However, I've got a friend from college (history major) who's about to turn 26. She's ensconced in grad school now, but previously had a string of temp/secretarial jobs. She wrote this lately:
"What's really got me bugged is the possibility that I might do everything right, I might have been a good student, good friend, good worker, good citizen, and still might not ever have a home or a family. That I might have done everything a "successful" person does, yet end up with none of the things I truly wanted most. It's not that I have a specific image of that "picket-fence" life. I'm not worried about "having it all"; it's the fact that I might not be able to swing any of it.
"If I knew this in high school, I'd have done more drugs."
It seems like one's success in today's world is directly proportional to your ability to believe that all your elders are lying to you. I was always pretty contemptuous of authority, so I did the end run around all my teachers and school administrators and taught myself stuff - stuff that was useful outside of school, not just inside the academic bubble.
Perhaps this is as it should be - I remember in one upper-level physics class, the professor said "You should be getting most of this out of the textbook" and a student helpfully added "Or in class." The teacher said, "No. If you're only learning from class, you're in trouble. I should be mostly superfluous." The students were basically flabbergasted.
But if your success is proportional to how much you believe authority figures are lying to you, what does that mean for the authority figures? "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." What happens to the social structure when people realize their leaders are basically lying, cheating, and stealing from them?
Rather than outright lying, much of it is due to the generation gap. Parents and other elders are just suggesting what worked for them. Doing everything right by being a good student, good worker, and good citizen was almost a surefire way to a successful, stable life until "Generation X" started to come of age.
But will people my age see it that way? Well-intentioned or not, it's still wrong. All that many of my friends see is that they do exactly what their parents said to - in some cases, spending years of their life for it - and they're doing worse than people who ignored it all and happened to get lucky.
Put another way, I study CS and I've never had a hard time finding work...and I don't owe it to mistrust of my elders.
Luckily, I happened to like computers anyway, and learned quite a bit of programming on my own. Plus, by sophomore year I'd basically figured out this was bullshit and employers really do care about concrete skills. But had I not been interested in programming as a hobby, things could've turned out very differently for me. I considered majoring in sociology, after all. ;-)
I wonder who has a better chance of getting a job at Google: a history major from Stanford or a CS major from , say, CSU Chico?
It's also interesting because I know some Amherst history majors that I could never imagine getting a job at Google. But I also know an Amherst Asian Languages & Civ major who does work at Google, albeit in a non-technical position. Yet I don't know anyone at Google from a CSU: my friends here are from Rice/Brown/Brown/Amherst/Stanford/Berkeley/ Stanford/UChic/Cornell/Berkeley/Berkeley/ CMU/Duke/UCSD.
The mainstream in computer science is incredibly ignorant of its own history, and burns a ton of energy reinventing the wheel every few years. (The old school Unix tools still work, for example, they're just fast as heck now because they were written to work on computes with about as much processing power as a bar of soap has these days.)
My 24 year old brother just recently quit his job and is currently riding out the crisis in the UK programming for some of the community projects he likes online.
Welcome! I hope all the paperwork goes smoothly and you get settled well.
We're hoping I don't need a police check in Canada as it can take up to 120 days, but another family friend can get them rushed and complete in 3 days. So I guess I'm kind of lucky my wife's family is so connected.
Looking at trying an experiment at the end of the year and 'going homeless' for three months after my lease expires. The worst case is I find out that it's hard and I don't like it, but it'll cut my monthly expenses down to nothing for a few months. Will look at buying a home in a few years, as I plan to turn into a traveling hacker for a year or two once my full-time gig is up.
I have zero sympathy for liberal arts majors who spent years in school, sans job, and now can't find a employment because they lack both marketable skills and the gumption to start a company.
I never attended college, so I was able to forgo college debt.
No plans to buy a house (yet) - but have plans to start a company in late 09' or 10'.
(Not to generally say which is a better city for startups, but just curious to your reasoning).