs.
The point is that it's also "skeevy as hell" - plus probably really bad management - to ask someone to maintain your $35,000 asset (possession of which could also get you in a world of legal trouble) in exchange for just a breakfast burrito.
Ignoring the morality of the entire subject, paying someone roughly $5 for many hours of work maintaining a $35,000 asset is just poor decision making.
You probably want to make sure that the people taking care of your $35,000 asset (and the business that goes along with it) are happily paid, otherwise you might find you don't have that asset anymore.
Apparently it's common to pay trimmers in 'scissor hash', ie what THC laden goop one can scrape from cutting shears, bud to smoke and food. Perhaps this employee was only paid with a burrito but I think it may be more likely she was compensated in both food and drugs. This is not to say the employers was acting fairly though.
The real problem is educating college students early on about the ramifications of their choice of major. Perhaps this also calls for an evaluation of which subjects are emphasized in American high schools as well.
Colleges could certainly help by explaining that money matters (instead of simply encouraging students to follow their passions, as many colleges do), and that success in certain industries can be particularly elusive. However, it's understandably hard for colleges to figure out what's going on in the labor market, which is always in flux. It's actually REALLY hard to make sense of the job options out there, and the risks involved for each: employers aren't transparent about salaries, job titles are difficult to parse, and the career trajectories + risks implied by various entry-level jobs aren't obvious (even to the employers themselves).
There are some mentions of NYC internships in this book... along with research, etc. Pretty good (very anti-Internship in general).
One solution: become an account or plumber, or software developer, and laugh all the way to the bank.
People who live in or attend school in non-tech-centric cities are often screwed. There are few companies that offer attractive employment opportunities, and those that do are in a position whereby they can hire only the best. (To be honest, I think that this is true everywhere. All startups want to hire the absolute best, and only the best. It appears otherwise because the best are the vocal minority. For every Google engineer on HN that made 120k out of college and extols the ease of finding lucrative employment, there are probably several developers who went to community college or a state school that spend their days in a cubicle in a Palo Alto office park for 30k per year. We just never hear from those people.)
So, I think a more accurate statement is "A US based dev, who lives in New York or San Francisco who went to Stanford and who is working 60 hours per week, and not making 50,000$+ is doing something wrong."
No startups, nothing sexy but if any of those companies recruiting us offered <$55k they were laughed at.
So that does seem like the ballpark figure, with the following 2 caveats: I don't know how reliable Monster is for this kind of data, and I picked three cities off the top of my head roughly in the middle of the USA that I don't think of tech centres but I don't know how out-of-touch I might be in that regard.
Google Image Search: work hours vs productivity
Productivity Presentation: http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres...
Thinking back, I definitely would have been an unprepared for life by the time college ended if it hadn't been for that confluence of events. I never really though about what I would do before, and I never had any economically sound interests (I almost went to high school for voice acting and singing!).
The report is a bit opaque though with the wide <35 category - you'd expect a big difference between 21 and 34 year olds so lumping them together makes it hard to tell what's going on. The full report is at: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/11/07/the-rising-age-gap...
It's even true within fields. You can usually find 40/hr week jobs in software that pay a good or even great wage, but they're usually doing boring stuff: business apps, IT support, financial stuff, etc. But in sexy areas like game development you're into crazy 60-80 hour work week for no pay territory again.
Had my 10yr reunion recently and I was the only one that owned their home.
I really can't understand, for instance, why one of the characters here interested in producing would seek toxic employment with the dying movie studios. With platforms like Kickstarter that circumvent traditional barriers to the entertainment industry (and other creative sectors), it's hard to imagine a bright future for old, gatekeeping jobs. She would probably be better served looking for marketing or sales work at a tech company.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/business/to-stay-relevant-...
We've entered an era of "Hypercompetition."
In case anybody else was wondering, those figures are in 2010 dollars, adjusted for inflation.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/11/07/the-rising-age-gap...
Giving an over-tired, over-worked, under-paid child the password to your social media accounts is probably a really bad idea.
8am waking up 9am finished breakfast / shower 10am finished commute to work 10pm finished workday 11pm at home
even if you cut commuting out of the equation you won't have a life. that may be fine with you if you work on something that is important too you... however it is fine to be outraged by this!