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Why you should take your 20's seriously

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Re: Why you should take your 20's seriously

#81

Post by marquis »

guylhem wrote: post #76
marquis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having children when you're young is a good idea primarily because kids are exhausting, and take up a LOT of time. Have them as young as you're able and wanting to do so: nothing to do with your gender. Men have fertility issues as they age also.

If you can make a resource by yourself, outsource- in this case, adopt. It will make some of the exhaustion go away, since it seems to be due to diverging circadian rythms between a newborn and an adult. A say 4 years old kid would logically be less exhausting to raise. Also, if the kid is adopted, it also removes fertility issues concerns. Strike 2 birds with 1 stone!

I wish I could agree but a) 4 years old are just as exhausting (the first year is actually the easiest in terms of time you have available) and b) adoption is increasingly more difficult. I have friends who just adopted a baby after 5 years of tests and checks and more checks.

Foster care is another option, it's easier to 'sign up' and you can get school-age kids, who need just as much help as an adopted kid.

Re: Why you should take your 20's seriously

#82

Post by hudibras »

engtech wrote: post #48

"2) Statistically, women need to have all their children by 35. According to the author, a woman’s ability to get pregnant plummets starting in her mid-thirties. To make matters worse, the odds of a miscarriage for a woman over 35 is one in four." Our family doctor gave the odds as 3 in 5. In practical experience, I know of four friends who have miscarried at 35 (after being pregnant for over 3 months), out of about…

The one-in-four statistic is for miscarriages after the sixth week of pregnancy. In the general population, the percentage of miscarriages is 15%, or about one-in-six.

One thing to keep in mind is that a miscarriage is not the end of the world. Heartbreaking, yes, but it's not too late to try again.

Re: Why you should take your 20's seriously

#83

Post by will_work4tears »

engtech wrote: post #56
crazygringo wrote: post #39

I "agree", but draw the exact opposite conclusions. You should take your 20's seriously... because it's the only time in your life that you aren't encumbered by building a career, having kids, etc. So you should take your 20's to do the things that you won't be able to do later. Work as a bartender, play in a band, travel the world on the cheap, teach English abroad, date the kind of people you wouldn't marry. You do…

"Don't waste your 20's "building a career". You've got your 30's and 40's and 50's to do that." It's hard to try to pivot in your 30s if you don't have a resume with at least some points to match your future career. If you haven't used anything from your post-secondary degree 8 years after getting it... employers are going to notice that and assume that your degree is worthless. I say this having seen far too many fr…

Yes, this is absolutely true in my case (similar though slightly reversed from what you describe).

I did the military thing and later college, but switched directions a couple years in college to pick up programming. Even if I reach master skill levels, I'm afraid that my career is stunted because of a short military stint and several years in warehouse/factory jobs before heading off to college.

People see that I'm in my mid-30s with less than 3 years experience in my field and automatically shuffle me out of the candidate pool (so it seems to me anyway).

Re: Why you should take your 20's seriously

#84

Post by hudibras »

randomdata wrote: post #41
nostromo wrote: post #29

Most startup advice is also good advice for 20-somethings. Get to an MVP quickly: Find a way to practice your target profession as soon as possible. (Don't spend hundreds of thousands getting a law degree just to discover you hate the actual work.) This is easy for programmers: just start building stuff before applying to the CS program. After MVP, iterate quickly: So you know Ruby? Time to learn another language, or…

The best paying job a 20 year old can get might be in construction or the military, but this may limit your upside down the road. From a purely financial perspective, money now is better than money later though. A 20 year old who secures a job that nets him enough to save $15,000 per year until retirement will ultimately have a lifetime net savings of about the same as someone who finally finds a job that pays enough…

And as for the military, cashing out at twenty years of service with a $47,000 annual pension (starting immediately and inflation-adjusted over time) plus the G.I. Bill is not a bad deal at all.

The downside is that you have to be in the military for 20 years.

Re: Why you should take your 20's seriously

#85

Post by icesoldier »

The issue I have with seeing life advice posts is that I've begun to see this dichotomy between "follow your heart" advice and "follow your head" advice. And I personally have a split between the two: my degree is in CS and my current job is in programming, but by "pie in the sky" dreams involve writing and performing music. I happen to have more knowledge in the former as a consequence of my degree, but I didn't really passionately pursue any major side projects. (This hindered my job hunt slightly, but I still managed to circumvent it via personal connections. It does pay to know people, in my experience.)

As I was closing in on the end of my college degree plan, I felt torn between these two seemingly divergent ends. As a result I crept into a disillusioned depression fueled by the realization that it was too late to switch degrees that wildly and by firsthand experience of the job hunt as a CS student from west Texas with little heart in the industry.

So I'm just taking solace in the fact that I'm working a job with a really short commute and a good environment where I can go home at 5:00 and pursue music as a hobby. I might even notice eventually that my life's passion doesn't land in either music or programming, and to be honest I'd be okay with that if it gave me a direction to point in. But at this point, having only graduated from college this year (turning 23 next week), it feels like I just need to to something. Unfortunately, I feel like I'm coasting now that I've "made it" out into the world relatively unscathed.

Re: Why you should take your 20's seriously

#86

Post by gefh »

derwiki wrote: post #47
diego wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with what cletus says. I'm 43 years old today. Some things just feel uninteresting because I started doing them too young. Interestingly programming is not one of them, I have been doing it for 30 years. On the other hand, I have been rock climbing for 7 years and I'm better than ever [in case you care: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olEgfe4cYuU ]. It still feels pretty new to me. I know 25-year-ol…

Are programming/rock climbing overlapping interests everywhere or more so in the Bay Area? The problem solving aspect of climbing (particularly bouldering) always appealed to me, and I always see programmers at the climbing gym. But it seems like a disproportionately high number of programmer friends (compared to other friends) climb in SF.

At the Seattle Bouldering Project I estimate a quarter of all climbers are from Google, Amazon or MS. Also a high proportion of resumés crossing my desk mention climbing.

Re: Why you should take your 20's seriously

#87

Post by guylhem »

marquis wrote: post #81
guylhem wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can make a resource by yourself, outsource- in this case, adopt. It will make some of the exhaustion go away, since it seems to be due to diverging circadian rythms between a newborn and an adult. A say 4 years old kid would logically be less exhausting to raise. Also, if the kid is adopted, it also removes fertility issues concerns. Strike 2 birds with 1 stone!

I wish I could agree but a) 4 years old are just as exhausting (the first year is actually the easiest in terms of time you have available) and b) adoption is increasingly more difficult. I have friends who just adopted a baby after 5 years of tests and checks and more checks. Foster care is another option, it's easier to 'sign up' and you can get school-age kids, who need just as much help as an adopted kid.

Interesting - when does the exhaustion function reaches a maximum ? I thought it was the hardest in the first 4 years.

(regarding the difficulties of adoption, they could be compared to the outsourcing cost :-/ foster care is a great idea, but may not work for people who want to have "their" kids)

Re: Why you should take your 20's seriously

#88

Post by freyr »

There are some good points here, but my advice is that you should take your teens seriously.

It seems like the prevailing advice today for anyone in their teens is to live their lives free of any commitments and as independent and undirected as possible. But lately I realized the importance of my teens to a degree I never had and it has changed how I plan to approach the last few years of my teens.

I'm not going to wait until my twenties to move into my parent's house and work on my startup. I already live in their house, so why wait?

Also, since everybody peaks in their twenties, why waste our best years making mistakes? By starting early, I'm getting lots of mistakes out of the way. By the time I hit my twenties, I'll be at peak performance and have tons of experience under my belt.

But sometimes I wish I'd started as a tween.

Re: Why you should take your 20's seriously

#89

Post by Shamiq »

irahul wrote: post #68
diego wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with what cletus says. I'm 43 years old today. Some things just feel uninteresting because I started doing them too young. Interestingly programming is not one of them, I have been doing it for 30 years. On the other hand, I have been rock climbing for 7 years and I'm better than ever [in case you care: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olEgfe4cYuU ]. It still feels pretty new to me. I know 25-year-ol…

> On the other hand, I have been rock climbing for 7 years and I'm better than ever OT(as far as the OP is concerned) questions from someone who is considering taking up climbing. 1. Isn't what you are doing in the video called bouldering? 2. Do you usually climb in your jeans? I am wondering does it allow you required flexibility? 3. Do you work on your core for climbing or climbing works your core? 4. What would yo…

Where are you based? I picked up climbing in May 2012, and can offer you some advice based on what I've been through. Email's in my profile to continue the chat if you want.

Re: Why you should take your 20's seriously

#90

Post by gefh »

cletus wrote: post #19

This is a delicate subject because one can view it as a call for those in their 20s to make the most of that time, which is a fine message, to something tantamount to ageism. While it's true that those in their 30s or older can be closed to new idea, that's not because they're "old", it's because they're people and some people are closed-minded. I find a lot of these complaints are more about the cultural and lifesty…

> those who have worked in the outside world ... and know how lucky they are and how different this is. And those that haven't and think this is just how the world is.

As a mid-30s guy at Google for 2 years, I'm never sure whether fresh grads getting their first job at Google will ever know (or need to know) how lucky they are.

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