What If You Could Do It All Over?
newyorker.com
What If You Could Do It All Over?
1–10 of 460 posts
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#2Definitely not be a software engineer. No one told me how incredibly low the social status is.
EDIT: I guess it was suspicious that 99% of my high school circle picked law or finance or business courses instead.
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#3Definitely not be a software engineer. No one told me how incredibly low the social status is. EDIT: I guess it was suspicious that 99% of my high school circle picked law or finance or business courses instead.
Couldn't you build something beautiful and useful and add to the world's treasures? That's not the mark of a low status person.
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#4Definitely not be a software engineer. No one told me how incredibly low the social status is. EDIT: I guess it was suspicious that 99% of my high school circle picked law or finance or business courses instead.
Hah. Nope. A career where you can make money and move up over time is not low status. Try being a blue collar member of the working poor, or someone deep in debt from a useless degree working a dead end service job. Software is a very cushy job compared with what more than half this country has.
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#5“Someone once told me the definition of Hell: The last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.”
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#6Definitely not be a software engineer. No one told me how incredibly low the social status is. EDIT: I guess it was suspicious that 99% of my high school circle picked law or finance or business courses instead.
Hah. Nope. A career where you can make money and move up over time is not low status. Try being a blue collar member of the working poor, or someone deep in debt from a useless degree working a dead end service job. Software is a very cushy job compared with what more than half this country has.
It's the lowest of the white collar jobs.
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah. Nope. A career where you can make money and move up over time is not low status. Try being a blue collar member of the working poor, or someone deep in debt from a useless degree working a dead end service job. Software is a very cushy job compared with what more than half this country has.
It's the lowest of the white collar jobs.
Postdoc, paralegal, architectural “cad monkies,” a lot of mid level administration...
Depends on where you work too. Sounds like you may need a new job.
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#8This reminds me of “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath, which has a quote Aziz Ansari used in his series “Master of None”:
> "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#9Definitely not be a software engineer. No one told me how incredibly low the social status is. EDIT: I guess it was suspicious that 99% of my high school circle picked law or finance or business courses instead.
Don't get a job based on how impressive it sounds when you tell people about it at parties. You will spend far more time doing the job than you will talking about it at parties.
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#10Definitely not be a software engineer. No one told me how incredibly low the social status is. EDIT: I guess it was suspicious that 99% of my high school circle picked law or finance or business courses instead.
You could try being a grad student in New Orleans. The James Earl Jones quote from Conan is apt here (my point being they will be thankful for what they have).
If it makes them feel better I have to teach the 99% of their high school they are talking about and they all seem pretty one track minded.