6 ms·

You graduated in one of the most well paid, expanding industry of the last 40 years and made it. Excellent.

iso1631 6y ago
And that's before the survivor bias. "I won the lottery, you can too"
533474 6y ago
Survivorship bias. Our system is broken, humanity needs a way to encourage success without punishing failure. Failure shouln't be hunger and homelessness...This will be another generation of hopeless dreamers lost in the looming financial depression. Why is our antidote hope against the adversity of going against all the odds?. Congrats to those who made it but more recognition to those who failed and managed to overcome misery
- pc86 6y ago
  > Our system is broken Citation needed. > humanity needs a way to encourage success without punishing failure Serious question - why? You state this as an objective fact with no argument for it. > Failure [shouldn't] be hunger and homelessness If you're smart about it, it isn't. What's wrong with saying "yes you should probably have savings to fall back on in case this doesn't work out?" What's wrong with saying "if you throw caution and all reasonableness to the wind and blow your life's savings trying to sell Amway products, your neighbor isn't going to be burdened with paying your bills while you look for another job?"
  - rsk67 6y ago
    This might be the most HN on-brand comment I've ever seen
  - nscalf 6y ago
    I think people are too quick to discount the importance of failure and feeling bad. If failing has no consequence, there will be far less motivation. However, in my opinion, this is a balance. Failure has to be sufficiently painful, but no more than that. From the research I’ve done, two major items have made failure too painful: stagnant wages and rapidly inflating rent prices. People can no longer hold onto savings in case something doesn’t work because they barely make ends meet. Our system is inherently broken. We need unions, raises in minimum wage, worker strikes, etc. This is not going to be a generation of people going through economic hardship just because of the economy, but also because we are no longer willing to fight for each other.
    - frockington1 6y ago
      How would unions help anything? Modern examples (such as teachers unions) seem to reward mediocrity and encourage paying into failing pensions
      - hdctambien 6y ago
        If unions were the cause of "mediocrity" then there should be better teaching in states that don't have teacher unions right? Ranking of states without unions (2011) https://www.businessinsider.com/states-where-teachers-unions-are-illegal-2011-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/states-where-teachers-unions... Wisconsin after unions were removed (2017) https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/17/news/economy/wisconsin-act-10-teachers/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/17/news/economy/wisconsin-act-...
    - pc86 6y ago
      How does unionization depress rising rent?
  - swiley 6y ago
    You don’t have savings just after graduation. Also: thinking about these people helps the rest of us, the economy is extremely fragile because most people aren’t able to save (high rent+low wages) and have limited mobility. I used to think all the SWEs getting paid well would make the world a better place because they were more capable of dealing with complex problems but comments like this make me question that.
  - charlesu 6y ago
    > If you're smart about it, it isn't. Citation needed. Whether you have something to fall back on in the event of failure has a lot to do with where and whom you're born to. It's pretty difficult to have a fall back option as a kid from a poor coal mining town with 20% unemployment. If you move out west with no network and lose your job soon after, yes, you can find yourself hungry and homeless in short order. Whether we acknowledge it or not, many of us are just one bout of extended unemployment or illness away from homelessness.
- austincheney 6y ago
  > without punishing failure Why not punish failure?
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    1. Because most people fail a lot in a lot of things. 2. Because failure often doesn't depend on you, and extremely often is at least partially dependent on external factors and context. 3. Because it's not that useful (psychologically) as opposed to other engagement approahces. 4. Because it can and will be misused to punish those who are disfavorable to the punishing establishment. and last but not least: 5. Because the social systems which need to be in place in order to punish failure, and the ethos necessary for the punishers and for legitimization of the punishers' concrete acts, are themselves repressive to the general populace and make life a worse experience for everyone.
  - bsanr2 6y ago
    >It's inhumane to oversee a system with the capability to feed and house its entire population and refuse to do so for procedural reasons. (Welfare gap, Section 8 waiting lists) >The system does not dole out failure meritocratically, therefore the existence of a total failure state will mean earnest and reasonably industrious individuals will still fail by chance alone. (Rust belt) >The official sanctioning of a failure state is the impetus for a black market safety net, where failure is precluded at the cost of rule of law. (Drug-dealing, prostitution, gang-controlled ghettoes) It's a hole in the ship's hull.
  - HumblyTossed 6y ago
    If you do, it shouldn't be: >Failure shouln't be hunger and homelessness...
  - guiriduro 6y ago
    What is failure? Is it failure to deliver some social good, even if your financial costs exceed your income? The system needs a reset.
  - charlesu 6y ago
    Would you rather optimize for people succeeding or optimize for people not failing? They are not the same thing.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- einpoklum 6y ago
  > to encourage success Scammers, arbitrage stock-traders, and opioid drug marketers can also achieve success... On the other hand, some endeavors "succeed" by not-failing and being out of sight and out of mind, e.g. a plumbing installation. You don't think of your "daily plumbing success". So, I'd say not success which should be encouraged, it is well-directed and well-applied effort. PS - The plumbing example can well be adapted to nearly any pursuit, definitely including software.
  - dgb23 6y ago
    > You don't think of your "daily plumbing success". Initially I had to laugh at this one, but why not? Robustness is something that seems to be very hard to measure, communicate and sell until something bad happens. I think one of the IT fields that is struggling with this is security, because the problem is most apparent there.
    - yourapostasy 6y ago
      > Robustness is something that seems to be very hard to measure, communicate and sell until something bad happens. This is endemic to business and is especially widespread in contemporary American-style business, and the general case seems to be a failure in pricing all kinds of tail risk. I suspect a key challenge in this space is the unsolved principal agent problem. I think the principal agent problem is rampant because pricing information is extremely lossy information compression; only the grossest outcomes are recorded in the market. Those who exploit the principal agent problem rely upon externalities to succeed, and those externalities are not timely or fine-grained reflected in the compressed/price information. Reputation systems lossily add the missing information back into the market as a side-channel. But what externalities to record is a whole other can of worms.
- golergka 6y ago
  That's exactly the kind of best intentions that the road to hell is paved with.
- asdfman123 6y ago
  You should look at statistics about how many countries are rising out of desperate poverty and joining the rich world. It's gotten so good that we've forgotten what desperate poverty even looks like.
draw_down 6y ago
Maybe my favorite post ever on HN
notacoward 6y ago
That's unnecessarily rude. Software is still the most well paid, expanding industry of the last 40 years. The parallel still holds. Times will be hard relative to the recent peak, but compared to just about every other industry we'll still be pretty fat and happy. I know that's pretty thin consolation for people who are struggling to find jobs while their classmates from one year before were the subject of bidding wars. It's not what I wanted to hear myself when I was struggling through the tech cull ten years before dot-com. But it's still true. If anyone washes out of the industry now it's probably not because of COVID-19. OP is supposed to be a message of hope in dark times. Most people are more resilient than they realize. Software jobs will continue to increase over any time span longer than a year or two. We'll get through this. It's sad that so many here are trying to turn a positive message into a negative one.
- hanoz 6y ago
  > Software is still the most well paid, expanding industry of the last 40 years. In a lot of the world it's nowhere near as well paid as most of the professions which have comparable requirements in terms of the amount academic study, vocational apprenticeship and natural aptitude needed.
  - zophosie 6y ago
    > In a lot of the world it's nowhere near as well paid as most of the professions which have comparable requirements in terms of the amount academic study, vocational apprenticeship and natural aptitude needed. Teaching/Academia isn't a real job and can be replaced with the internet
    - yes_man 6y ago
      Teaching/academia being a job has nothing to do with the comment you replied to, and even if it were, I'm curious how would you replace academical research "with the internet"?
    - mattkrause 6y ago
      It baffles me that you can even write "academia isn't a real job" while the entire planet is desperately hoping for biomedical breakthroughs. Almost all of the people working on COVID have advanced degrees; many of them work in academic labs. As for teaching, if you want to be intubated by someone who once a post about it on Medium, well...best of luck.
bob33212 6y ago
Some kids graduating today took in 50k+ in loans because they heard how great the industry is like you said.
mc32 6y ago
One thing that may be different here is that when we come out of this, there will be pent-up demand, for most industries and trades. There will be some that will take a hit (the ones enjoying a surge now, like furniture, electronics, entertainment/distraction, PPE manufacturing, etc), but many categories will have pent up demand, some will recover slowly, some may never reach the levels we had before, still most I think will recover)
j45 6y ago
$35,000/yr for a BSc is the most well paid? It was a different kind of collapse in 2001, there was little demand or reliance on online services.
zeveb 6y ago
I think you missed the article's point: yes, over the last 20 years or so tech has been an awesomely-expanding career. But it sure didn't seem that way after the dot com bust or the Eleventh of September. I was around then, and it was terrible. That tech was awesome is the article's point. I do not see any fundamental reason why tech will not continue to be an awesome career field. Software is still eating the world. Yeah, the economy is suffering right now. It will recover.
dang 6y ago
Would you please stop posting snark and flamebait to HN? You've been doing it for a long time, unfortunately. It breaks the site guidelines and destroys the intended spirit of this place, which is curious conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- brosinante 6y ago
  Thanks for policing rude hn comments, friend. (seems like that's all you're doing)
  - dang 6y ago
    I'm afraid it's my job (I'm a moderator here). Unfortunately the system doesn't regulate itself without moderation feedback, so such comments are a necessary evil. In case it helps at all, they're more tedious to write than they are to read. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20tedious%20write%20read&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
    - brosinante 6y ago
      Do you sometimes think that instead of moderating bad behaviour, you're burying critisisms under the guise of rudeness, perpetuating the atmosphere in hn that seeps into (and from) the rest of the ecosystem?

And that's before the survivor bias. "I won the lottery, you can too"

Survivorship bias. Our system is broken, humanity needs a way to encourage success without punishing failure. Failure shouln't be hunger and homelessness...This will be another generation of hopeless dreamers lost in the looming financial depression. Why is our antidote hope against the adversity of going against all the odds?. Congrats to those who made it but more recognition to those who failed and managed to overcome misery

pc86 6y ago
> Our system is broken Citation needed. > humanity needs a way to encourage success without punishing failure Serious question - why? You state this as an objective fact with no argument for it. > Failure [shouldn't] be hunger and homelessness If you're smart about it, it isn't. What's wrong with saying "yes you should probably have savings to fall back on in case this doesn't work out?" What's wrong with saying "if you throw caution and all reasonableness to the wind and blow your life's savings trying to sell Amway products, your neighbor isn't going to be burdened with paying your bills while you look for another job?"
- rsk67 6y ago
  This might be the most HN on-brand comment I've ever seen
- nscalf 6y ago
  I think people are too quick to discount the importance of failure and feeling bad. If failing has no consequence, there will be far less motivation. However, in my opinion, this is a balance. Failure has to be sufficiently painful, but no more than that. From the research I’ve done, two major items have made failure too painful: stagnant wages and rapidly inflating rent prices. People can no longer hold onto savings in case something doesn’t work because they barely make ends meet. Our system is inherently broken. We need unions, raises in minimum wage, worker strikes, etc. This is not going to be a generation of people going through economic hardship just because of the economy, but also because we are no longer willing to fight for each other.
  - frockington1 6y ago
    How would unions help anything? Modern examples (such as teachers unions) seem to reward mediocrity and encourage paying into failing pensions
    - hdctambien 6y ago
      If unions were the cause of "mediocrity" then there should be better teaching in states that don't have teacher unions right? Ranking of states without unions (2011) https://www.businessinsider.com/states-where-teachers-unions-are-illegal-2011-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/states-where-teachers-unions... Wisconsin after unions were removed (2017) https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/17/news/economy/wisconsin-act-10-teachers/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/17/news/economy/wisconsin-act-...
  - pc86 6y ago
    How does unionization depress rising rent?
- swiley 6y ago
  You don’t have savings just after graduation. Also: thinking about these people helps the rest of us, the economy is extremely fragile because most people aren’t able to save (high rent+low wages) and have limited mobility. I used to think all the SWEs getting paid well would make the world a better place because they were more capable of dealing with complex problems but comments like this make me question that.
- charlesu 6y ago
  > If you're smart about it, it isn't. Citation needed. Whether you have something to fall back on in the event of failure has a lot to do with where and whom you're born to. It's pretty difficult to have a fall back option as a kid from a poor coal mining town with 20% unemployment. If you move out west with no network and lose your job soon after, yes, you can find yourself hungry and homeless in short order. Whether we acknowledge it or not, many of us are just one bout of extended unemployment or illness away from homelessness.
austincheney 6y ago
> without punishing failure Why not punish failure?
- einpoklum 6y ago
  1. Because most people fail a lot in a lot of things. 2. Because failure often doesn't depend on you, and extremely often is at least partially dependent on external factors and context. 3. Because it's not that useful (psychologically) as opposed to other engagement approahces. 4. Because it can and will be misused to punish those who are disfavorable to the punishing establishment. and last but not least: 5. Because the social systems which need to be in place in order to punish failure, and the ethos necessary for the punishers and for legitimization of the punishers' concrete acts, are themselves repressive to the general populace and make life a worse experience for everyone.
- bsanr2 6y ago
  >It's inhumane to oversee a system with the capability to feed and house its entire population and refuse to do so for procedural reasons. (Welfare gap, Section 8 waiting lists) >The system does not dole out failure meritocratically, therefore the existence of a total failure state will mean earnest and reasonably industrious individuals will still fail by chance alone. (Rust belt) >The official sanctioning of a failure state is the impetus for a black market safety net, where failure is precluded at the cost of rule of law. (Drug-dealing, prostitution, gang-controlled ghettoes) It's a hole in the ship's hull.
- HumblyTossed 6y ago
  If you do, it shouldn't be: >Failure shouln't be hunger and homelessness...
- guiriduro 6y ago
  What is failure? Is it failure to deliver some social good, even if your financial costs exceed your income? The system needs a reset.
- charlesu 6y ago
  Would you rather optimize for people succeeding or optimize for people not failing? They are not the same thing.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
einpoklum 6y ago
> to encourage success Scammers, arbitrage stock-traders, and opioid drug marketers can also achieve success... On the other hand, some endeavors "succeed" by not-failing and being out of sight and out of mind, e.g. a plumbing installation. You don't think of your "daily plumbing success". So, I'd say not success which should be encouraged, it is well-directed and well-applied effort. PS - The plumbing example can well be adapted to nearly any pursuit, definitely including software.
- dgb23 6y ago
  > You don't think of your "daily plumbing success". Initially I had to laugh at this one, but why not? Robustness is something that seems to be very hard to measure, communicate and sell until something bad happens. I think one of the IT fields that is struggling with this is security, because the problem is most apparent there.
  - yourapostasy 6y ago
    > Robustness is something that seems to be very hard to measure, communicate and sell until something bad happens. This is endemic to business and is especially widespread in contemporary American-style business, and the general case seems to be a failure in pricing all kinds of tail risk. I suspect a key challenge in this space is the unsolved principal agent problem. I think the principal agent problem is rampant because pricing information is extremely lossy information compression; only the grossest outcomes are recorded in the market. Those who exploit the principal agent problem rely upon externalities to succeed, and those externalities are not timely or fine-grained reflected in the compressed/price information. Reputation systems lossily add the missing information back into the market as a side-channel. But what externalities to record is a whole other can of worms.
golergka 6y ago
That's exactly the kind of best intentions that the road to hell is paved with.
asdfman123 6y ago
You should look at statistics about how many countries are rising out of desperate poverty and joining the rich world. It's gotten so good that we've forgotten what desperate poverty even looks like.

draw_down 6y ago

Maybe my favorite post ever on HN

notacoward 6y ago

That's unnecessarily rude. Software is still the most well paid, expanding industry of the last 40 years. The parallel still holds. Times will be hard relative to the recent peak, but compared to just about every other industry we'll still be pretty fat and happy. I know that's pretty thin consolation for people who are struggling to find jobs while their classmates from one year before were the subject of bidding wars. It's not what I wanted to hear myself when I was struggling through the tech cull ten years before dot-com. But it's still true. If anyone washes out of the industry now it's probably not because of COVID-19. OP is supposed to be a message of hope in dark times. Most people are more resilient than they realize. Software jobs will continue to increase over any time span longer than a year or two. We'll get through this. It's sad that so many here are trying to turn a positive message into a negative one.

hanoz 6y ago
> Software is still the most well paid, expanding industry of the last 40 years. In a lot of the world it's nowhere near as well paid as most of the professions which have comparable requirements in terms of the amount academic study, vocational apprenticeship and natural aptitude needed.
- zophosie 6y ago
  > In a lot of the world it's nowhere near as well paid as most of the professions which have comparable requirements in terms of the amount academic study, vocational apprenticeship and natural aptitude needed. Teaching/Academia isn't a real job and can be replaced with the internet
  - yes_man 6y ago
    Teaching/academia being a job has nothing to do with the comment you replied to, and even if it were, I'm curious how would you replace academical research "with the internet"?
  - mattkrause 6y ago
    It baffles me that you can even write "academia isn't a real job" while the entire planet is desperately hoping for biomedical breakthroughs. Almost all of the people working on COVID have advanced degrees; many of them work in academic labs. As for teaching, if you want to be intubated by someone who once a post about it on Medium, well...best of luck.

bob33212 6y ago

Some kids graduating today took in 50k+ in loans because they heard how great the industry is like you said.

mc32 6y ago

One thing that may be different here is that when we come out of this, there will be pent-up demand, for most industries and trades. There will be some that will take a hit (the ones enjoying a surge now, like furniture, electronics, entertainment/distraction, PPE manufacturing, etc), but many categories will have pent up demand, some will recover slowly, some may never reach the levels we had before, still most I think will recover)

j45 6y ago

$35,000/yr for a BSc is the most well paid? It was a different kind of collapse in 2001, there was little demand or reliance on online services.

zeveb 6y ago

I think you missed the article's point: yes, over the last 20 years or so tech has been an awesomely-expanding career. But it sure didn't seem that way after the dot com bust or the Eleventh of September. I was around then, and it was terrible. That tech was awesome is the article's point. I do not see any fundamental reason why tech will not continue to be an awesome career field. Software is still eating the world. Yeah, the economy is suffering right now. It will recover.

dang 6y ago

Would you please stop posting snark and flamebait to HN? You've been doing it for a long time, unfortunately. It breaks the site guidelines and destroys the intended spirit of this place, which is curious conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

brosinante 6y ago
Thanks for policing rude hn comments, friend. (seems like that's all you're doing)
- dang 6y ago
  I'm afraid it's my job (I'm a moderator here). Unfortunately the system doesn't regulate itself without moderation feedback, so such comments are a necessary evil. In case it helps at all, they're more tedious to write than they are to read. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20tedious%20write%20read&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
  - brosinante 6y ago
    Do you sometimes think that instead of moderating bad behaviour, you're burying critisisms under the guise of rudeness, perpetuating the atmosphere in hn that seeps into (and from) the rest of the ecosystem?