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Seems like a huge # of techies I meet out here are trying to reach a million dollars in savings in a job they hate so that they can "go live in a cabin in the woods." I try to tell them that my Cousin has been doing that for 40 years, and he dropped out of high school and worked at a gas station.
- Lawrence from Office Space
Seems like a huge # of techies I meet out here are trying to reach a million dollars in savings in a job they hate so that they can "go live in a cabin in the woods." I try to tell them that my Cousin has been doing that for 40 years, and he dropped out of high school and worked at a gas station.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoa, that's a lot of super weird assumptions you're making. Fwiw, neither myself nor any other parent i ever met even gets in the remote vicinity of the picture you're painting. It sounds to me like you just have shitty parent-friends in your bubble? But rest assured that there a legion of other parents out there who neither got kids because they're afraid to die alone nor want to force their own wishes and life goa…
I mean most people (like you) seem to justify having kids in a selfish way (self-growth, experiences). As someone who doesn't want my own kids (but like kids and spend time with them), I feel no need to have my own
What is an example of a non-selfish reason someone would have kids?
"I'm wealthy enough to retire and not work another day in my life. Oh, woe be unto me"
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A baker, landscaper, or small business owner doesn't need to do 10 years of additional education at specialize schools, not that they're less beneficial. The charitable reading of the OP's comments would be that it's an inefficient use of society's resources to invest in the education of these folks only to have them leave their respective fields after a short amount of time. The broader question is how do we change…
Most of society's direct expenses in their education is in the K-12 phase, not in the undergrad or graduate schooling. A baker, landscaper, and a computer programmer all had very similar levels of direct educational investment. I don’t think the computer programmer has any different obligation back to society than any of the others.
True that K-12 costs more, but public assistance in higher education is substantial [1]. From grants, subsidized loans to directed money into public universities, it's a sizable investment at the state and federal level. It'd be more efficient to take that money and invest it directly in vocational schools if we knew people would utilize it and then swap careers due to burn out.
1 - https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...
Edit: Updated reference to 2019 version.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoa, that's a lot of super weird assumptions you're making. Fwiw, neither myself nor any other parent i ever met even gets in the remote vicinity of the picture you're painting. It sounds to me like you just have shitty parent-friends in your bubble? But rest assured that there a legion of other parents out there who neither got kids because they're afraid to die alone nor want to force their own wishes and life goa…
> It's rather that despite all those sacrifices, kids enrich your life, and they allow tremendous opportunity for self-growth and a host of experiences that are hard to replicate otherwise. This is the reason why most people have kids. This doesn't entirely contradicts the parent post though: People are having kids for their self benefits.
Which are entirely different reasons than the parent poster gave.
This whole meta discussion of whether it's done for "selfish" reasons is largely not valuable, as every decision one makes in their life can be framed as being entirely selfish.
I sympathize and did the same thing earlier this year: I quit my job to try and strike out on my own. For most tech companies, they sell you on this "mission" and tell you how valuable your work is. Then, you realize all you do is grease the wheels of bureaucracy. Any serious attempts of asking the question "how would anything be different if I didn't do my work" only leads to depressing answers. I've found the resul…
> For most tech companies, they sell you on this "mission" and tell you how valuable your work is. That's because hiring is marketing; they're selling a job to you, you pay them in your labor and attention span. Nobody will be attracted to a job where the description says what it is - e.g. "legacy enterprise java application maintenance". Nobody wants to work a job that is just to fill a seat.
To become really succesful in a tech career the demands are simply too great even if you are in the top percentile in IQ. To go to a good university you literally have to be super focused in high-school and do all sorts of extracurricular activities and basically things that look good on a college application. No one cares if you were a caretaker for your grandma. But then once you are in university you haven't even…
> If you have intrinsic interest in CS that will get destroyed pretty quickly because you may be put on to some super boring project. Potentially unpopular opinion: This is why I’m actually very bullish on graduates from famously demanding colleges like Ivy League and other competitive universities. To graduate, you can’t just be smarter than average and coast your way through to graduation. You actually have to work…
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> kids enrich your life, and they allow tremendous opportunity for self-growth and a host of experiences that are hard to replicate otherwise As other people said, these are by-the-book examples of selfish justifications. (And no, I'm not saying that ALL parenting is selfish) And this is without considering climate change. If you consider it, having kids is very selfish.
There's also an argument that it's unethical to intentionally bring someone into the world when there are so many problems and a fair chance that their life may involve a lot of suffering
There is also an argument that people choose not to have kids because they are too lazy and self-involved to care for another person.