seem_2211

Seems to have worked out pretty well with Elon... when were we supposed to get the Model Y/Roadster/Full Self Driving/Profitability (and all of the other things) again?

Taking a more benign view, I don't know if Austen is a scammer, but he seems like a smart guy, who's a bit over his head, with a smart team, who are in over their heads. The kind of students they've targeted need more help, not less, which makes this a bit of a messy situation.

This is a golden example of where in person beats online. It's so much easier to weed out the people who will not show up when you do things in person (and there are plenty of those in College). But even diligent people are more likely to flake when things are online. There's simply less commitment.

There's a good Top Gear episode where they tried 'cooking' with a car engine (apparently the food tasted awful)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9vhGiSL904

I work in sales recruiting (agency) with various tech companies in SF.

Compared to the people in this story, it's a totally different world, where candidates have a lot more power (partly evidenced by the fact that companies will pay for external recruiting help).

That said, I've run a few LinkedIn & Indeed job posts. It's frustrating when you see the same people apply for wildly different jobs over and over again. Whenever I hear about someone who's angry that they've applied to thousands of jobs but get no callbacks, I think about the candidates I see with no relevant experience, who've applied for a mid/sr level position only a week after they applied for a graduate level position. I get that candidates are frustrated, but as someone who's screening for people, it won't get you moved forward.

I think there's a supply & demand thing. Most people are not that excited about finance, or sales, or computer science. And there's a need for a few million of those people across the US economy to do those jobs. Whereas there might be a similar amount of people interested in being a professional musician at the same degree, but the commercial demand means that say 5,000 of those people can afford to go full time.

Anecdotally, a lot of my friends went into teaching / nursing because it was seen as stable, and pretty easy to get into.

I don't think most technical startups are that interesting (especially as a non technical person) in a pure 'solving the problem' way. What makes it interesting is all of the real world variables that come with it.

Admittedly I'm not personally a technical person (I studied marketing and now work in sales), but as an example, just as I find it more interesting to work on the creation and process of making real world advertising than it is to do pure academic 'marketing' research.

Patrick McKenzie has an interesting bit on how running a software company is something like 90% not coding. That's where the interesting bit comes in, the actual business that surrounds it all.

But I think it all ultimately comes down to how are personally wired. Some people prefer working on pushing the limits of theory, others work on practical application, and some people work in the middle somewhere. All are good!

I went to University in New Zealand, but my student loan for undergraduate study is higher than every single one of my American friends.

In America the price you see and the price you pay are not the same thing.

I don't think the average American has any real sense of how much better off they are than even people in most of the Western World. People point to places in Europe with high tax rates as these absolute havens, when in reality you're probably not making much money (and that's assuming you're even employed!)

The birth rates in Europe are dire.

I'm from New Zealand, but live in America now. Average incomes are so much higher in America it's not even funny. The average American house is so cheap and you can fix a mortgage for 30 years.

> You or your family get sick

Most Americans get health insurance through their employers

> Car accident

Insurance is not that expensive

> Want to have a child

Also, not that expensive

> Need to buy something expensive for your occupation

Likely that your employer will cover this, or you're making enough for this to be worth your while.

In most of the world, people don't roll around with $500+/ month in car payments, as a birthright.

America is a terrible place to be on the bones of your ass poor. That's not true for someone making anything closer to the median income.

I think the amount you need to make to 'afford' to have a child is so small, that it's not really worth talking about for the average American family (NB: in this case I'm talking about a married couple).

If you want to drive 2 new cars, put your kids into a private school and have a 5,000 square foot home, yeah, you'll need a fairly large chunk of change. But none of those things are necessary to be a good parent.

Well yes, but the majority of it is captured by the middle class, in the form of public pensions, 401k's, the stock market etc.

Surely there's a few red flags that could have come up and that's what we're preventing here?

Yes, Ive was absolute shit, which is why Steve Jobs (widely known as a cuddly man who never had a sharp word to say), said

"If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it's Jony. Jony and I think up most of the products together and then pull others in and say, 'Hey, what do you think about this?' He gets the picture as well as the most infinitesimal details about each product. And he understands that Apple is a product company. He's not just a designer. That's why he works directly for me. He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me."

But sure. I prefer the clunky beige form that ruled the world before Apple started making big design waves in computers.

Rolling deep into anecdotal avenue, but my thoughts on grad school

• Lucrative fields like medicine & dentistry saddle you with enormous debts (often in the mid six figures) that take multiple years to pay off. The ROI is probably worth it if you work to 65, but you're locked in for easily twenty years, and such high debt levels make taking risks very difficult.

• Lucrative, but more populated fields like law & business also often saddle you with enormous debt, and for these degrees you need a school with a strong brand name to get a look in anywhere (if you do an MBA and you aren't at Harvard/Stanford/Wharton, and a very few others, what's the point?).

• In a lot of fields (liberal arts/social sciences) what's the point of getting a masters? Do you get an earning premium? Is the earning premium worth the opportunity cost? I'd be surprised if the answer is often yes. I have a friend who was a teacher and is now studying to be a families therapist. Lovely person, but absolutely terrible choice. Years of additional study and debt, and no hope of a future earning substantially more money to show for it all.

I agree completely with your points about teenagers not doing enough due diligence before they study.

Yep, I was giving up about $30k a year ($120k / 4 years). I was working in a supermarket. $2 more an hour needed over the course of my career to make the juice worth the squeeze. Nothing to write home about.

I've done the math on the opportunity cost of how much I would have made if I hadn't gone to university. It was about $120k over 4 years, and raised the opportunity cost to about $160k (I borrowed $60k, but some of that money was for living expenses, that would have been covered by working full time). I was earning about $16/$17 per hour at the time. It increased the jump I needed to make from $.50 per hour to $2 per hour.

Correct - I didn't study a STEM subject, but I've done ok for myself despite that.

I think there's a world of difference between "I want to study acting and I'll end up successful like Brad Pitt" and "Hmm, my cousin is in marketing, and seems to have created a great career there, I should talk to them about that."

Anecdotes about people you don't know, and career stories you don't fully understand aren't helpful, but frankly I don't think massive data sets on how much the average graduate earns within two years of graduation (for example) are all that helpful either, except as a broad way to compare yourself. It's such a large number of people, you don't really anything particularly useful at an individual level (even though there are plenty of good uses for data like that).

And I'm not going to feel bad about it either!

Oh yeah, it's a great deal for me. What I meant was Americans who studied and then work in America end up paying roughly the same (when you take into account average earnings) as Kiwis who study and then stay in NZ.

Haha, especially if you like burning couches! I went to Waikato.

Fair enough. When it comes to career advice, I prefer anecdotes to large data sets, because there are far too many variables, and it's too easy to torture numbers.

Does STEM actually pay off, or does engineering/technology pay off?

I've got a few friends who work in science, and it seems to be a pretty poorly paying field, with a real lack of job prospects, unless you secure a job at a government research department.

Yeah fair points. I was sick of studying by the time I graduated - I enjoyed my experience at University, but I wanted to get into the private sector (probably worth mentioning that I studied business at the undergrad level, so I think a lot of that 'postgrad research' in marketing for example is suspect at best).

Yeah it's not great!

There's fairly decent financial aid available to cover your living costs if you're from a low income family, but that cuts off pretty quickly, and unlike the US, there isn't really a culture of paying for your children's education, so there's a lot of kids (like me) who grew up upper-middle class but didn't get much help through university.

Overall, I'd equate the USD = NZD as realtively equivalent, even though there is a currency difference. The average American is graduating into a job paying $51k USD, whereas NZ grads are often starting at $50-55k NZD.

[1] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensatio...

The argument you put forward doesn't make sense. It's not a ripoff to make close to minimum wage for a number of years (and possibly take on high levels of student loan debt), all to work in a field where there is an oversupply of labour that depresses wages?

Ok...

I went to university in a country with a Gini coefficient of .35, and now live in a country with a Gini coefficient of .39 (See OECD link below)

The funny thing is, my student loan is one of the highest out of my American friend group† (although very normal amongst my NZ peers). Unlike the US, there was a lot less much in the way of financial aid/scholarships available, so sticker price was what people actually paid.

https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm

† For people with undergraduate degrees

Good point, I was more thinking Med school / Law school / MBA / masters level study.

I have a degree from a no-name university in New Zealand. I'd do it again for a few pragmatic reasons.

1: Lots of companies will reject you on sight without a degree. I don't think it's a good thing, but it is reality.

2: With a degree your ability to move overseas dramatically improves. I moved to America after graduating. I flat out couldn't have done that without a degree. Points based systems immigration systems like New Zealand have dramatic bonuses for people with degrees.

3: You don't have to jump through the hoops and explain why you don't have a degree all the time. Stupid reason I know, but it's something I've seen friends without degrees have to do constantly - and not just in career situations. As I mentioned, I went to a no-name university. If you live in NZ, you'll know it. If you're an American, chances are, you've never heard of it. But because I have a degree, it doesn't ever really come up.

4: The cost isn't that bad, when you spread it out over a career. My degree & living costs cost about $60k NZD (~$40k USD). That's $1k USD / year, or $.50 per hour. Considering how my income has multiplied in the few years since I've graduated (SF wages help tremendously here), the actual cost is barely anything, even when you control for the opportunity cost of studying.

Where I think College returns make a lot less sense

• Paying out of state tuition for lifestyle reasons, when you're going into a relatively low paid field afterwards (e.g. teaching).

• Paying private school tuition at a school without a strong reputation

• Grad school, in general, seems to be a rip off

I don't agree. I think enterprise software is a big lever that we can use to improve society. It looks different to biotech and cancer cures, but it's still important.

Enterprise software should make businesses more efficient, and productive. And we have that now. I can run a business that employs people from anywhere, using Quickbooks (accounting & billing), Rippling (HR/payroll/IT), Brex (charge card) etc. I built a simple website earlier this year on Squarespace (far better than handcoding it myself, or using old editing software). I can collect payments from anywhere using Stripe and Paypal. If I was running an ecommerce site, I'd probably be using Shopify and that related world of plugins.

Productivity growth is one of the biggest challenges of our time, and software lets us do that, without harming the environment. YC is a great addition to capitalism and societal development.

I went to University that had a similar deadline system (sometimes midnight, sometimes midday, sometimes 3pm - all depended on the lecturer/tutor).

If you had a truly extenuating circumstance, you could always speak to the lecturer via email or during their office hours. Some had more relaxed policies than others, while others had various penalties for being late.

As far as I'm aware, the difference between 12:00:00 and 12:00:30 wasn't ever really a thing, as any reasonable system can expect a few minutes of delay owing to computer problems.