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I wish adults understood the realities of being young in 2020. Even when I graduated HS in 2007 I could tell my experience and the academic expectations I neede

I wish adults understood the realities of being young in 2020. Even when I graduated HS in 2007 I could tell my experience and the academic expectations I needed to live up to were much higher than it was for my mom. After I graduated I saw younger friends take more AP classes than I did and do more leadership activities than I did. Expectations are always ramping up. It is no party. Our laws and bureaucracies haven’t caught up to life from 50 years ago, and that is something young people today have to deal with too. There are a lot of incongruities in programs offered. One example is Federal Work Study. In college I qualified, it was a benefit, and my attitude was to not leave anything on the table. In reality the money I made was not enough to make a difference and the time I spent working could have been spent taking another class. If I didn’t do work study I could have graduated a semester sooner and that would have been much more valuable financially. The only reason to work in college would be at a job that is directly related to your field. And of course the adults don’t get it. Every once in a while you’ll hear about a congress person or a business leader say that college students aren’t pulling their own weight in society. The friends of your parents will ask you how you like going to college parties. Reality is you have a deep backlog of work from 6 classes, which are related but have very different concepts and you need to master them all in four months.

alexhutcheson 6y ago
FWIW, this isn't so much a story of "being young in 2020" as it is "being young in 2020 in the hyper-competitive culture of major coastal metro areas of the US". This phenomenon is actually pretty unique to a handful of metro areas, which happen to be over-represented on HN. In most of the country, bright high school students are focused on getting into their state's flagship public university, and exceptionally successful ones might be focused on getting into the honors programs at those universities. Those students might buff their resume by participating in the "National Honor Society", but they're not doing anywhere near the amount of credential-buffing described above. Unfortunately, if you live somewhere where this is the culture, it's very difficult to opt-out. Parents don't have full control, because students absorb expectations from their peers and their peers' parents as well. Everyone agrees that the situation is out of control, but no one can "unilaterally disarm".
- gibolt 6y ago
  Absolutely disagree. This was the case for me at average high school and college in the midwest. I'd say ~50% of the populations had those pressures. Going to a upper tier college for grad school showed me that only the percentage changes, going from maybe ~50% to ~75%
- closeparen 6y ago
  This is the segment of every part of the country that aspires to those costal metro areas. The driving motivation is "get me the hell out of this godforsaken place." The personal cost was immense, but I'm glad I did. I got to do fun and high-impact work at a fast-rising startup while my title and TC leapt up by $50-$100k each year. I got to meet friends from all over the world, travel, hike, run outdoors year-round, never shovel snow again, walk to everything I need from my high-rise apartment. At home I'd be lucky to have made Help Desk Technician II for $17/hour, lucky to have a car that starts, lucky to know a single personal socially who had ever voluntarily read a book. Most of my classmates who stayed aren't working at all. The only ones really thriving had guaranteed slots at family businesses. It's not a poor place. Everyone's parents made a decent living. But the firms at which they did so were in either stasis or decline, not desperate to hire 22-year-olds. The delayed gratification story is very much real.
  - alexhutcheson 6y ago
    NYC, SF, Silicon Valley, Seattle, LA, etc. are all full of successful people who went to public universities that didn’t require crazy high school credentials to get into.
    - lambdasquirrel 6y ago
      If you want to be an engineer and deal with tech culture, sure. We can be a little myopic about that here on HN. Engineering is not "status" oriented, and going to a nice school doesn't have the weight it does, if you want to be doctor and heal people, for example. School still matters. We can't all start startups.
jrs235 6y ago
Typically in the past I have recommended that anyone without a high school diploma or G.E.D. not read The Underachiever's Manifesto. After reading about your experience and how things are today, maybe if every high school senior read it then things might generally cool off a bit. Sure there will still be those that don't but there will always be a few.
vmception 6y ago
There was a time when I looked "down" on tiers of schools, differently. It was like what I was qualified for was better, Ivy League was a pipe dream and unnecessary, and everything else was a joke. Around my sophomore year, I was interning in a Federal Work Study program, pushing pencils right next to someone studying a Princeton. When I realized this fate was still intertwined, I immediately transferred to a cheaper school with a less coveted reputation, and also took summer and winter community college courses to get a few extra credits to just get out of there faster and cheaper. My current thoughts are that Ivy League is a world of its own (along with a few others like Stanford), and then everything else. Nobody cares about how good your state school is at Journalism/Business/Finance/Econ/Computer Science, at that level you either have the degree or not. At Ivy League, the network and opportunities are totally different, and the association is more important since you just go there to drop out anyway and say you went. The faster you drop out the cooler. All I can say is that the cards I had available to play became very clear.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- throwawayfang1 6y ago
  Right. People who go to the world's top universities are in the position where they don't HAVE to work for a big company. I went to one of the listed "second-tier universities" and work at FANG (and to be clear, not Amazon), and I don't think I have a single coworker from Harvard or Stanford. I have one coworker from Oxford who considers himself the "failure" of his graduating class because he only works at a big tech company. Big tech companies are sweat shops, offering just enough pay to have the TOP end of an upper-middle class lifestyle (after sufficient robbery by the tax man, since you're not quite rich enough for any of the Trump-esque tax loopholes to apply), in exchange for the expected 60-80 hour weeks. You still have to work for a living, and you're competing in Stack Ranking with the majority of employees who are visa workers (hiring visa workers is a PLUS for these companies) that will happily sacrifice their family life and weekends to avoid deportation by being slotted into the "bottom 10%" during the bi-annual performance review (which means you get fired). Sure, it's a local optimum for a lot of people (work insanely hard and sacrifice your health to drive a Porsche/Tesla and own a house/luxury condo in a top-tier city), but make no mistake, it is a second-tier lifestyle. On the other hand, people from Harvard and Yale are UPPER class -- not upper-MIDDLE class. This means they have last names like Bush or Clinton, get ushered into upper management or C-level at their father's companies, go "work" for cushy jobs at rentseekers like PE/VC/real estate with corporate credit cards, run for office, repeatedly start failed companies, or go indefinitely "exploring" or "finding the next thing to do" (courtesy of their trust fund). Meanwhile, the vast majority of my graduating class is slaving away as entry-level rat racers at FANG, investment banks, legal, Big 4, medical residencies, etc.
goldenManatee 6y ago
Lifespan productivity, from teens upward, has increased, but rewards haven’t kept up. And why should those rewards keep up, when the status quo already creates an environment of increased competition with small financial reward changes. This does create a set of negative externalities though, which one can begin to observe in increasing stress, lower sex drive among 20 year olds, deteriorating social safety nets of retirement for future generations, increased levels of student debt coupled with lower first-time home buyers, entrepreneur rates that haven’t kept up and greater number of companies consolidating. There has been a lot of costs to the centralized gains born from social and material pressures that have been the boon of previous decades/generations. The bill is overdue.
kristjankalm 6y ago
First, I am relatively familiar with the admission process at Cambridge and noone gives a crap whether you were on a robotics team at high school + the rest of the extra-curricular jazz. Personal statements mostly just get ignored. Have no idea about the US thouigh, maybe its very different over there. Second, I know several people from a generation born it the 50s and 60s whose parents either directly forbade them going to the university (rural France, woman's place it at home) or had to put up with conditions unfathomable to most of undergraduates today. The last 2-3 generations are historically unbelievable privileged. But sure, 'It is no party'.
- NegativeLatency 6y ago
  Mind if I ask what generation you are in?
  - kristjankalm 6y ago
    born in the 1980s
- einpoklum 6y ago
  So, these days, women are not expected to stay at home. Instead, they're expected to go to work, and invest in their careers, and raise their kids, and service their (often one-parent) family unit's debt, and also be content and well-balanced. Not sure I'd want to go back to the 1970s, but - yes, it is definitely no party, and "privilege" is a skewed way to look at it.
sharadov 6y ago
Every generation has told the generation younger than them that they are not pulling their weight. I am Gen X, and I genuinely feel the Millenials and Gen Z, are getting the short end of the stick. Fuck the boomers,they shat on everything.

alexhutcheson 6y ago

FWIW, this isn't so much a story of "being young in 2020" as it is "being young in 2020 in the hyper-competitive culture of major coastal metro areas of the US". This phenomenon is actually pretty unique to a handful of metro areas, which happen to be over-represented on HN. In most of the country, bright high school students are focused on getting into their state's flagship public university, and exceptionally successful ones might be focused on getting into the honors programs at those universities. Those students might buff their resume by participating in the "National Honor Society", but they're not doing anywhere near the amount of credential-buffing described above. Unfortunately, if you live somewhere where this is the culture, it's very difficult to opt-out. Parents don't have full control, because students absorb expectations from their peers and their peers' parents as well. Everyone agrees that the situation is out of control, but no one can "unilaterally disarm".

gibolt 6y ago
Absolutely disagree. This was the case for me at average high school and college in the midwest. I'd say ~50% of the populations had those pressures. Going to a upper tier college for grad school showed me that only the percentage changes, going from maybe ~50% to ~75%
closeparen 6y ago
This is the segment of every part of the country that aspires to those costal metro areas. The driving motivation is "get me the hell out of this godforsaken place." The personal cost was immense, but I'm glad I did. I got to do fun and high-impact work at a fast-rising startup while my title and TC leapt up by $50-$100k each year. I got to meet friends from all over the world, travel, hike, run outdoors year-round, never shovel snow again, walk to everything I need from my high-rise apartment. At home I'd be lucky to have made Help Desk Technician II for $17/hour, lucky to have a car that starts, lucky to know a single personal socially who had ever voluntarily read a book. Most of my classmates who stayed aren't working at all. The only ones really thriving had guaranteed slots at family businesses. It's not a poor place. Everyone's parents made a decent living. But the firms at which they did so were in either stasis or decline, not desperate to hire 22-year-olds. The delayed gratification story is very much real.
- alexhutcheson 6y ago
  NYC, SF, Silicon Valley, Seattle, LA, etc. are all full of successful people who went to public universities that didn’t require crazy high school credentials to get into.
  - lambdasquirrel 6y ago
    If you want to be an engineer and deal with tech culture, sure. We can be a little myopic about that here on HN. Engineering is not "status" oriented, and going to a nice school doesn't have the weight it does, if you want to be doctor and heal people, for example. School still matters. We can't all start startups.

jrs235 6y ago

Typically in the past I have recommended that anyone without a high school diploma or G.E.D. not read The Underachiever's Manifesto. After reading about your experience and how things are today, maybe if every high school senior read it then things might generally cool off a bit. Sure there will still be those that don't but there will always be a few.

vmception 6y ago

There was a time when I looked "down" on tiers of schools, differently. It was like what I was qualified for was better, Ivy League was a pipe dream and unnecessary, and everything else was a joke. Around my sophomore year, I was interning in a Federal Work Study program, pushing pencils right next to someone studying a Princeton. When I realized this fate was still intertwined, I immediately transferred to a cheaper school with a less coveted reputation, and also took summer and winter community college courses to get a few extra credits to just get out of there faster and cheaper. My current thoughts are that Ivy League is a world of its own (along with a few others like Stanford), and then everything else. Nobody cares about how good your state school is at Journalism/Business/Finance/Econ/Computer Science, at that level you either have the degree or not. At Ivy League, the network and opportunities are totally different, and the association is more important since you just go there to drop out anyway and say you went. The faster you drop out the cooler. All I can say is that the cards I had available to play became very clear.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwawayfang1 6y ago
Right. People who go to the world's top universities are in the position where they don't HAVE to work for a big company. I went to one of the listed "second-tier universities" and work at FANG (and to be clear, not Amazon), and I don't think I have a single coworker from Harvard or Stanford. I have one coworker from Oxford who considers himself the "failure" of his graduating class because he only works at a big tech company. Big tech companies are sweat shops, offering just enough pay to have the TOP end of an upper-middle class lifestyle (after sufficient robbery by the tax man, since you're not quite rich enough for any of the Trump-esque tax loopholes to apply), in exchange for the expected 60-80 hour weeks. You still have to work for a living, and you're competing in Stack Ranking with the majority of employees who are visa workers (hiring visa workers is a PLUS for these companies) that will happily sacrifice their family life and weekends to avoid deportation by being slotted into the "bottom 10%" during the bi-annual performance review (which means you get fired). Sure, it's a local optimum for a lot of people (work insanely hard and sacrifice your health to drive a Porsche/Tesla and own a house/luxury condo in a top-tier city), but make no mistake, it is a second-tier lifestyle. On the other hand, people from Harvard and Yale are UPPER class -- not upper-MIDDLE class. This means they have last names like Bush or Clinton, get ushered into upper management or C-level at their father's companies, go "work" for cushy jobs at rentseekers like PE/VC/real estate with corporate credit cards, run for office, repeatedly start failed companies, or go indefinitely "exploring" or "finding the next thing to do" (courtesy of their trust fund). Meanwhile, the vast majority of my graduating class is slaving away as entry-level rat racers at FANG, investment banks, legal, Big 4, medical residencies, etc.

goldenManatee 6y ago

Lifespan productivity, from teens upward, has increased, but rewards haven’t kept up. And why should those rewards keep up, when the status quo already creates an environment of increased competition with small financial reward changes. This does create a set of negative externalities though, which one can begin to observe in increasing stress, lower sex drive among 20 year olds, deteriorating social safety nets of retirement for future generations, increased levels of student debt coupled with lower first-time home buyers, entrepreneur rates that haven’t kept up and greater number of companies consolidating. There has been a lot of costs to the centralized gains born from social and material pressures that have been the boon of previous decades/generations. The bill is overdue.

kristjankalm 6y ago

First, I am relatively familiar with the admission process at Cambridge and noone gives a crap whether you were on a robotics team at high school + the rest of the extra-curricular jazz. Personal statements mostly just get ignored. Have no idea about the US thouigh, maybe its very different over there. Second, I know several people from a generation born it the 50s and 60s whose parents either directly forbade them going to the university (rural France, woman's place it at home) or had to put up with conditions unfathomable to most of undergraduates today. The last 2-3 generations are historically unbelievable privileged. But sure, 'It is no party'.

NegativeLatency 6y ago
Mind if I ask what generation you are in?
- kristjankalm 6y ago
  born in the 1980s
einpoklum 6y ago
So, these days, women are not expected to stay at home. Instead, they're expected to go to work, and invest in their careers, and raise their kids, and service their (often one-parent) family unit's debt, and also be content and well-balanced. Not sure I'd want to go back to the 1970s, but - yes, it is definitely no party, and "privilege" is a skewed way to look at it.

sharadov 6y ago

Every generation has told the generation younger than them that they are not pulling their weight. I am Gen X, and I genuinely feel the Millenials and Gen Z, are getting the short end of the stick. Fuck the boomers,they shat on everything.