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A generation of American men give up on college

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Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#181

Post by notanzaiiswear »

twic wrote: post #146
orwin wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about that, i've hear Professor Emeritus Mallard talk about his youth in the genetical field and the first use of computers to assist geneticists, he told me that he basically never saw men doing computer work, and that changed in the 80s, along with the culture.

The story i've heard is that the olden days, operating a computer was seen as clerical work, just like being a secretary, so ideally suited to women. Then we got 8-bit microcomputers in every home, and operating a computer became a technical hobby, so ideally suited to boys. The generation of boys growing up playing with computers, and girls not playing with computers, swamped any existing biases in the industry. I w…

How many women were in electronics? I think the 8 Bit Homecomputer thing grew out of the electronics hobby, not office computers.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#182

Post by throwaway556677 »

tchaffee wrote: post #152
spoonjim wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have bad information because FAANG companies compete over hiring black software engineers. They want to get their numbers up and there aren’t many to hire.

How many FAANG companies are there? I guess five from the name. Does every black applicant with a CS degree get a job if they apply? It's a free pass? Your sample size of five elite companies can't be taken as a serious attempt to describe the actual experience of black CS grads applying for jobs.

A charitable (and, I think, reasonable) reading would be that the poster used FAANG as a representation of the overall trend in tech. FAANG are what the rest of the industry aspires to be, after all.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#183

Post by notanzaiiswear »

oldsecondhand wrote: post #120
Bayart wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a legacy of socialist regimes enforcing gender ratios. Gender disparity is usually proportional to freedom of choice. ie. countries where there's less pressure to choose a particular field are more disparate in their gender ratios across disciplines.

It's a legacy of socialist systems where you can have 2 years of paid maternity leave and then go back to your previous job.

Also I guess you HAVE to go back to your job. Everybody has to do their part for society.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#184

Post by hellbannedguy »

smitty1e wrote: post #74
baron816 wrote: post #63

A lot of this is driven by narratives—A narrative that college isn’t worth it anymore. A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. And a narrative that those men aren’t wanted by society any more. I’m not convinced that all those men need to go to college, but they clearly need something. They need to feel like they’re part of society. Nothing good can come of an entire gener…

My brother in law is an electrician. I had enough EE in college to change a light switch without burning the house down. However, that book-learnin' fell apart when confronted with troubleshooting a strangely wired room, and I got very polite while asking him over to bail me out. These fellows eschewing the ivory tower, where being of European extraction and bearing a Y-chromosome on the college campus is an indictme…

I've was a union electrician for a few years.

Get in early. Get in a union. 25-30 years to retirement in most unions. You don't want to be 60, and still in construction.

The test is easy, but figure 1000-2000 guys are taking the test too, so you need to get most of the questions right to get in. An oral interview counts for 1/2 the hiring process.

Just say you love working with your hands--love unions, but understand the needs of the contractors too.

Remember it's construction. You're around guys all day long. It's brainless work, and you will never have to act cheery when the owner's spoiled kid comes to work.

I do not recommend non-union construction at all.

Then again---hide in school for a long time. I loved college. It was cheaper 25 years ago though, and not that fun, but much better than any job I've had.

Your interest will change as you age.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#185

Post by RubberbandSoul »

mih wrote: post #163
WalterBright wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EE programs tend to focus on electronics, not electrical systems. But learning how house wiring works is a simple book away. But be careful - unlike electronics, house electrics can kill you. On the other hand, electricians have weird gaps in their knowledge. If I ask them to do something slightly out of the ordinary, this becomes apparent. For example, none of them understand inductive coupling, or even know what it…

Out of curiosity, why shouldn't one run low voltage wires through same holes as AC wires ?

I'm guessing it's because the AC voltage will introduce noise on the DC low voltage current.

But like everything else it depends. Is the DC feeding something like a lightbulb or a fan? Then it probably won't matter.

Does the DC feed something that has a good low pass filter or is it an expensive AC cable with good shielding? Then it might also not matter.

None of the above should be considered be professional advice and it's probably a good rule of thumb to never mix wires like that.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#186

Post by ceilingcorner »

atoav wrote: post #159
ceilingcorner wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "you have to be hard or else you won't survive"-mentality Europeans often have this opinion but I don't think it's an accurate reading of the issue. The issue is not that Americans work too hard, it's that this hard work is no longer actually amounting to anything. In the past, you could pay for college by working summers at the local restaurant. Today the average debt is $30K and you still won't get a decent job.…

> The article (and others) just show that American men are starting to put their efforts into places that do reward them; namely, the trades and entrepreneurship. Good point. I did not intend to argue otherwise. To go into trade is not an irrational reaction on an individual level — quite the opposite in fact. What I did argue however, was that making it hard for people to get a higher education is not a good thing f…

You have still missed my point. The American dream was an effective, real thing for a long period of time. Most Americans today are descendants of poor immigrants that worked hard and gave their children a better quality of life. This wasn’t “a lottery” and your characterization of it as such is both historically misinformed and just ideological in nature.

As I said, the issue is that this hard work no longer results in progress. The system has become broken. This is easily observable via a bevy of statistical measures like inequality and college costs.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#187

Post by nickd2001 »

throwtheworld wrote: post #99
baron816 wrote: post #63

A lot of this is driven by narratives—A narrative that college isn’t worth it anymore. A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. And a narrative that those men aren’t wanted by society any more. I’m not convinced that all those men need to go to college, but they clearly need something. They need to feel like they’re part of society. Nothing good can come of an entire gener…

> A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. This is very perspective dependent. I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well. When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past…

Do you mean by "we know we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees", simply that they're looking for identically qualified people that aren't black? If so, I'm extremely sorry to hear this, and disgusted that its happening. I can't actually think of anyone I worked with who'd knowingly treat or value a black colleague or interview candidate any differently, but maybe that's white blindness on my part, maybe its been going on and I didn't notice. In case this is helpful info, I know that Capital One tech has robust D&I policies and seeks to redress the balance. They sponsor an organisation called "Blacks in Tech". Their senior management seem to say it makes good business sense and provides competitive edge, to reward talented people who happen to be black, whom other employers are too stupid/racist to consider hiring and/or promoting quick enough once hired. so, if I were a black American looking for a job in tech I'd look at Capital One if struggling to get anywhere with other employers.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#188

Post by WalterBright »

mih wrote: post #163
WalterBright wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EE programs tend to focus on electronics, not electrical systems. But learning how house wiring works is a simple book away. But be careful - unlike electronics, house electrics can kill you. On the other hand, electricians have weird gaps in their knowledge. If I ask them to do something slightly out of the ordinary, this becomes apparent. For example, none of them understand inductive coupling, or even know what it…

Out of curiosity, why shouldn't one run low voltage wires through same holes as AC wires ?

If you run, say, the telephone wires through the same holes, they'll pick up a maddening 60 Hz hummmmmmmmmmm. You're screwed because when this is discovered, the house is finished, and it gets very very expensive to rewrite it.

The closer the low voltage wires are to the high voltage ones, and the longer the distance, the more hmmmmmmm they'll pick up.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#189

Post by hellbannedguy »

WalterBright wrote: post #160
blueblisters wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing with vocationals skills - they make you really good at understanding how something works or how to fix something without breaking something else, but beyond that range of problems and solutions, you need to talk to an engineer. Not that vocational jobs are not important - clearly they add value and create employment.

I'm not so sure they understand how it works, though. BTW, if you ever see an EE with a card that has printed on it: V = I*R I = V/R R = V/I it's a sure sign he's a formula-plugger, and has no idea how it works. He doesn't even understand algebra. https://testguy.net/content/266-Ohm-s-Law-Watt-s-Law-Cheat-S... A definite no-hire :-/

There's a book called, Everytjing I should have learned in Engineering School, but didn't.

I had no idea there were EE's walking around who were rusty with basic electrical formulas.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#190

Post by AussieWog93 »

throwtheworld wrote: post #99
baron816 wrote: post #63

A lot of this is driven by narratives—A narrative that college isn’t worth it anymore. A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. And a narrative that those men aren’t wanted by society any more. I’m not convinced that all those men need to go to college, but they clearly need something. They need to feel like they’re part of society. Nothing good can come of an entire gener…

> A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. This is very perspective dependent. I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well. When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past…

>It’s like if I’ll have to sell sneakers to make ends meet after college anyways

Just for what it's worth, I (not black, but from a different group that is not looked upon kindly by HR types) took the route of EEE Degree -> PhD (dropped out) -> Software Engineer at Relatively Elite company (not FAANG, but about as good as we have in Melbourne, AU) -> running eCommerce businesses from home (selling used video games on eBay as well as a USB oscilloscope I designed as a student, mostly through Amazon).

If you're smart and skilled, you can make an absolute killing doing something that stoners or less intelligent people do to "get by", and at the same time spend massive amounts of quality time with your (probably at this stage future) wife and kids.

If you want to have a chat about it, feel free to shoot us an email (see profile). But long story short, even if you're locked out of the traditional job market it doesn't mean you should give up on developing your skills or give up hope. Capitalism provides, man.

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