12 ms·

Good essay overall, but this footnote in particular stood out to me: > [2] Tiger parents, as parents so often do, are fighting the last war. Grades mattered mo

Good essay overall, but this footnote in particular stood out to me: > [2] Tiger parents, as parents so often do, are fighting the last war. Grades mattered more in the old days when the route to success was to acquire credentials while ascending some predefined ladder. But it's just as well that their tactics are focused on grades. How awful it would be if they invaded the territory of projects, and thereby gave their kids a distaste for this kind of work by forcing them to do it. Grades are already a grim, fake world, and aren't harmed much by parental interference, but working on one's own projects is a more delicate, private thing that could be damaged very easily. It's so true. I got obsessed with programming around 11, started off with my shitty vb6 programs and moved on to reverse engineering video games and writing hacks. I never told any adults what I was doing until I was nearly an adult myself, out of fear they'd ruin my hobby like they did everything else. I remember thinking to myself how much school sucked and being determined not to let that poison the one thing I liked worked on. My parents thought I was a degenerate who did nothing but play computer games all day. Blew them away when I got my first programming job and eventually skipped college to start working right out of high school. I have a bunch of friends who say the same thing. They'd find some new cool thing, show even the slightest interest in it and their mom would immediately start making them drill it three hours a day until they hated it and weren't interested in it anymore. It's a sad story.

opportune 5y ago
Grades still matter for the vast majority of people who aren’t born into mega rich families. Most people don’t become Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and even those that do benefit greatly from the pedigrees that academic achievement opens up (going to top colleges, working at desirable employers, although grades matter little there unless you’re right out of college). For everyone else grades are still used for tracking into the traditionally high paid professions like law and medicine, and for tracking into the target colleges for high powered banking and consulting.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  You've hit on it, grades matter right up until you're out of school. For most people, they matter for getting a first job (because there usually isn't much else to serve as a filter). After that, nobody will ever ask for or look at them again.
  - opportune 5y ago
    Most of the high paying professions outside of software require the degree and that first job to break into them. Sure for banking and consulting it’s not a hard requirement, but it’s much harder to get into them with bad grades or a degree from a non-target school. It’s really only in the software bubble where people are able to prove themselves to break into it, due to various factors including engineers being in very short supply relative to demand for over a decade now. Sure nobody asks for my grades now that I’ve been out of college for a while, but they still look at where I went to college (based on high school achievement) and my first job (based on college achievement) and subsequent jobs (much easier to get because of where I worked at my first job), etc. I just see this argument as very tone deaf because there are hundreds of millions of us regular people out there, and academic achievement is the most surefire way to get noticed and be given opportunities if you aren’t lucky enough to come from an important/influential family. It’s not only about the grades themselves but how they pipeline the rest of your career and credentials. Rich people can shmooze and scheme to get some of those credentials and opportunities for their kids without the grades, but not us regular folk.
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      > but they still look at where I went to college (based on high school achievement) and my first job (based on college achievement) and subsequent jobs (much easier to get because of where I worked at my first job), etc. No one has ever asked me about my schooling and I haven't had a school on my resume in over 10 years. Do they look at it because you put it on your resume?
      - opportune 5y ago
        I am still early in my career. And many jobs I have applied for/am interested in unfortunately index on having gone to a good school. I’ll probably never work for one but I’m pretty interested in HFT and quant hedge funds, and have interviewed with them before, and am of the understanding that having a name brand college on your resume is a soft requirement.
- jdmoreira 5y ago
  Grades don't matter. They matter if you really want to follow the beaten path. Sure, go ahead... join McKinsey or something like that. Being good a learning matters. Being good at executing matters. Being good at communicating matters. Being good at leading matters. Grades and credentials are just gatekeeping invented by people that are worse than talented people. Grades are for status not for wealth and even much less for creative and fulfilment. It's a losers game. I played it and it was stupid I will never allow my children to play that game.
  - opportune 5y ago
    For most people the beaten path is how they get on the ladder towards building wealth. You can always hop off the well worn part of that ladder but you can’t easily get back on it once you’ve fallen off. You can feel that way regarding status vs talent if you want. Reality to me indicates that learning and execution are only important if you can get yourself into a position where you can use them. If you are a peon it’s quite hard to make a difference in the world even if you have those in spades. The way you find yourself in such a position might vary but going through the well worn path is tried and true.
  - zamfi 5y ago
    > will never allow my children to play that game I can see not forcing them to play the game, but "will never allow my children to" always struck me as a weird tone.
    - jdmoreira 5y ago
      I will also never allow my children to gang up on and beat homeless people in the streets. Sounds like a weird tone?
      - hobofan 5y ago
        Yes, still sounds like a weird tone. Do you think that other people "beat homeless people in the streets", because their parents allowed them to do that?
- shard 5y ago
  Expanding on your comment, to get into a good school and make the connections that would help you in the future, good grades are table stakes. And for certain minorities, good grades are assumed and you have to have achievements on top of that to stand out. Sure, there are many paths to success, but just like investing, where the ROI probabilities would be better if you put your money into an index fund as opposed to the state lottery, the ROI probabilities from developing a good work ethic and getting into a good school are better than alternatives. As a parent, you are using your knowledge and experience to make optimization decisions that the child might not be able to envision or foresee. Different children need different kinds of parenting techniques. I don't see how anyone can claim that either project-based parenting or tiger parenting is the be-all and end-all to raising a child.
- ErrantX 5y ago
  Yup I came here to say the same thing; I'd go further and say it's not just mega rich families but most of the middle class. You got options even with just a little disposable income (ie paying for clubs can unlock a career, for example). For those from traditionally working class background, differentiating from your peers through grades is essential to unlocking funds that can take you where you want to be. That's why through the pandemic school grades (in the UK at least) have been so sensitive; they deployed an algorithm last year which probably mostly got it right but also (because it was averages) didn't pluck out those from the poorest backgrounds who would have managed to differentiate themselves.
- dangerface 5y ago
  > Grades still matter for the vast majority of people who aren’t born into mega rich families. Not really, while its generally better to have a qualification than no qualification 48% of people with a degree are in a job that don't require it. Qualifications don't matter if everyone has them, this is because employers care about the skills some one has not the lectures they sat through. Skills are difficult to develop lectures are easy to sit through. If every one has those qualifications supply/demand kills the need for those jobs. If you sacrifice building up skills to chase grades you have a near 50/50 chance of ending up working behind a till with €50k in debt, not a good position to be in if you are not mega rich.
dpogorniy 5y ago
That's because parents are afraid that their child won't be competitive enough to have a decent life. If only parents were relaxed, if only they knew that their child can live full life without grinding through exercises. Then child just would pursue what they love, interested (unless it's unaffordable to their social strata). I wonder what we can do today to make this happen sooner. On the side note. There is a great book which makes easier for parents to make piece with themselves: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35457692-the-self-driven-child https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35457692-the-self-driven...
- foobarian 5y ago
  > If only parents were relaxed, if only they knew that their child can live full life without grinding through exercises. Isn't that how young people end up with liberal arts degrees saddled with debt they have little chance of ever repaying? I guess it might be a full life still but I haven't met many people in this position who enjoyed it.
  - fossuser 5y ago
    I feel like there’s a middle ground? Encourage the child to do well and be honest about the importance of credentials/marketability of jobs without crushing their spirit? I think the main issue is parents are largely ignorant of what’s important for a new generation - especially when things are undergoing radical technical change. My fiancée is reading Walden - and there are comical similarities to a modern day van life Silicon Valley programmer. The industrial revolution left parents at the time clueless - something similar is happening again.
    - vicda 5y ago
      There's always the sweet spot, but like almost everything involved with predicting the future you rarely know what that is. So you take an educated guess and do what feels right, and the people you know and the media you consume paint that normal for you. Hopefully you don't have a warped perception, because you won't know under after the damage is done.
bredren 5y ago
I had mostly the opposite experience. I learned to program in zero period at Wilson High School in Portland, Oregon. It was a self-taught course but I didn’t have to hide the work—-no one really cared. Not that my parents didn’t care, they were glad I was doing something I enjoyed. But that no one had any idea how deep I was going into writing code. The assignments were given once a quarter or so by Veryl Smith. We had far ranging latitude to figure it out on our own and gold plate projects as much as we wanted. By the time the game of life assignment was due I had added a mouse interface and vga, color display of the cells and grid, all in Pascal. I often lost points due to things like shadowed naming or other bad patterns. But that didn’t really matter too much. I made up for it getting “A” grades working as a teacher’s assistant for the attendance office, writing hall passes and absence slips for myself and others as necessary. That was a great hack. Anyhow, this essay resonates deeply with me. It has good ideas in it.
void_mint 5y ago
This matches my experience almost identically (starting at 11, vb6 hacks, lying about it). Had I opened up about my interest/what I was doing, my mom would've made me hyper focus on it but also used it as a weapon to demand obedience.
punnerud 5y ago
Called “Tiger parents” because this is common in China? Coined by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua who have Chinese parents.
- roland35 5y ago
  The term "Tiger Mom" became popular when Amy Chua (Chinese American) wrote a book about how she pushed her kids hard. I am sure the term existed before but I am not sure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Chua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Chua
  - quartesixte 5y ago
    As an aside, it’s really strange how this book picked up so much steam at its time of publication. The book mostly centers around the mom pushing her two kids to be world-class violinists and her pushing causes one of her daughters to abandon the instrument. [1] If, anything, it’s a cautionary tale. [1] the violin is an incredibly difficult instrument to begin with and becoming a world-class violinist requires a metric fuckton of effort...Amy Chua’s experiences w/r/t raising her children are hardly unique in the classical music world.
    - speapr 5y ago
      She has since written some extremely questionable things about race and identity, and been credibly accused of grooming her law students to be sexually harassed both by her own husband and by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
      - quartesixte 5y ago
        Oh...that...is an interesting turn of events 0_o
asadlionpk 5y ago
Wait so how do I 'not-force' my kid into programming these days? Our generation didn't have roblox, youtube and minecraft to distract us much.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  Boredom is the mother of curiosity. Take away the dopamine factories and let your kid be bored enough to be interested in learning things.
  - asadlionpk 5y ago
    That's pretty hard to do imo, specially when other kids in school have all kinds of devices and are hooked to youtube 24/7.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      Kids in school don't have time to affect others 24/7, maybe an hour tops if they aren't in sports.
    - jimbokun 5y ago
      And that's the key, pry the device out of their hand and send them outside. Good luck actually doing it, though.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Indeed. Youtube is in short supply at our house, and not only as a result of the advertising, surveillance, and addiction factors.
  - hanspeter 5y ago
    Ironically, to many kids YouTube is the primary source and inspiration for learning. I have a kid, and it's an ongoing challenge to limit the screentime. But I'm also impressed by the creative projects and the rapid skill development that sometimes is the result of being glued to the iPad.
- 5y ago
99_00 5y ago
Tiger parents A largely Chinese-American concept, the term draws parallels to strict parenting styles ostensibly common to households in East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. (wikipedia) The idea behind tiger parents is that Asians earn more money. And it's true, but not the whole store. But the problem is that average Asian incomes are pulled up by Indian-Americans. Chinese-Americans earn less than many European-Americans. So the whole concept is based on flawed logic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_per_capita_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
- m0llusk 5y ago
  One idea is that tiger parenting results in kids that make more money as adults. The more general observation is that strict parenting results in different behaviors and expectations and patterns of engagement. While wealth is a dominant social metric other measures such as criminal convictions also come up and do indicate some differences in outcomes. Saying this is about flawed logic is a mistake as the idea is not based in logic but rather on the wild variation exhibited during the process of raising children.
- MispelledToyota 5y ago
  I think the idea behind it is the parenting approach. A hypothesis about it is that it results in children earning more money, but that's not inherent to the concept.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  >Chinese-Americans earn less than many European-Americans. On the page you link, Chinese-Americans have a lower per-capita income than Americans of Macedonian, Russian, Latvian, British (not otherwise specified), Lithuanian, Slovene, Australian, and Austrian ancestry. They have a higher per-capita income than Americans of Scottish, Czechoslovakian, Croatian, Romanian, Hungarian, Slovak, Belgian, Swiss, Welsh, Danish, Israeli, Ukrainian, Canadian, Scotch-Irish, English, European (not otherwise specified), Bulgarian, Polish, Norwegian, Italian, German, Finnish, Irish, Dutch, French (excluding Basques), Yugoslav, Portuguese, American (not otherwise specified) and Pennsylvania German ancestry. I am curious to hear how you define "many".
yc-kraln 5y ago
are you me?
yatz 5y ago
Very true, I opened up all electronics or electrical or mechanical things at home, from wrist watches to air conditioners just to see how they work - some I could not put back together like my watch, my parents never bought me a wrist watch ever again - haha
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  My grandpa donated a whole bunch of mechanical watches for me to dissasemble. :) Sifting through garbage for discarded electronics was another favorite hobby of mine.
splithalf 5y ago
Immigrant parents, being more likely to be overachiever on average, are very different than normal parents in this regard. I didn’t know anybody growing up who had to drill on school work. Some dads were into sports and would pressure their kids to be the next babe Ruth or oj Simpson, but school work not so much. The education arms race is very much a function of globalization and international competition, which has added a lot of stress to childhood for today’s middle class American adolescent.
greghinch 5y ago
It’s funny that he wrote this now living in the UK. As an American living in England for the better part of a decade now, it still shocks me how much grades matter in the hiring process for professionals with many years of experience. If you don’t get a first or at least a 2:1 in uni, and/or do poorly on your A-levels, it will hold you back for the rest of your life here
- codefined 5y ago
  Interesting. Mileage may vary by company / area of work. I didn't go to Uni and went straight to work. Got a few A-levels but nothing special. Wasn't even asked about them for my first job.
  - yw3410 5y ago
    It's certainly true for a lot of corporate graduate schemes require a 2.1 in a relevant subject and reputable university in the UK. It's typically used as an initial filter.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  As a developer? Nobody ever asked me anything about my education. Maybe you need to find the right workplace. And this is still if you're doing the employee way. You can find other ways to create value in society and make money out of it.
  - tsukikage 5y ago
    Agree. Anecdata: am doing interviews with prospective new people right now. Things I care about in my software engineer hires (for whom this is not their first job): * that you're able to talk about stuff you've done in the past, involving diving into technical detail at will, and showing some understanding of what was happening one level of abstraction below/above whatever bit you were working on. (I don't actually care what you did. Don't tell me proprietary stuff. I want to know that you understood what you were doing, why you were doing it, what it depended on and what depended on it, and that you are able to communicate this to me.) * that you're familiar with the languages/tools/environments you said in your CV you are, and are able to communicate this to me * that you have some general data structures+algorithms awareness, and ability to apply this knowledge to at least trivial problems rather than merely recite the textbook contents on demand
josephorjoe 5y ago
My son and one of his friends spent a huge portion of their stuck-at-home time during the pandemic playing minecraft. It turns out a lot of what they were doing while "playing video games" was learning how to make really complex and unique game scenarios using minecraft command blocks and redstone -- essentially creating both a RPG PvP arena and a multilevel party dungeon crawl w boss fights. I run a small minecraft server for them to play and experiment on and I've resisted the urge to try to teach them anything about setting up and running servers, backing up data, or using text editors with syntax highlighting or source control to edit and preserve their command block commands. I just show up for demos and let them know how cool what they're doing is and backup and reboot the server as needed. I've messed up plenty as a parent but i think not trying to turn their interest in programming within minecraft into a learning experience has been one of my better decisions.
- agucova 5y ago
  I'm curious, why do you think it'll be bad for them to learn programming? I mean sure, don't force them into them, but I don't think hiding what's underneath is fair either. I actually learned to program for the first time while playing Minecraft around 2011, and I started programming without my parents even knowing. There was a mod for Minecraft called ComputerCraft that allowed you to program inside the game (using virtual computers) with Lua. This led to me on a path to Java to mod Minecraft, then Python to script things and many tools and projects later I ended up becoming a programmer. For me, Minecraft opened me to a world full of wonders; something I never knew was possible, and I definitely don't regret it.
  - josephorjoe 5y ago
    i think it would be great for them to learn programming. i think if i try to push them to learn programming, they will lose interest because i will be turning their 'fun' into 'work'. it is better for them to go at their own pace where their interests take them. if they ask for my help (they both know i could teach them programming), i'd be delighted to help them. and minecraft is really fantastic. from the base game, to advance features like command blocks, to the ecosystem of plug ins and online multiplayer adaptations. really an impressive creation.
tmp_anon_22 5y ago
> I never told any adults what I was doing until I was nearly an adult myself, out of fear they'd ruin my hobby like they did everything else. I dropped out of college and was ~4 years into a successful career before it clicked with parents and other "adults" of what I had done and what I had "thrown away". Having been through 3 serious tech jobs and dozens of interviews only one company rejected me due to my lack of a degree - Capitol One. All said however I do think about going back to complete my degree at some point as I expect as my career progresses to upper upper management it might get in the way.
- vidarh 5y ago
  I only went back and did my degree as pure resume stuffing. Did it by distance learning alongside work. Overall it was a security thing - it felt like plugging a minor hole - and I'm still not sure if it was worth the time I invested in it.
dasyatidprime 5y ago
Without going into too much detail, my mother¹ had a way of interfering in my attempts at projects both by trying to tie it into "getting a credentialed person on board"² for Proper Supervision and piling on… other abuse, often after I was a significant ways in. Fifteen years after escaping, I still haven't published anything real, and I can see the pattern. I saw the pattern ten years ago, even, but deep conditioning is really hard to break. Only being able to finish things for other people is kind of a disaster, especially when you wind up in the “need experience to gain experience” trap. ¹ Who, again without too much detail, was Asian. ² Which never happened. She never put any actual energy into it, I had no framework for approaching it as a child, and I'm not sure the surrounding environment contained people who were willing to do that sort of thing anyway.
rel2thr 5y ago
Tiger parents are already evolving on this, every elite high school student is now starting non profits or micro startups to put on their resumes .
- matmatmatmat 5y ago
  Or "volunteering" at an animal sanctuary at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro, which they happen to have climbed while there over the summer.
  - aspaceman 5y ago
    Sometimes I really wish I could read some of those college essays that went in with mine. I wrote about my dad playing games with me, making a GB emulator and my mom dying. At the time I figured that's what most of them were. Grandma/Uncle/My pet fish died and that was sad. I broke my leg / struggled with grades / couldn't make friends blah blah blah. I built something or wrote something or did this charity thing. The occasional military / older adult. Would really be curious how those have changed. Plus the difference in Ivy League vs Public schools.
enos_feedler 5y ago
Very similar to my story. I grew up in a shitty industrial town of oil refineries. Schools and teachers were not that great, so I went to the local community college bookstore and stole programming books by stuffing them in my jacket and walking out. I got AOL, then internet and eventually IRC. I learned disassemblers, debuggers and x86 instruction set. Joined world-famous cracking groups and wrote key generators and cd checks. At the time I thought this was all normal, but looking back it was pretty wild. Eventually moved to silicon valley, worked for big tech, etc. But it was all no thanks to grades, exams, etc.
- lgvld 5y ago
  This old school cracking scene is one of the things I think I really missed -- I was way too young back in the days, and maybe also lacked of self confidence, as assembler and hexadecimal looked like another dimension.
hrishi 5y ago
I hate the obsession with grades as much as anyone, but most parents are often mirroring the importance we place on them as a society. Disagree with a number of the sub-comments here, grades matter. Not eventually and not on their own, but they provide optionality the same way race and wealth and other factors do: you can succeed without them, but it definitely helps your chances.
brabel 5y ago
I am the kind of person who never gets a job unless I am so far apart from the other candidates that taking someone else would make it too obvious that they were basing their decision on "gut feeling" (or like they like to call it now, cultural fit). The way I found to overcome that was to excel academically and technically, giving me that clear advantage I need... Unfortunately, many companies will only check your basic technical skills and then focus massively on "cultural fit", and to succeed here there's nothing much I can do other than try to show that, yes, I am a social person and I do like to work with other people and so on (things they will never be able to objectively measure). But to really have a good chance here, let's not kid ourselves: being white, male, good looking and from a wealthy background will get you way ahead before you even say a word. My strategy served me well while I was relatively junior... but now that I am reaching a second decade in the industry, I again don't seem to have a clear advantage that I can objectively prove, and back to square one: getting a good job is a real challenge again.
victor9000 5y ago
Similarly, my first programming class was a middle school lunch table where me and a few friends sat around abusing TI-81s. We found ways to do fun things with these devices and showing off your work to friends became a natural driver that kept us focused. This continued through all of high school and then people wondered how we all became software engineers when our school had no such classes.
okprod 5y ago
My parents physically beat me if I got less than A's; that just made me relish spending time on my own projects and interests away from their priorities.
bentcorner 5y ago
My kid is in University right now and is doing an internship - recently he's been getting deep into contributing to an open source mod for a game, and I'm worried it's distracting him from his internship work and ultimately his final year of school. I see him on steam during the work day playing the game he's modding and he's taken time to show off his modding work and how it's put together - he's really proud of it, and honestly I am too. I've been tempted to say something to him to make sure he balances his time appropriately and fulfills his other commitments.. but maybe I'll let it go a little while longer. I think he's getting a lot out of his project and I don't want to discourage him. I suppose ultimately he's an adult and should make his own decisions and suffer his own consequences. But I worry.
- knightofmars 5y ago
  Step away. You've hit the right conclusion, "...ultimately he's an adult and should make his own decision...", don't let your fears cloud your perspective, "...suffer his own consequences." You're already assuming at this point that his time involved in this game is potentially a negative. What if it lands him a job?
  - bentcorner 5y ago
    > You're already assuming at this point that his time involved in this game is potentially a negative. What if it lands him a job? Fair enough, you're right that I'm showing my biases. I appreciate the feedback.

opportune 5y ago

Grades still matter for the vast majority of people who aren’t born into mega rich families. Most people don’t become Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and even those that do benefit greatly from the pedigrees that academic achievement opens up (going to top colleges, working at desirable employers, although grades matter little there unless you’re right out of college). For everyone else grades are still used for tracking into the traditionally high paid professions like law and medicine, and for tracking into the target colleges for high powered banking and consulting.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwawayboise 5y ago
You've hit on it, grades matter right up until you're out of school. For most people, they matter for getting a first job (because there usually isn't much else to serve as a filter). After that, nobody will ever ask for or look at them again.
- opportune 5y ago
  Most of the high paying professions outside of software require the degree and that first job to break into them. Sure for banking and consulting it’s not a hard requirement, but it’s much harder to get into them with bad grades or a degree from a non-target school. It’s really only in the software bubble where people are able to prove themselves to break into it, due to various factors including engineers being in very short supply relative to demand for over a decade now. Sure nobody asks for my grades now that I’ve been out of college for a while, but they still look at where I went to college (based on high school achievement) and my first job (based on college achievement) and subsequent jobs (much easier to get because of where I worked at my first job), etc. I just see this argument as very tone deaf because there are hundreds of millions of us regular people out there, and academic achievement is the most surefire way to get noticed and be given opportunities if you aren’t lucky enough to come from an important/influential family. It’s not only about the grades themselves but how they pipeline the rest of your career and credentials. Rich people can shmooze and scheme to get some of those credentials and opportunities for their kids without the grades, but not us regular folk.
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    > but they still look at where I went to college (based on high school achievement) and my first job (based on college achievement) and subsequent jobs (much easier to get because of where I worked at my first job), etc. No one has ever asked me about my schooling and I haven't had a school on my resume in over 10 years. Do they look at it because you put it on your resume?
    - opportune 5y ago
      I am still early in my career. And many jobs I have applied for/am interested in unfortunately index on having gone to a good school. I’ll probably never work for one but I’m pretty interested in HFT and quant hedge funds, and have interviewed with them before, and am of the understanding that having a name brand college on your resume is a soft requirement.
jdmoreira 5y ago
Grades don't matter. They matter if you really want to follow the beaten path. Sure, go ahead... join McKinsey or something like that. Being good a learning matters. Being good at executing matters. Being good at communicating matters. Being good at leading matters. Grades and credentials are just gatekeeping invented by people that are worse than talented people. Grades are for status not for wealth and even much less for creative and fulfilment. It's a losers game. I played it and it was stupid I will never allow my children to play that game.
- opportune 5y ago
  For most people the beaten path is how they get on the ladder towards building wealth. You can always hop off the well worn part of that ladder but you can’t easily get back on it once you’ve fallen off. You can feel that way regarding status vs talent if you want. Reality to me indicates that learning and execution are only important if you can get yourself into a position where you can use them. If you are a peon it’s quite hard to make a difference in the world even if you have those in spades. The way you find yourself in such a position might vary but going through the well worn path is tried and true.
- zamfi 5y ago
  > will never allow my children to play that game I can see not forcing them to play the game, but "will never allow my children to" always struck me as a weird tone.
  - jdmoreira 5y ago
    I will also never allow my children to gang up on and beat homeless people in the streets. Sounds like a weird tone?
    - hobofan 5y ago
      Yes, still sounds like a weird tone. Do you think that other people "beat homeless people in the streets", because their parents allowed them to do that?
shard 5y ago
Expanding on your comment, to get into a good school and make the connections that would help you in the future, good grades are table stakes. And for certain minorities, good grades are assumed and you have to have achievements on top of that to stand out. Sure, there are many paths to success, but just like investing, where the ROI probabilities would be better if you put your money into an index fund as opposed to the state lottery, the ROI probabilities from developing a good work ethic and getting into a good school are better than alternatives. As a parent, you are using your knowledge and experience to make optimization decisions that the child might not be able to envision or foresee. Different children need different kinds of parenting techniques. I don't see how anyone can claim that either project-based parenting or tiger parenting is the be-all and end-all to raising a child.
ErrantX 5y ago
Yup I came here to say the same thing; I'd go further and say it's not just mega rich families but most of the middle class. You got options even with just a little disposable income (ie paying for clubs can unlock a career, for example). For those from traditionally working class background, differentiating from your peers through grades is essential to unlocking funds that can take you where you want to be. That's why through the pandemic school grades (in the UK at least) have been so sensitive; they deployed an algorithm last year which probably mostly got it right but also (because it was averages) didn't pluck out those from the poorest backgrounds who would have managed to differentiate themselves.
dangerface 5y ago
> Grades still matter for the vast majority of people who aren’t born into mega rich families. Not really, while its generally better to have a qualification than no qualification 48% of people with a degree are in a job that don't require it. Qualifications don't matter if everyone has them, this is because employers care about the skills some one has not the lectures they sat through. Skills are difficult to develop lectures are easy to sit through. If every one has those qualifications supply/demand kills the need for those jobs. If you sacrifice building up skills to chase grades you have a near 50/50 chance of ending up working behind a till with €50k in debt, not a good position to be in if you are not mega rich.

dpogorniy 5y ago

That's because parents are afraid that their child won't be competitive enough to have a decent life. If only parents were relaxed, if only they knew that their child can live full life without grinding through exercises. Then child just would pursue what they love, interested (unless it's unaffordable to their social strata). I wonder what we can do today to make this happen sooner. On the side note. There is a great book which makes easier for parents to make piece with themselves: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35457692-the-self-driven-child https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35457692-the-self-driven...

foobarian 5y ago
> If only parents were relaxed, if only they knew that their child can live full life without grinding through exercises. Isn't that how young people end up with liberal arts degrees saddled with debt they have little chance of ever repaying? I guess it might be a full life still but I haven't met many people in this position who enjoyed it.
- fossuser 5y ago
  I feel like there’s a middle ground? Encourage the child to do well and be honest about the importance of credentials/marketability of jobs without crushing their spirit? I think the main issue is parents are largely ignorant of what’s important for a new generation - especially when things are undergoing radical technical change. My fiancée is reading Walden - and there are comical similarities to a modern day van life Silicon Valley programmer. The industrial revolution left parents at the time clueless - something similar is happening again.
  - vicda 5y ago
    There's always the sweet spot, but like almost everything involved with predicting the future you rarely know what that is. So you take an educated guess and do what feels right, and the people you know and the media you consume paint that normal for you. Hopefully you don't have a warped perception, because you won't know under after the damage is done.

bredren 5y ago

I had mostly the opposite experience. I learned to program in zero period at Wilson High School in Portland, Oregon. It was a self-taught course but I didn’t have to hide the work—-no one really cared. Not that my parents didn’t care, they were glad I was doing something I enjoyed. But that no one had any idea how deep I was going into writing code. The assignments were given once a quarter or so by Veryl Smith. We had far ranging latitude to figure it out on our own and gold plate projects as much as we wanted. By the time the game of life assignment was due I had added a mouse interface and vga, color display of the cells and grid, all in Pascal. I often lost points due to things like shadowed naming or other bad patterns. But that didn’t really matter too much. I made up for it getting “A” grades working as a teacher’s assistant for the attendance office, writing hall passes and absence slips for myself and others as necessary. That was a great hack. Anyhow, this essay resonates deeply with me. It has good ideas in it.

void_mint 5y ago

This matches my experience almost identically (starting at 11, vb6 hacks, lying about it). Had I opened up about my interest/what I was doing, my mom would've made me hyper focus on it but also used it as a weapon to demand obedience.

punnerud 5y ago

Called “Tiger parents” because this is common in China? Coined by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua who have Chinese parents.

roland35 5y ago
The term "Tiger Mom" became popular when Amy Chua (Chinese American) wrote a book about how she pushed her kids hard. I am sure the term existed before but I am not sure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Chua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Chua
- quartesixte 5y ago
  As an aside, it’s really strange how this book picked up so much steam at its time of publication. The book mostly centers around the mom pushing her two kids to be world-class violinists and her pushing causes one of her daughters to abandon the instrument. [1] If, anything, it’s a cautionary tale. [1] the violin is an incredibly difficult instrument to begin with and becoming a world-class violinist requires a metric fuckton of effort...Amy Chua’s experiences w/r/t raising her children are hardly unique in the classical music world.
  - speapr 5y ago
    She has since written some extremely questionable things about race and identity, and been credibly accused of grooming her law students to be sexually harassed both by her own husband and by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
    - quartesixte 5y ago
      Oh...that...is an interesting turn of events 0_o

asadlionpk 5y ago

Wait so how do I 'not-force' my kid into programming these days? Our generation didn't have roblox, youtube and minecraft to distract us much.

idiotsecant 5y ago
Boredom is the mother of curiosity. Take away the dopamine factories and let your kid be bored enough to be interested in learning things.
- asadlionpk 5y ago
  That's pretty hard to do imo, specially when other kids in school have all kinds of devices and are hooked to youtube 24/7.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Kids in school don't have time to affect others 24/7, maybe an hour tops if they aren't in sports.
  - jimbokun 5y ago
    And that's the key, pry the device out of their hand and send them outside. Good luck actually doing it, though.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Indeed. Youtube is in short supply at our house, and not only as a result of the advertising, surveillance, and addiction factors.
- hanspeter 5y ago
  Ironically, to many kids YouTube is the primary source and inspiration for learning. I have a kid, and it's an ongoing challenge to limit the screentime. But I'm also impressed by the creative projects and the rapid skill development that sometimes is the result of being glued to the iPad.
5y ago

99_00 5y ago

Tiger parents A largely Chinese-American concept, the term draws parallels to strict parenting styles ostensibly common to households in East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. (wikipedia) The idea behind tiger parents is that Asians earn more money. And it's true, but not the whole store. But the problem is that average Asian incomes are pulled up by Indian-Americans. Chinese-Americans earn less than many European-Americans. So the whole concept is based on flawed logic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_per_capita_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

m0llusk 5y ago
One idea is that tiger parenting results in kids that make more money as adults. The more general observation is that strict parenting results in different behaviors and expectations and patterns of engagement. While wealth is a dominant social metric other measures such as criminal convictions also come up and do indicate some differences in outcomes. Saying this is about flawed logic is a mistake as the idea is not based in logic but rather on the wild variation exhibited during the process of raising children.
MispelledToyota 5y ago
I think the idea behind it is the parenting approach. A hypothesis about it is that it results in children earning more money, but that's not inherent to the concept.
sbierwagen 5y ago
>Chinese-Americans earn less than many European-Americans. On the page you link, Chinese-Americans have a lower per-capita income than Americans of Macedonian, Russian, Latvian, British (not otherwise specified), Lithuanian, Slovene, Australian, and Austrian ancestry. They have a higher per-capita income than Americans of Scottish, Czechoslovakian, Croatian, Romanian, Hungarian, Slovak, Belgian, Swiss, Welsh, Danish, Israeli, Ukrainian, Canadian, Scotch-Irish, English, European (not otherwise specified), Bulgarian, Polish, Norwegian, Italian, German, Finnish, Irish, Dutch, French (excluding Basques), Yugoslav, Portuguese, American (not otherwise specified) and Pennsylvania German ancestry. I am curious to hear how you define "many".

yc-kraln 5y ago

are you me?

yatz 5y ago

Very true, I opened up all electronics or electrical or mechanical things at home, from wrist watches to air conditioners just to see how they work - some I could not put back together like my watch, my parents never bought me a wrist watch ever again - haha

hypertele-Xii 5y ago
My grandpa donated a whole bunch of mechanical watches for me to dissasemble. :) Sifting through garbage for discarded electronics was another favorite hobby of mine.

splithalf 5y ago

Immigrant parents, being more likely to be overachiever on average, are very different than normal parents in this regard. I didn’t know anybody growing up who had to drill on school work. Some dads were into sports and would pressure their kids to be the next babe Ruth or oj Simpson, but school work not so much. The education arms race is very much a function of globalization and international competition, which has added a lot of stress to childhood for today’s middle class American adolescent.

greghinch 5y ago

It’s funny that he wrote this now living in the UK. As an American living in England for the better part of a decade now, it still shocks me how much grades matter in the hiring process for professionals with many years of experience. If you don’t get a first or at least a 2:1 in uni, and/or do poorly on your A-levels, it will hold you back for the rest of your life here

codefined 5y ago
Interesting. Mileage may vary by company / area of work. I didn't go to Uni and went straight to work. Got a few A-levels but nothing special. Wasn't even asked about them for my first job.
- yw3410 5y ago
  It's certainly true for a lot of corporate graduate schemes require a 2.1 in a relevant subject and reputable university in the UK. It's typically used as an initial filter.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
As a developer? Nobody ever asked me anything about my education. Maybe you need to find the right workplace. And this is still if you're doing the employee way. You can find other ways to create value in society and make money out of it.
- tsukikage 5y ago
  Agree. Anecdata: am doing interviews with prospective new people right now. Things I care about in my software engineer hires (for whom this is not their first job): * that you're able to talk about stuff you've done in the past, involving diving into technical detail at will, and showing some understanding of what was happening one level of abstraction below/above whatever bit you were working on. (I don't actually care what you did. Don't tell me proprietary stuff. I want to know that you understood what you were doing, why you were doing it, what it depended on and what depended on it, and that you are able to communicate this to me.) * that you're familiar with the languages/tools/environments you said in your CV you are, and are able to communicate this to me * that you have some general data structures+algorithms awareness, and ability to apply this knowledge to at least trivial problems rather than merely recite the textbook contents on demand

josephorjoe 5y ago

My son and one of his friends spent a huge portion of their stuck-at-home time during the pandemic playing minecraft. It turns out a lot of what they were doing while "playing video games" was learning how to make really complex and unique game scenarios using minecraft command blocks and redstone -- essentially creating both a RPG PvP arena and a multilevel party dungeon crawl w boss fights. I run a small minecraft server for them to play and experiment on and I've resisted the urge to try to teach them anything about setting up and running servers, backing up data, or using text editors with syntax highlighting or source control to edit and preserve their command block commands. I just show up for demos and let them know how cool what they're doing is and backup and reboot the server as needed. I've messed up plenty as a parent but i think not trying to turn their interest in programming within minecraft into a learning experience has been one of my better decisions.

agucova 5y ago
I'm curious, why do you think it'll be bad for them to learn programming? I mean sure, don't force them into them, but I don't think hiding what's underneath is fair either. I actually learned to program for the first time while playing Minecraft around 2011, and I started programming without my parents even knowing. There was a mod for Minecraft called ComputerCraft that allowed you to program inside the game (using virtual computers) with Lua. This led to me on a path to Java to mod Minecraft, then Python to script things and many tools and projects later I ended up becoming a programmer. For me, Minecraft opened me to a world full of wonders; something I never knew was possible, and I definitely don't regret it.
- josephorjoe 5y ago
  i think it would be great for them to learn programming. i think if i try to push them to learn programming, they will lose interest because i will be turning their 'fun' into 'work'. it is better for them to go at their own pace where their interests take them. if they ask for my help (they both know i could teach them programming), i'd be delighted to help them. and minecraft is really fantastic. from the base game, to advance features like command blocks, to the ecosystem of plug ins and online multiplayer adaptations. really an impressive creation.

tmp_anon_22 5y ago

> I never told any adults what I was doing until I was nearly an adult myself, out of fear they'd ruin my hobby like they did everything else. I dropped out of college and was ~4 years into a successful career before it clicked with parents and other "adults" of what I had done and what I had "thrown away". Having been through 3 serious tech jobs and dozens of interviews only one company rejected me due to my lack of a degree - Capitol One. All said however I do think about going back to complete my degree at some point as I expect as my career progresses to upper upper management it might get in the way.

vidarh 5y ago
I only went back and did my degree as pure resume stuffing. Did it by distance learning alongside work. Overall it was a security thing - it felt like plugging a minor hole - and I'm still not sure if it was worth the time I invested in it.

dasyatidprime 5y ago

Without going into too much detail, my mother¹ had a way of interfering in my attempts at projects both by trying to tie it into "getting a credentialed person on board"² for Proper Supervision and piling on… other abuse, often after I was a significant ways in. Fifteen years after escaping, I still haven't published anything real, and I can see the pattern. I saw the pattern ten years ago, even, but deep conditioning is really hard to break. Only being able to finish things for other people is kind of a disaster, especially when you wind up in the “need experience to gain experience” trap. ¹ Who, again without too much detail, was Asian. ² Which never happened. She never put any actual energy into it, I had no framework for approaching it as a child, and I'm not sure the surrounding environment contained people who were willing to do that sort of thing anyway.

rel2thr 5y ago

Tiger parents are already evolving on this, every elite high school student is now starting non profits or micro startups to put on their resumes .

matmatmatmat 5y ago
Or "volunteering" at an animal sanctuary at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro, which they happen to have climbed while there over the summer.
- aspaceman 5y ago
  Sometimes I really wish I could read some of those college essays that went in with mine. I wrote about my dad playing games with me, making a GB emulator and my mom dying. At the time I figured that's what most of them were. Grandma/Uncle/My pet fish died and that was sad. I broke my leg / struggled with grades / couldn't make friends blah blah blah. I built something or wrote something or did this charity thing. The occasional military / older adult. Would really be curious how those have changed. Plus the difference in Ivy League vs Public schools.

enos_feedler 5y ago

Very similar to my story. I grew up in a shitty industrial town of oil refineries. Schools and teachers were not that great, so I went to the local community college bookstore and stole programming books by stuffing them in my jacket and walking out. I got AOL, then internet and eventually IRC. I learned disassemblers, debuggers and x86 instruction set. Joined world-famous cracking groups and wrote key generators and cd checks. At the time I thought this was all normal, but looking back it was pretty wild. Eventually moved to silicon valley, worked for big tech, etc. But it was all no thanks to grades, exams, etc.

lgvld 5y ago
This old school cracking scene is one of the things I think I really missed -- I was way too young back in the days, and maybe also lacked of self confidence, as assembler and hexadecimal looked like another dimension.

hrishi 5y ago

I hate the obsession with grades as much as anyone, but most parents are often mirroring the importance we place on them as a society. Disagree with a number of the sub-comments here, grades matter. Not eventually and not on their own, but they provide optionality the same way race and wealth and other factors do: you can succeed without them, but it definitely helps your chances.

brabel 5y ago

I am the kind of person who never gets a job unless I am so far apart from the other candidates that taking someone else would make it too obvious that they were basing their decision on "gut feeling" (or like they like to call it now, cultural fit). The way I found to overcome that was to excel academically and technically, giving me that clear advantage I need... Unfortunately, many companies will only check your basic technical skills and then focus massively on "cultural fit", and to succeed here there's nothing much I can do other than try to show that, yes, I am a social person and I do like to work with other people and so on (things they will never be able to objectively measure). But to really have a good chance here, let's not kid ourselves: being white, male, good looking and from a wealthy background will get you way ahead before you even say a word. My strategy served me well while I was relatively junior... but now that I am reaching a second decade in the industry, I again don't seem to have a clear advantage that I can objectively prove, and back to square one: getting a good job is a real challenge again.

victor9000 5y ago

Similarly, my first programming class was a middle school lunch table where me and a few friends sat around abusing TI-81s. We found ways to do fun things with these devices and showing off your work to friends became a natural driver that kept us focused. This continued through all of high school and then people wondered how we all became software engineers when our school had no such classes.

okprod 5y ago

My parents physically beat me if I got less than A's; that just made me relish spending time on my own projects and interests away from their priorities.

bentcorner 5y ago

My kid is in University right now and is doing an internship - recently he's been getting deep into contributing to an open source mod for a game, and I'm worried it's distracting him from his internship work and ultimately his final year of school. I see him on steam during the work day playing the game he's modding and he's taken time to show off his modding work and how it's put together - he's really proud of it, and honestly I am too. I've been tempted to say something to him to make sure he balances his time appropriately and fulfills his other commitments.. but maybe I'll let it go a little while longer. I think he's getting a lot out of his project and I don't want to discourage him. I suppose ultimately he's an adult and should make his own decisions and suffer his own consequences. But I worry.

knightofmars 5y ago
Step away. You've hit the right conclusion, "...ultimately he's an adult and should make his own decision...", don't let your fears cloud your perspective, "...suffer his own consequences." You're already assuming at this point that his time involved in this game is potentially a negative. What if it lands him a job?
- bentcorner 5y ago
  > You're already assuming at this point that his time involved in this game is potentially a negative. What if it lands him a job? Fair enough, you're right that I'm showing my biases. I appreciate the feedback.