Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive • Hacker News Board

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#31

Post by spydum » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 2:02 AM UTC

munin wrote: post #12

spydum wrote: post #8

There is a lot of focus on programmers , which is absolutely fine: they are usually the "makers". However I wonder why admins get overlooked. Just like the plumber or the electrician, sys/net admins are the handyman/tradesmen of the computing world, and as software deployments grow, so will their demand.

admins are going to be replaced by programs that software engineers write (consider devops, heroku, aws, etc).

All of those services are run by sysadmins using software, not by software themselves. They just moved up a level of abstraction (take a look at the SRE listings, places are crowded with trying to hire proper devops/SRE). They have become the utility, which is where my plumbing/eletrician analogy comes in.

You might argue this is just suggesting there is a greater demand for software engineers, and that may be true, but I would be very skeptical of someone saying sysadmins would be replaced. Why haven't we replaced plumbers/electricians? Clearly we have utilities/plumbing/wiring that has been deployed for decades with little to no maintenance? Yet the profession still exists. The reality is, it still takes these tradesmen to build new environments, and support the frequent changes that technology throws us.

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#32

Post by SatvikBeri » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 2:07 AM UTC

moocow01 wrote: post #21

A lot of this article has points I agree with but feels swarmy and misdirected. The take-away seems to be "forget about getting educated, pick up a few O'reilly books, make a website, make sure your friends are doing the same". Yeah a lot of stuff is tough for young folks. Yeah we probably have got some tough things coming. We've got a lot of collective debt, healthcare problems, student debt, global warming, etc etc…

I agree with avoiding debt - it should be every young persons first priority. Go to college, work on the side, take a year off, work full time, go back etc IF you want an education. Yeah it sucks but its better than coming out and realizing you essentially are enslaved for the next X years of life.

I'm not sure how this makes sense, financially. You'll generally earn much more with a degree, so 4 years of college followed by 4 years of work will leave you with much more money than alternating years of college & work.

It's much more important to focus on increasing your income than decreasing your debt. Negotiating a salary increase once pretty much means an extra $X,000/year for the rest of your life, whereas growing your own food will save you $X00 and you have to do the work again each year. Do it if it satisfies you, but recognize you'll have a much higher (financial) RoI by focusing on earning more.

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#33

Post by jeffdavis » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 2:17 AM UTC

moocow01 wrote: post #21

A lot of this article has points I agree with but feels swarmy and misdirected. The take-away seems to be "forget about getting educated, pick up a few O'reilly books, make a website, make sure your friends are doing the same". Yeah a lot of stuff is tough for young folks. Yeah we probably have got some tough things coming. We've got a lot of collective debt, healthcare problems, student debt, global warming, etc etc…

"I also feel like these articles always skirt the issue that education has a very strong correlation to earnings - even still today."

Unfortunately, only causation will pay back the $200K ;-)

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#34

Post by nicholas73 » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 2:17 AM UTC

brianchu wrote: post #30

Firstly, it's misleading to say that the cost of a UC Berkeley education is $210,000. That's the price is you're an out-of-state resident and you receive no financial aid. In-state residents without financial aid end up paying roughly $120,000 (and the cost is even less since most students live off-campus after their first year, but I digress). Going to the flagship state college in the state you live in is generally…

Interesting. So the impending diarrhea I had during the last section of my PSAT cost me a potential free ride at USC (I scored a notch below what it took to be a top merit scholar).

Oh well ended up at a state school anyway.

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#35

Post by moocow01 » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 2:23 AM UTC

SatvikBeri wrote: post #32

moocow01 wrote: post #21

A lot of this article has points I agree with but feels swarmy and misdirected. The take-away seems to be "forget about getting educated, pick up a few O'reilly books, make a website, make sure your friends are doing the same". Yeah a lot of stuff is tough for young folks. Yeah we probably have got some tough things coming. We've got a lot of collective debt, healthcare problems, student debt, global warming, etc etc…

I agree with avoiding debt - it should be every young persons first priority. Go to college, work on the side, take a year off, work full time, go back etc IF you want an education. Yeah it sucks but its better than coming out and realizing you essentially are enslaved for the next X years of life. I'm not sure how this makes sense, financially. You'll generally earn much more with a degree, so 4 years of college fol…

Your point is correct in many scenarios.

If an engineering major who genuinely wants to be an engineer said should I take time off school to pay for the next year - Id likely point him/her to exactly what you just said. Very much agree

The big problem is that many people do the following... they say say Ill take on debt for undergrad and get paid pretty well so I can pay it off. Then they graduate, work for a couple years, pay a bit off and then say "you know what if I get that professional degree Ill be making even more". So they go back to school and add more debt and then they come out and are making more money. And then they do something similar like say "if I pull out a big mortgage and leverage myself in the housing market I can live well and increase my net worth faster". I know this is hyperbole but its a common path for many many people - essentially trying to use debt as a tool...

And then when they have a lot of debt and are making a lot of money... something "unforeseen" happens. The market falls apart, lose their job, they decide they hate their profession, they get divorced, housing market falls apart, get sick, etc - thats when all the accumulated debt can really run you over.

I agree that debt can be utilized to do good but it can turn on someone real quick if they keep the cycle going.

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#36

Post by pc86 » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 2:23 AM UTC

muzz wrote: post #13

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

While it is true that a four year college degree at Yale, or Stanford or USC can easily set you back $200K, the only reasonable thing about 'point 2' is that we don't need Spanish Majors, but we do need scientists, mathematicians, and engineeers. And a California State education is about $5k a year [1] or $20K for four years. Same cost as a car these days. You can pay off a car with a 60month loan, why not your colle…

The main fallacy of the whole rising-college-tuition thing is that students don't actually pay "sticker price". The actual cost is much less: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-27/misconceptions-101-...

Paying sticker on a college education is like paying above sticker on a car. The college I went to was a private institution and had a sticker price of $35k my freshman year and over $40k my senior year. Room and board and textbooks were additional.

I took loans for everything not covered by scholarships or grants and I owe barely $20k.

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#37

Post by rfurlong » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 2:26 AM UTC

This article, like many articles on Hacker News equates the value of education into dollars. Education, intrinsically, cannot be solely measured in dollars. The problem isn't people getting useless degrees, its degrees that don't correspond to high paying jobs in the current economy costing too much. THERE IS NO SHAME IN GETTING A DEGREE IN LITERATURE. Education should be free.

I just get a knee jerk reaction to any article like this because it wholly overlooks how education is supposed to make you a better human being, not a money making machine.

Articles like this take the easy way and basically say ASSIMILATE or die. Yea, thats going to solve the problem...

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#38

Post by nicholas73 » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 2:28 AM UTC

bbthorson wrote: post #26

jacalata wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might have misunderstood either you or the article, but the main point of the article seemed to be that people don't really have much use for business/econ grads - they need people who will write the software. So you're clearly pretty smart, but are you hoping to be a programmer/teaching yourself to program, or what? How is your story a response to this article?

I think point 1 is largely that business/econ isn't needed, however a large part of econ is dealing with data sets. Regardless, college isn't a tremendous metric of ability; how many times has the fallacy been sold that it doesn't matter what you graduated in, just that you graduate? Programming and comp sci are largely about logic, and teaching oneself how to program is certainly a fine suggestion but it's not a ver…

"Tt's ridiculous to think that an employer would hire you and put you to work with no training."

What changed from the past is that now businesses are focused more on the short term. They want someone who is plug and play right out of school. When the managers themselves might hop job in the next year, there is no incentive to do anything but what helps them right away.

The way to show you can do the job is to show you have done something similar. For software it is some side project or open source contrib. I'm not sure for your case, but you need something you can talk about.

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#39

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 2:38 AM UTC

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #24

Since the beginning of the financial crisis the media has constantly been repeating that the housing market was key to recovery and that the government had to do things to help prop up house prices. As someone who would like to own a house in the future, I find it quite unfair that the government is helping to maintain bubble prices. It is yet another way for current homeowners to to extract as much money as possible…

[deleted]

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#40

Post by BobWarfield » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 2:40 AM UTC

spydum wrote: post #31

munin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

admins are going to be replaced by programs that software engineers write (consider devops, heroku, aws, etc).

All of those services are run by sysadmins using software, not by software themselves. They just moved up a level of abstraction (take a look at the SRE listings, places are crowded with trying to hire proper devops/SRE). They have become the utility, which is where my plumbing/eletrician analogy comes in. You might argue this is just suggesting there is a greater demand for software engineers, and that may be true,…

Nooooo. They are being managed by software. Facebook has 1 admin per 1000 MySQL instances. You can't do that except with software. If the DevOps guy is spending much time touching servers, you got the wrong guy.

I've been through this multiple times. In each case, I hired a good Devops guy and told him to work his way out of a job ASAP. Typically, he was down to spending 1/3 of his time on ops of any kind, including DevOps, within 6 months. At that stage I had him helping Prof Svcs, QA, and the Developers by directly writing product code.