It greatly bothers me that rayiner's post is showing up as 'dead', presumably because it was either downvoted too much or just flagged too much. Anyway. So whi

It greatly bothers me that rayiner's post is showing up as 'dead', presumably because it was either downvoted too much or just flagged too much. Anyway. So while we're all giving out examples and anecdotes, here's mine: I'm from an Asian family of 5, I was the only one who was given the 'follow your dreams!' advice out of the 5 (there's a long/funny story behind this). I did end up being the only one who went to school for a non-STEM field (literature/music). Guess who's the only one unemployed out of the 5. Guess who wishes who was forced to stick to a STEM field? If I have children, damn right I'll force them toward STEM field, enroll them to a school with reputable robotics programs, expose them to folks who're in engineering/medical fields, etc. Do read qzxt's relevant post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5308799 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5308799 And lastly, because the idea of censorship doesn't sit well with me, here is what rayiner posted: My parents had a plan for me and my brother growing up: I'd be an engineer and he'd be a doctor. At some point when we were old enough, we asserted yourselves, and I went into law and he went into banking. But in retrospect I'm glad my parents didn't just tell me "follow your dreams!" If it were up to me as a teenager, I'd just sit around all day masturbating and eating Cheetos. Kids need more direction than that. Here is the thing about kids: they're not very smart. And they don't know it. My infant is convinced that if she sucks hard enough on my arm milk will come out. At 17 I was no less misguided just about different things. You can always quit your professional job that puts food on the table to follow a more capricious path. But when your teenage dreams collapse against the hard ground of reality, you can't usually do the opposite.