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I’ve worked with groups of juniors and college students every year for a while now. I agree that something is going on, but I don’t think there is a single expl

I’ve worked with groups of juniors and college students every year for a while now. I agree that something is going on, but I don’t think there is a single explanation. Social media is a big part of it, but from what I’ve seen it’s not in the way people usually describe it. The most unhappy people I see aren’t the ones talking to their friends on Instagram and Facebook during their lunch break. To be honest, those people seem to be thriving socially simply by virtue of keeping up with their friends and coordinating social activities. The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours of Reddit and Twitter every day. They have a never ending stream of ragebait, outrage headlines, tragedy stories, and world-is-ending stories filling their feeds. They’re also filled with unreasonable expectations about the workplace. In recent years multiple juniors have confidently told me that “nobody can do more than about 2 hours of work per day”, citing Reddit or Twitter threads that explain it. Then they get into a real job that requires a full day of work and feel like they’re being taken advantage of. I’ve had a concerning number of conversations with juniors who are getting paid $120K or more to do entry level work with great mentoring at a local company, only to be outraged at some idea that the industry is taking advantage of them because they haven’t been promoted to senior with $300K total comp after their first year. The source of these expectations is always some form of social media (Reddit, Blind, Twitter) I don’t know how this translates to academic contexts because that’s not my mentoring domain. I imagine it’s at least contributing, though. That said, academic environments are known to be grueling so it’s not entirely a singular issue. They really are grueling.

cornercasechase 3y ago
I think being angry is a natural and healthy response to the current economic reality. The juniors you’re working with have it right. If the CEO is going to make 100X as much as me, I’m going to do my best to work 100X less than they do. Hopefully we’ve reached a timeline where we no longer acquiesce to rampant inequality.
- refurb 3y ago
  If the CEO is going to make 100X as much as me, I’m going to do my best to work 100X less than they do. You realized CEO's make that much money after a long career where they were busting their asses as juniors. You basically made the same argument the grandparent is criticizing.
  - cornercasechase 3y ago
    I realize that the CEO was born into a family where they were handed their position. You don’t get to the top by “working hard” that’s a sucker’s game. You need to be born to the right family, grease the right palms and be in the right place at the right time. Being a complete sociopath doesn’t hurt either.
    - badpun 3y ago
      - CEO of Microsoft is a child of middle class Indian immigrants - so is CEO of Google - CEO of Apple comes from working/lower-middle class family - CEO of Johnson and Johnson (12th largest SP500 company) is an immigrant from Spain, coming from middle class family etc etc etc
      - cornercasechase 3y ago
        > CEO of Microsoft is a child of middle class Indian immigrants Middle class people aren’t the secretary to the prime minister. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/satya-nadela-microsoft-ceo-father-bn-yugandhar-dies-hyderabad-1598978-2019-09-13 https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/satya-nadela-microsoft... > so is CEO of Google “His father also had a manufacturing plant that produced electrical components” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai You’re buying the propaganda.
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Middle class people aren’t the secretary to the prime minister. That sounds quite normal, actually. But the middle class (the petit bourgeoisie) is a small, economically elite class. It is in the middle between the working class that makes up the vast majority and the even narrower haut borgeoisie — the major capitalists whose relation to the economy centers on control of capital to which rented labor is applied. Unfortunately, people sometimes confuse the middle class with the middle income segment of the working class, which is a very different thing. (And that confusion is often deliberately exploited.)
- badpun 3y ago
  If the CEOs have it so great, why not become a CEO yourself and reap all those benefits?
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    Personally, my knife fighting skills aren't anywhere near up to par for that.
_fat_santa 3y ago
> To be honest, those people seem to be thriving socially simply by virtue of keeping up with their friends and coordinating social activities. > The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours of Reddit and Twitter every day. I think you make a good distinction here. We always seems to lump "social media" into one big blob when talking about it but like you said I think there is some nuance here. I see Reddit/Twitter as a different kind of social media than Facebook/Instagram. On Instagram/FB it's all about the "real you", I have an account with my name on it and photos of me. Reddit (and to a lesser degree Twitter) on the other hand is all about being anonymous and interacting with strangers (as opposed to your friends) on the internet. There's a time and place for both types of interactions but I feel like the "anonymous stranger internet" is what's really driving most of the negatives we see in social media.
commandlinefan 3y ago
I don't know - I have two kids, one 17 and one 19. The 19-year-old graduated valedictorian from his high school of 700 last year, did extracurriculars and scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT... and was still rejected by the "top" colleges he applied to (Stanford, MIT). The 17-year-old got a B this year, and she's devastated - if getting everything nearly perfect isn't enough, what hope does everybody else have? It wasn't like this when I was a teenager in the 80's.
- ke88y 3y ago
  > The 19-year-old graduated valedictorian from his high school of 700 last year, did extracurriculars and scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT > Stanford, MIT I see this attitude often and... I just don't get it. It seems innumerate at best. MIT accepts around 500 students and Stanford accepts around 2,000 students. There's overlap between those two groups, but let's assume they are entirely disjoint. That gives us 2,500 seats. Let's round up to 3,000 just for fun. Last year, around 3 million students graduated from 20,469 high schools. That's 20,469 valedictorians for 3,000 spots. Last year, 1.7 million students took the SAT. That's 17,000 in the top percentile for 3,000 spots. The set of valedictorians and set of SAT 99th percentile students probably mostly overlap. (And to the extent that they don't overlap, it's often because valedictorian is a weird game; eg, at both the high school I attended and the high school in my current community it's basically mathematically impossible to win the valedictorian game if you participate in band/orchestra because they aren't honors courses for the first 3 semesters... but, of course, any sane admissions department knows this and will weigh significant involvement in music over two additional honors courses.) So there are at least 10K students who meet at least your son's (high) bar, all competing for less than 3,000 seats at MIT/Stanford. And that's a conservative estimate. You can add in another 5-10 top schools and the arithmetic is still either impossible for extremely challenging, even if you limit yourself to grades and test scores. And that's with extremely generous assumptions. But, of course, they competition is far stiffer because a lot of those seats will go to kids who didn't get 4.0s and weren't valedictorians and didn't get 99th percentile SAT scores. But that's because they were spending too much time doing far more impressive things than running up their scores in those categories. Eg doing well at a national science fair, doing well at a national debate or mock trial tournament, winning a major mathematics competition, winning a major writing or art award, doing well nationally in a competitive sport, performing a musical instrument at a very high level, etc. And those are just the color-inside-the-lines youth competition things. A step up from the "grades and tests" nonsense but still very sand boxy. High school students do a lot of impressive real world stuff as well -- significant open source contributions, significant community development work, publishing peer reviewed scientific articles, etc. Read George Hotz's wiki page -- kids with those sorts of accomplishments apply to places like MIT and Stanford every year. Perfect grades and test scores were criteria that didn't matter much until a candidate was already second or third tier; the difference between 3.8 or even 3.5 and 4.0 just doesn't matter when a seventeen year old already has career accomplishments on their resume that I'd be proud to have at 30. That's just computing. There are wunderkids like that in every field. Lots of them. And even after all of that we still haven't left the borders of the USA (at MIT, about 10% of undergraduates are international). > It wasn't like this when I was a teenager in the 80's. Fewer students went to college. More importantly, systemic barriers to entry -- both informational and cultural -- remained extremely high for most people without WASPy coastal and/or upper-middle-class-suburb backgrounds. The internet eroded a lot of those informational and cultural barriers. Democratizing access to knowledge dramatically increased the efficiency of this market, and that has resulted in much stiffer competition. > if getting everything nearly perfect isn't enough, what hope does everybody else have? I really hope that my kids aren't going to aim for elite universities. Having spent a lot of time at both of the institutions you mentioned, I know they can get a great education and almost certainly live a better life without that kind of pressure.
shusaku 3y ago
> The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours of Reddit and Twitter every day Or god forbid Hacker News!

cornercasechase 3y ago

I think being angry is a natural and healthy response to the current economic reality. The juniors you’re working with have it right. If the CEO is going to make 100X as much as me, I’m going to do my best to work 100X less than they do. Hopefully we’ve reached a timeline where we no longer acquiesce to rampant inequality.

refurb 3y ago
If the CEO is going to make 100X as much as me, I’m going to do my best to work 100X less than they do. You realized CEO's make that much money after a long career where they were busting their asses as juniors. You basically made the same argument the grandparent is criticizing.
- cornercasechase 3y ago
  I realize that the CEO was born into a family where they were handed their position. You don’t get to the top by “working hard” that’s a sucker’s game. You need to be born to the right family, grease the right palms and be in the right place at the right time. Being a complete sociopath doesn’t hurt either.
  - badpun 3y ago
    - CEO of Microsoft is a child of middle class Indian immigrants - so is CEO of Google - CEO of Apple comes from working/lower-middle class family - CEO of Johnson and Johnson (12th largest SP500 company) is an immigrant from Spain, coming from middle class family etc etc etc
    - cornercasechase 3y ago
      > CEO of Microsoft is a child of middle class Indian immigrants Middle class people aren’t the secretary to the prime minister. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/satya-nadela-microsoft-ceo-father-bn-yugandhar-dies-hyderabad-1598978-2019-09-13 https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/satya-nadela-microsoft... > so is CEO of Google “His father also had a manufacturing plant that produced electrical components” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai You’re buying the propaganda.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Middle class people aren’t the secretary to the prime minister. That sounds quite normal, actually. But the middle class (the petit bourgeoisie) is a small, economically elite class. It is in the middle between the working class that makes up the vast majority and the even narrower haut borgeoisie — the major capitalists whose relation to the economy centers on control of capital to which rented labor is applied. Unfortunately, people sometimes confuse the middle class with the middle income segment of the working class, which is a very different thing. (And that confusion is often deliberately exploited.)
badpun 3y ago
If the CEOs have it so great, why not become a CEO yourself and reap all those benefits?
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  Personally, my knife fighting skills aren't anywhere near up to par for that.

_fat_santa 3y ago

> To be honest, those people seem to be thriving socially simply by virtue of keeping up with their friends and coordinating social activities. > The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours of Reddit and Twitter every day. I think you make a good distinction here. We always seems to lump "social media" into one big blob when talking about it but like you said I think there is some nuance here. I see Reddit/Twitter as a different kind of social media than Facebook/Instagram. On Instagram/FB it's all about the "real you", I have an account with my name on it and photos of me. Reddit (and to a lesser degree Twitter) on the other hand is all about being anonymous and interacting with strangers (as opposed to your friends) on the internet. There's a time and place for both types of interactions but I feel like the "anonymous stranger internet" is what's really driving most of the negatives we see in social media.

commandlinefan 3y ago

I don't know - I have two kids, one 17 and one 19. The 19-year-old graduated valedictorian from his high school of 700 last year, did extracurriculars and scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT... and was still rejected by the "top" colleges he applied to (Stanford, MIT). The 17-year-old got a B this year, and she's devastated - if getting everything nearly perfect isn't enough, what hope does everybody else have? It wasn't like this when I was a teenager in the 80's.

ke88y 3y ago
> The 19-year-old graduated valedictorian from his high school of 700 last year, did extracurriculars and scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT > Stanford, MIT I see this attitude often and... I just don't get it. It seems innumerate at best. MIT accepts around 500 students and Stanford accepts around 2,000 students. There's overlap between those two groups, but let's assume they are entirely disjoint. That gives us 2,500 seats. Let's round up to 3,000 just for fun. Last year, around 3 million students graduated from 20,469 high schools. That's 20,469 valedictorians for 3,000 spots. Last year, 1.7 million students took the SAT. That's 17,000 in the top percentile for 3,000 spots. The set of valedictorians and set of SAT 99th percentile students probably mostly overlap. (And to the extent that they don't overlap, it's often because valedictorian is a weird game; eg, at both the high school I attended and the high school in my current community it's basically mathematically impossible to win the valedictorian game if you participate in band/orchestra because they aren't honors courses for the first 3 semesters... but, of course, any sane admissions department knows this and will weigh significant involvement in music over two additional honors courses.) So there are at least 10K students who meet at least your son's (high) bar, all competing for less than 3,000 seats at MIT/Stanford. And that's a conservative estimate. You can add in another 5-10 top schools and the arithmetic is still either impossible for extremely challenging, even if you limit yourself to grades and test scores. And that's with extremely generous assumptions. But, of course, they competition is far stiffer because a lot of those seats will go to kids who didn't get 4.0s and weren't valedictorians and didn't get 99th percentile SAT scores. But that's because they were spending too much time doing far more impressive things than running up their scores in those categories. Eg doing well at a national science fair, doing well at a national debate or mock trial tournament, winning a major mathematics competition, winning a major writing or art award, doing well nationally in a competitive sport, performing a musical instrument at a very high level, etc. And those are just the color-inside-the-lines youth competition things. A step up from the "grades and tests" nonsense but still very sand boxy. High school students do a lot of impressive real world stuff as well -- significant open source contributions, significant community development work, publishing peer reviewed scientific articles, etc. Read George Hotz's wiki page -- kids with those sorts of accomplishments apply to places like MIT and Stanford every year. Perfect grades and test scores were criteria that didn't matter much until a candidate was already second or third tier; the difference between 3.8 or even 3.5 and 4.0 just doesn't matter when a seventeen year old already has career accomplishments on their resume that I'd be proud to have at 30. That's just computing. There are wunderkids like that in every field. Lots of them. And even after all of that we still haven't left the borders of the USA (at MIT, about 10% of undergraduates are international). > It wasn't like this when I was a teenager in the 80's. Fewer students went to college. More importantly, systemic barriers to entry -- both informational and cultural -- remained extremely high for most people without WASPy coastal and/or upper-middle-class-suburb backgrounds. The internet eroded a lot of those informational and cultural barriers. Democratizing access to knowledge dramatically increased the efficiency of this market, and that has resulted in much stiffer competition. > if getting everything nearly perfect isn't enough, what hope does everybody else have? I really hope that my kids aren't going to aim for elite universities. Having spent a lot of time at both of the institutions you mentioned, I know they can get a great education and almost certainly live a better life without that kind of pressure.

shusaku 3y ago

> The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours of Reddit and Twitter every day Or god forbid Hacker News!