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Things I wish someone had told me about life after college

zackshapiro.com

101–110 of 134 posts

Re: Things I wish someone had told me about life after college

#101

Here are some things I wish someone would've shared with me... - If you want to thrive in the professional world, get a fucking haircut and at least look the part. - If you think that you can send out a bunch of resumes and be flooded with calls about job offers, you are wrong. - Most of the phrases you've heard in your youth are true. Ex. "The squeaky wheel gets the grease". See the above point. If you get a job (or…

> If you get a check just by sending a invoice, consider it an anomaly, and yourself lucky.

So very, very true.

"Oh you want to get paid for this consulting project huh? Well we can't just wire the money to you, no, please fill out this form so we can put you in our SAP system. Oh, you haven't been paid? well well, you're not in our system.

We've finally put you our system, here's a record of our payment to you.

no money in my bank account

argh!"

Direct experience with my country's 3rd largest bank. Once outside regular salaried work, liquidity is more of an issue than solvency. You might have billed 5 months of rent, but your real estate agent doesn't accept unpaid invoices as legal tender....

Re: Things I wish someone had told me about life after college

#102
post #94
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same boat here. I worked for a Fortune 500 corporation for the first 3.5 years after college, and for the most part I was just putting in my 8 hours. I enjoy software development, but the atmosphere and mentality at this business didn't encourage you to go the extra mile. If you said, "Man, I love this company," people would give you strange looks, probably suspecting you of being a suck-up. There was a lo…

> [...] and vacation is unlimited. I think there's a case to be made for mandatory vacation. Just make people take off at least two weeks every year.

In the financial sector, there are regulations requiring a minimum consecutive absence.

> It is the FDIC's goal that all banks have a vacation policy which provides that active officers and employees be absent from their duties for an uninterrupted period of not less than two consecutive weeks. http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/financial/1995/fil9552.html

Re: Things I wish someone had told me about life after college

#103
post #64

The vast majority of kids who enter college do so right after high school. They are used to summers off, parents sending tuition checks and allowances for rent/living. There is a misunderstanding in todays youth that college is a social club with the side effect of gaining an education. Few kids choose their school on quality of education, but rather how big the parties are/what the scene is like. To me this entire s…

College is wasted on the college aged. I don't think I was ready at 18 and neither were most of the people I went to college with. I suspect a few years of work or national service would do a lot to help young people.

Re: Things I wish someone had told me about life after college

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree, everything in moderation, though. I'd rather live with the regret of 'Oh I wish I hadn't done this/that/the other' than being 50 and looking back on my life regretting I didn't enjoy myself more.

Speak to people over 60, they generally regret what they didn't do than what they did.

People who don't live to 60 generally would have regretted things they did rather than things they didn't.

Re: Things I wish someone had told me about life after college

#106
post #94
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same boat here. I worked for a Fortune 500 corporation for the first 3.5 years after college, and for the most part I was just putting in my 8 hours. I enjoy software development, but the atmosphere and mentality at this business didn't encourage you to go the extra mile. If you said, "Man, I love this company," people would give you strange looks, probably suspecting you of being a suck-up. There was a lo…

> [...] and vacation is unlimited. I think there's a case to be made for mandatory vacation. Just make people take off at least two weeks every year.

I think as a general rule, I do agree with this. When you don't have mandatory vacation, you start asking yourself the question, "Should I really time off work?" Motivated, hard-working people have a hard time saying "yes" to that question. So far, we've all taken time off for vacation this past summer, and we're getting a couple weeks for Christmas, but I can see how such a system could have negative impacts.

Re: Things I wish someone had told me about life after college

#107
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people say academia is not the real world they generally mean a few things. "Real world" might not be dictionary-correct but this is what is meant: 1. Many of the problems you're forced to solve are contrived. They're practice problems and often the knowledge required to implement the solution has been provided to you already in classroom or textbooks. 2. You are evaluated on the academic quality of your work. I…

I agree on the first three points. I disagree on the fourth. The fourth point is, ironically, most true for those who manage to become highly sought-after professionals. You have to be very well-paid and sought-after these days to achieve financial independence from any one employer, allowing you to take full responsibility for yourself. At the other end, you either get basic needs supplied via the wage paid by your…

I see what you're saying and have various opinions on this topic in general (in some cases I disagree strongly), but the point still remains that college, especially the undergraduate level, still tends to be yet one or two layers more insulated than what you describe. That's really all I was saying.

Technically speaking there is nothing that is not the real world and I think that's what cat_kittles was getting at. There's always a mix of personal responsibility and dependence on others and society. My point was specifically about the relationship between college students and everyone else.

Re: Things I wish someone had told me about life after college

#108

What got me in the adult world was "4.0 syndrome". (Well, my actual GPA wasn't 4.0, but close.) Not that I was used to getting great grades and had a rude awakening, because school was a lot more intellectually challenging than 95+ percent of what I encountered in the real world, but that school led me to believe the world was more meritocratic, fair, and straight-forward than it actually is. For example, some teache…

Well put. College is a constrained optimization problem, and real life is not. The only way to figure that out is to live it. As an aside, I know a lot of people here on HN find your comments to be overly aggressive, but I love them. Keep it up.

As an aside, I know a lot of people here on HN find your comments to be overly aggressive

Many HNers (and this is a hard group to categorize, because there's still a lot of diversity of thought) are still in the honeymoon phase with the positive-sum promise of technology and the startup economy.

I believe in these things very strongly, but I'm also old and experienced enough to know that we, the good guys, have real enemies. They aren't stupid, and they're not weak. We seem to think we can out-compete them by being smarter, more productive, and earnestly working toward a better world. We act is if we'll be able to peacefully render them irrelevant and that they won't know what is happening (or care) enough to fight. Well, perhaps. Time will tell. I am not yet at the point of saying we need to take AK-47s against our corporate masters (please don't do that; your aim probably sucks and weapons are nasty things even when used well). However, I am also not optimistic enough to believe that they will surely opt for graceful decline and let us build this better world that we want. Perhaps they will, content to be very rich (in a world whose prosperity begins to dramatically increase, probably around 2025-40, rendering them less relatively wealthy and powerful) but increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps they won't. My experience with the upper class is that they are mean-spirited, ethically depraved people. Their weak point is that they underestimate us, because we're less than human to them, and because they see us as intellectually inferior. However, if we underestimate them, then we are making the same mistake.

Most of my HN "enemies" (and that's too strong a word, because I don't dislike them and they don't know me) are Googlers who were shocked when I exposed unethical management, in a very visible way, in October 2011. When you wave a whistle in the public ("whistle" as in whistleblowing) some people act as if you're waving a gun, and especially those who can't stand to hear the truth about their utopia. This reaction is ridiculous, because a lot of the people who get up in arms and fight whistleblowers have nothing to fear. They are too in love with the Woodbury with the quaint coffee shops, not the real Woodbury with the fascistic Governor and the zombie gladiator fights.

What's sort of amazing about whistleblowing is that you don't get the worst opposition from the powerful people you are exposing. They know they're doing wrong and will often make some concessions (but rarely enough). The mindless and often vicious opposition that you get is from other peasants who are shocked and upset at what appears to be going down. In the Philippines, this is referred to as the "crab mentality", whereby crabs in a bucket prevent each other from escaping and they all die. That's what you see when subordinate employees go to the mat to defend unethical managers who wouldn't lift a finger to do anything for them.

Re: Things I wish someone had told me about life after college

#109

What got me in the adult world was "4.0 syndrome". (Well, my actual GPA wasn't 4.0, but close.) Not that I was used to getting great grades and had a rude awakening, because school was a lot more intellectually challenging than 95+ percent of what I encountered in the real world, but that school led me to believe the world was more meritocratic, fair, and straight-forward than it actually is. For example, some teache…

>> you have to actively manage your career

I completely agree with this statement. Nowhere in school are you prepared or told that you will have to manage your career, and no one will do it for you. I think that's the biggest thing left off of this list. Schooling is 12+ years of following steps and getting to the next one is an easy, clear, and direct path that's been laid out for you. The real world has no such thing, often the are not clear paths to get up to the next step, you have to figure this out yourself.

I think another big change from school to working life is that it is easy to get stuck in a "rut", in the sense that life is sometimes the same, day in and out, for months or even years. Yes, in school you are busy and frequently work hard, and often don't have all the time you like. But no matter what, in 4 months, everything is going to be different. Different classes with different people in different buildings. You will meet new people and make new friends and do different work. If you're in a social group in college, some people graduate and leave and new people come every year. It keeps things interesting. The real world doesn't change things up that often, and sometimes that sucks. A lot. I think variety is the spice of life, and I thrive on new and evolving friendships and intellectual problems. Being in a static state can be a drag, but is very very common for most workplaces, and that can spread out to the other activities in your life as well.

So I guess the two items I'd add to the list are:

* nobody is going to tell you how to advance, it's up to you to manage your career/future

*Things such as friendships and workloads can/will become more static, learn how to cope with this, or learn how to mitigate it.

Re: Things I wish someone had told me about life after college

#110

What got me in the adult world was "4.0 syndrome". (Well, my actual GPA wasn't 4.0, but close.) Not that I was used to getting great grades and had a rude awakening, because school was a lot more intellectually challenging than 95+ percent of what I encountered in the real world, but that school led me to believe the world was more meritocratic, fair, and straight-forward than it actually is. For example, some teache…

>> you have to actively manage your career I completely agree with this statement. Nowhere in school are you prepared or told that you will have to manage your career, and no one will do it for you. I think that's the biggest thing left off of this list. Schooling is 12+ years of following steps and getting to the next one is an easy, clear, and direct path that's been laid out for you. The real world has no such thi…

I remember when I was in 7th grade and realized that the working world would be like being in one class for 8 hours and it was somewhat of a panic moment.

Well, it's more accurate to say that the classes aren't defined. You have to create the structure by deciding what's important to you, and you may face opposition from managers who think they know better than you do when it comes to what you should be doing.

If I were running a company, the default assumption would be that employees are autonomous and the manager's role would be advisory, as in, "If you don't know what to work on yet, would be a good place to start. I'll introduce you to the team."

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