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"17. People rely mainly on their parents for advice on what to do about education, and that has to be among the worst places to go for educational advice" This

"17. People rely mainly on their parents for advice on what to do about education, and that has to be among the worst places to go for educational advice" This one certainly hits me hard. With a mother who dropped out of university and a father who didn't go myself and my sister both have good degrees (she's a newly qualified Vet and I'm a startup's birth and death out of uni), and nowhere to get decent advice. I know a lot of advice I did get was wrong, my professors basically said they don't have good advice for me, and I know I'm not making the most of the experience I have behind me. Searching for relevant mentorship is a very very hard problem.

golergka 9y ago
Same here, only the opposite way. Anyone in my family have had degrees for at least 3 generations (majority had 2 degrees in different fields, and some pursued academic careers as well). Dropping out of university to do what I love is still something I feel guilty about - even 10 years later, being pretty much successful in the field I chose, I still feel like I'm a failure just because I don't have this damn piece of paper.
- edraferi 9y ago
  You can always get the paper later -- they are for sale. The main issue is just deciding to spend the time they demand. Go to school when you feel you need something they can teach you, and not before.
  - golergka 9y ago
    I would gladly invest time into some graduate course, but they require undegrad degree - and getting an undergrad CS degree after programming my whole life, studying a lot of theory and making personal hobby projects in almost every field (from OS to db to compilers to 3d renderers to ML) seems like a total waste.
jackgolding 9y ago
I started writing a comment to share my similar story of a blue-collar upbringing, but realised that other than a few chance encounters most of the relevant mentorship I have gotten was as a professional or read in articles/books. The best things I've learned in life through tough lessons - the trick is don't fail too hard. The important stuff I learned before graduating my bachelors was things like: 1) It's better to be a small fish in the big pond (my career councillor told me this when I was 16, I think I disagreed with it in my first 3 years of uni but now I can totally agree.) 2) You don't owe anyone anything and you aren't tied to anyplace on earth (Mum - grew up moving a lot so when I had an opportunity to attend a more prestigious university my mum gave me a lot of support) 3) Always swap jobs every few years (my uncle worked for the same company for 18 years before being laid off - he has done well but nearly everyone he started working with are execs now) Most related to your comment is something I was told a few years after university where I was pushing work to fast track my professional development as much as possible. A senior manager told me there is only so much other people can teach you, in the end you need to do the time and build the experience.
- bartedinburgh 9y ago
  Small fish in a big pond? I've heard a completely opposite advice stating that "in a big pond" there's much competition, and dominating a small niche yields better results. What is the rationale behind being a small fish in a big pond?
  - akvadrako 9y ago
    I can't see how either choice could be always correct. A small pond can have great rewards, but also great risk. Like if it dries up totally.
    - BrandonM 9y ago
      I take away something different from both of you. To me, the question is about whether it's better to be the most impressive person in a shithole town or a nobody in an amazing place. I'm not even sure I know the answer for myself, and it probably varies a lot based on personality.
austenallred 9y ago
For me it was the reverse. Parents that grew up poor and saw college as the way out but didn’t understand dynamics beyond that, so it was, “Go to the best (most expensive) college you can, study anything at all, and you’ve got it made” which is either OK advice or terrible advice depending on what college that is and what you happen to study.
- faitswulff 9y ago
  I got similar advice from my parents and followed it, somewhat bitterly. My dad regrets dropping out of college, but he also paid $400/semester for tuition, not $20,000 like I did. I feel like "any degree == $$$" was much more true in the 70s and 80s than it was when I graduated.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    A much smaller fraction of the population earned a college degree 30-40 years ago so it was more of a differentiator. It's still pretty clear that a (4 year) degree changes access to jobs, I guess it's less clear that it will matter for a given person.
    - dpark 9y ago
      A 4-year still matters a lot. The issue is that a 4-year from a state school has almost as much value as a 4-year from an Ivy League. A prestigious university on your resume will open a few extra doors, but in most disciplines it’s just not worth the extra cost. The University of Washington is $5.5k/semester (resident tuition). If you’re spending 20k/semester, you better be getting a degree from somewhere very prestigious and you better have a plan to leverage the network you build there. Otherwise you’re just wasting ~90k on your 4-year degree. And of course the less in demand your degree is, the more the math favors cheaper schools.
      - maxerickson 9y ago
        For people where the $15K difference matters a great deal, the tuition at the elite school is increasingly likely to be greatly reduced or free. Such policy is even trickling down to public schools with big endowments: https://goblueguarantee.umich.edu/ https://goblueguarantee.umich.edu/ The place where people get killed is when they go to a private school that is expensive and not particularly an academic standout (of course there's many more mediocre private schools than elite private schools).
rc-1140 9y ago
> Searching for relevant mentorship is a very very hard problem. I completely agree. As someone just reaching a bit over 3 years out of a bachelor's program, I had no one that I could talk to for a solid 20 years of my life about computers, let alone what I wanted to do. Like a bunch of people here, computers were my "thing" but no one around me seemed to take much interest in them. When it came time to go through the college hunt in high school, my mother had no idea what to tell me since although she had a background in math, she worked as a lab tech, social worker, and teacher. I ended up railroaded onto a liberal arts education until I reached my community college, where I encountered people - not just professors - who knew that the magic hardware box could do other things besides send and receive email. I didn't even know it was POSSIBLE to get a degree in computer science until community college, and later interacting with people I met from video game communities. I still couldn't actually get my bachelor's in computer science for financial reasons (have a LibArts BA), and even with knowing about CS as a path, I didn't have anyone who could help me or even just talk to about what to do. Professors at my university didn't know what to do with me, and the university career center tried to shove me into roles like inner-city teacher, advertising, and camp counselor. It wasn't until two years ago that I became good friends with someone who had been through a lot from his college to several jobs in industry, and he helped me get on track to doing something I wanted to do. Went from a dead-end job doing forced cowboy coding and data entry at a small insurance company to QA automation at a nice software company that works in the transport industry. Even now, I wouldn't really consider him my mentor because I know he's got a lot more work responsibility than I do and I don't like asking him questions that remind him of work, especially since he's my friend first. I firmly believe that if I had someone LIKE my friend as an actual mentor earlier in my life, I'd have been studying things I liked doing way earlier. EDIT: Something that occured to me after I hit submit is that I still feel that I don't have an actual mentor, yet many articles/blogs and people I've spoken to insist that it's easy and almost natural to find and have one, be it at the workplace or somewhere else; any articles I've read or listened to (example of the latter being the Hello World Podcast) about people who have done it without mentors were people who grew up with computers/programming texts in the home. I'm still not sure if this is a reality or something that happens to maybe 5% of the programmer population.
- bitwize 9y ago
psyc 9y ago
My single working mother had no bandwidth to help me with getting into college. Neither of my parents had a dime to give me. Despite both my parents being college educated and emphasizing its importance, they had little practical advice or assistance to give. I knew nothing. I ended up applying to one state university, in-state, commuting long distance, not taking any loan, and working 30 hours a week to afford it. I dropped out after a semester from the unmitigated strain and sleep deprivation. I owe my quite exceptional career to our industry being lax about degrees.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  Most advice parents or anyone who went to college before say, the mid 90s or before is fairly useless anyway, unless it's study advice. The job market, costs of college, and many other factors are incredibly different. Just as an example, I had a friend in your situation but whose parents encouraged him to go to an expensive school and not worry too much what to study. You can probably guess what would've happened if he didn't end up doing his own research instead.
  - lallysingh 9y ago
    Like anything else, they should be able to teach you to fish. I.e. find out where to get the info you need.
    - sotojuan 9y ago
      Most middle class parents who aren't first or second generation immigrants won't even know the answer to this. To them, the answer is "high school counselor" or another similarly uninformed high school individual. Maybe millennial parents will be the first to recommend internet forums or similar. Again, for them, it was a very different world.
- nurettin 9y ago
  Industries use degrees as a comparison level when there is nothing else to compare. Through luck and skill you may have ended up in an incomparable position, but many white collars in the industry end up better off and more respected just on the merit of having a doctorate in a field.
walshemj 9y ago
That depends on your parents class if your a bright working class kid whose parents didn't go to uni you don't get told the unspoken rules. You also don't have access to the behind the scenes influence eg being a legacy at Harvard or similar, I was surprised to hear my mum saying I we had stayed in Brummagem they would have used my grandfathers influence to try and get me into King Edwards.
RobertRoberts 9y ago
When I started looking for answers on what to do, even when I found good ones, it wasn't always easy to do what they said. And I know I failed at this a few times. Just having the right advice isn't always enough, you need to be able to do something with it, often times that's what parents help with too. Edit: my advice to my kids, get and stay educated (don't care how, college is one way), work hard and treat people decently. Don't need much more than that to succeed. Edit: Dave Chappelle said in an interview that his dad warned him not to go to hollywood, "you might not make it." Dave said "..that depends on what making it is, dad." And summed up by saying that if he could "make a teachers salary as a comedian", he's made it. That's just awesome. Worth watching this bit here: https://youtu.be/SyZsxCyoARM?t=1268 https://youtu.be/SyZsxCyoARM?t=1268 NOTE: He convinces his dad to support him going into comedy. It's brilliant. "I was the first person in the family 'not' to go to college, that had not been a slave." - Dave Chappelle
BatFastard 9y ago
My advice to my kids "Find a career in something you enjoy. If you love it, it is not work". What did they do instead? Both went into CS!

golergka 9y ago

Same here, only the opposite way. Anyone in my family have had degrees for at least 3 generations (majority had 2 degrees in different fields, and some pursued academic careers as well). Dropping out of university to do what I love is still something I feel guilty about - even 10 years later, being pretty much successful in the field I chose, I still feel like I'm a failure just because I don't have this damn piece of paper.

edraferi 9y ago
You can always get the paper later -- they are for sale. The main issue is just deciding to spend the time they demand. Go to school when you feel you need something they can teach you, and not before.
- golergka 9y ago
  I would gladly invest time into some graduate course, but they require undegrad degree - and getting an undergrad CS degree after programming my whole life, studying a lot of theory and making personal hobby projects in almost every field (from OS to db to compilers to 3d renderers to ML) seems like a total waste.

jackgolding 9y ago

I started writing a comment to share my similar story of a blue-collar upbringing, but realised that other than a few chance encounters most of the relevant mentorship I have gotten was as a professional or read in articles/books. The best things I've learned in life through tough lessons - the trick is don't fail too hard. The important stuff I learned before graduating my bachelors was things like: 1) It's better to be a small fish in the big pond (my career councillor told me this when I was 16, I think I disagreed with it in my first 3 years of uni but now I can totally agree.) 2) You don't owe anyone anything and you aren't tied to anyplace on earth (Mum - grew up moving a lot so when I had an opportunity to attend a more prestigious university my mum gave me a lot of support) 3) Always swap jobs every few years (my uncle worked for the same company for 18 years before being laid off - he has done well but nearly everyone he started working with are execs now) Most related to your comment is something I was told a few years after university where I was pushing work to fast track my professional development as much as possible. A senior manager told me there is only so much other people can teach you, in the end you need to do the time and build the experience.

bartedinburgh 9y ago
Small fish in a big pond? I've heard a completely opposite advice stating that "in a big pond" there's much competition, and dominating a small niche yields better results. What is the rationale behind being a small fish in a big pond?
- akvadrako 9y ago
  I can't see how either choice could be always correct. A small pond can have great rewards, but also great risk. Like if it dries up totally.
  - BrandonM 9y ago
    I take away something different from both of you. To me, the question is about whether it's better to be the most impressive person in a shithole town or a nobody in an amazing place. I'm not even sure I know the answer for myself, and it probably varies a lot based on personality.

austenallred 9y ago

For me it was the reverse. Parents that grew up poor and saw college as the way out but didn’t understand dynamics beyond that, so it was, “Go to the best (most expensive) college you can, study anything at all, and you’ve got it made” which is either OK advice or terrible advice depending on what college that is and what you happen to study.

faitswulff 9y ago
I got similar advice from my parents and followed it, somewhat bitterly. My dad regrets dropping out of college, but he also paid $400/semester for tuition, not $20,000 like I did. I feel like "any degree == $$$" was much more true in the 70s and 80s than it was when I graduated.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  A much smaller fraction of the population earned a college degree 30-40 years ago so it was more of a differentiator. It's still pretty clear that a (4 year) degree changes access to jobs, I guess it's less clear that it will matter for a given person.
  - dpark 9y ago
    A 4-year still matters a lot. The issue is that a 4-year from a state school has almost as much value as a 4-year from an Ivy League. A prestigious university on your resume will open a few extra doors, but in most disciplines it’s just not worth the extra cost. The University of Washington is $5.5k/semester (resident tuition). If you’re spending 20k/semester, you better be getting a degree from somewhere very prestigious and you better have a plan to leverage the network you build there. Otherwise you’re just wasting ~90k on your 4-year degree. And of course the less in demand your degree is, the more the math favors cheaper schools.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      For people where the $15K difference matters a great deal, the tuition at the elite school is increasingly likely to be greatly reduced or free. Such policy is even trickling down to public schools with big endowments: https://goblueguarantee.umich.edu/ https://goblueguarantee.umich.edu/ The place where people get killed is when they go to a private school that is expensive and not particularly an academic standout (of course there's many more mediocre private schools than elite private schools).

rc-1140 9y ago

> Searching for relevant mentorship is a very very hard problem. I completely agree. As someone just reaching a bit over 3 years out of a bachelor's program, I had no one that I could talk to for a solid 20 years of my life about computers, let alone what I wanted to do. Like a bunch of people here, computers were my "thing" but no one around me seemed to take much interest in them. When it came time to go through the college hunt in high school, my mother had no idea what to tell me since although she had a background in math, she worked as a lab tech, social worker, and teacher. I ended up railroaded onto a liberal arts education until I reached my community college, where I encountered people - not just professors - who knew that the magic hardware box could do other things besides send and receive email. I didn't even know it was POSSIBLE to get a degree in computer science until community college, and later interacting with people I met from video game communities. I still couldn't actually get my bachelor's in computer science for financial reasons (have a LibArts BA), and even with knowing about CS as a path, I didn't have anyone who could help me or even just talk to about what to do. Professors at my university didn't know what to do with me, and the university career center tried to shove me into roles like inner-city teacher, advertising, and camp counselor. It wasn't until two years ago that I became good friends with someone who had been through a lot from his college to several jobs in industry, and he helped me get on track to doing something I wanted to do. Went from a dead-end job doing forced cowboy coding and data entry at a small insurance company to QA automation at a nice software company that works in the transport industry. Even now, I wouldn't really consider him my mentor because I know he's got a lot more work responsibility than I do and I don't like asking him questions that remind him of work, especially since he's my friend first. I firmly believe that if I had someone LIKE my friend as an actual mentor earlier in my life, I'd have been studying things I liked doing way earlier. EDIT: Something that occured to me after I hit submit is that I still feel that I don't have an actual mentor, yet many articles/blogs and people I've spoken to insist that it's easy and almost natural to find and have one, be it at the workplace or somewhere else; any articles I've read or listened to (example of the latter being the Hello World Podcast) about people who have done it without mentors were people who grew up with computers/programming texts in the home. I'm still not sure if this is a reality or something that happens to maybe 5% of the programmer population.

bitwize 9y ago

psyc 9y ago

My single working mother had no bandwidth to help me with getting into college. Neither of my parents had a dime to give me. Despite both my parents being college educated and emphasizing its importance, they had little practical advice or assistance to give. I knew nothing. I ended up applying to one state university, in-state, commuting long distance, not taking any loan, and working 30 hours a week to afford it. I dropped out after a semester from the unmitigated strain and sleep deprivation. I owe my quite exceptional career to our industry being lax about degrees.

sotojuan 9y ago
Most advice parents or anyone who went to college before say, the mid 90s or before is fairly useless anyway, unless it's study advice. The job market, costs of college, and many other factors are incredibly different. Just as an example, I had a friend in your situation but whose parents encouraged him to go to an expensive school and not worry too much what to study. You can probably guess what would've happened if he didn't end up doing his own research instead.
- lallysingh 9y ago
  Like anything else, they should be able to teach you to fish. I.e. find out where to get the info you need.
  - sotojuan 9y ago
    Most middle class parents who aren't first or second generation immigrants won't even know the answer to this. To them, the answer is "high school counselor" or another similarly uninformed high school individual. Maybe millennial parents will be the first to recommend internet forums or similar. Again, for them, it was a very different world.
nurettin 9y ago
Industries use degrees as a comparison level when there is nothing else to compare. Through luck and skill you may have ended up in an incomparable position, but many white collars in the industry end up better off and more respected just on the merit of having a doctorate in a field.

walshemj 9y ago

That depends on your parents class if your a bright working class kid whose parents didn't go to uni you don't get told the unspoken rules. You also don't have access to the behind the scenes influence eg being a legacy at Harvard or similar, I was surprised to hear my mum saying I we had stayed in Brummagem they would have used my grandfathers influence to try and get me into King Edwards.

RobertRoberts 9y ago

When I started looking for answers on what to do, even when I found good ones, it wasn't always easy to do what they said. And I know I failed at this a few times. Just having the right advice isn't always enough, you need to be able to do something with it, often times that's what parents help with too. Edit: my advice to my kids, get and stay educated (don't care how, college is one way), work hard and treat people decently. Don't need much more than that to succeed. Edit: Dave Chappelle said in an interview that his dad warned him not to go to hollywood, "you might not make it." Dave said "..that depends on what making it is, dad." And summed up by saying that if he could "make a teachers salary as a comedian", he's made it. That's just awesome. Worth watching this bit here: https://youtu.be/SyZsxCyoARM?t=1268 https://youtu.be/SyZsxCyoARM?t=1268 NOTE: He convinces his dad to support him going into comedy. It's brilliant. "I was the first person in the family 'not' to go to college, that had not been a slave." - Dave Chappelle

BatFastard 9y ago

My advice to my kids "Find a career in something you enjoy. If you love it, it is not work". What did they do instead? Both went into CS!