6 ms·

Your Credentials Are Holding You Back

• avenger123 14y ago
  I would argue that debt holds most people back. It's easier to change jobs when you don't have unnecessary debt. The only debt that I would consider necessary is mortgage debt. Car loans, credit card debit, etc. are all things that can be managed and eliminated.
  • nostrademons 14y ago
    Agree on car loans and credit card debt, but...student loans? That's the elephant in the room, and arguably as necessary as mortgage debt. (You can rent a small apartment, but you're shut out of many career-track jobs without at least a college degree.)
  • Evbn 14y ago
    Mortgage debt, or more precisely, home ownership, locks you into expensive maintenance on an asset that is expensive to get rid of. You can't just downsize your house -- all the benefit gets soaked up in transaction fees.
    • protomyth 14y ago
      It also limits the geographic area that you can look for non-telecommuting work.
    • RougeFemme 14y ago
      And in some scenarios, it really "is" cheaper to rent. But renting goes against what we've been raised to believe, especially regarding the American dream, our sense of permanence/putting down roots, etc.
    • yaddayadda 14y ago
      Agreed. While my student loans have constrained my options, my home ownership has constrained my options by many more orders of magnitude. I hate my student loans, but don't regret them. I hate AND regret my home ownership.
• joallard 14y ago
  > First, eliminate your debt load. Need money? 1. Make money Now here's my guide to happiness in life: 1. Become happy. Voilà. Problem solved. Enjoy.
  • sp332 14y ago
    FTA: Perennially caught between the dream of pursuing her true passions and the responsibility of generating a direct return on her education, she once again decides to grin and bear her current role. Apparently some people need to be reminded!
  • nostrademons 14y ago
    The irony is that your guide to happiness in life is basically exactly how it works. If you want to be happy, the solution is...become happy, and there's no other trick to it. It doesn't work so well for money because there're at least some external constraints on wealth, but for happiness, it really is purely mental and your "guide" will work perfectly well for most people. Well, the ones who're willing to take enough of a leap to follow it.
    • joallard 14y ago
      For happiness, I agree, although often a significant lack of money will hinder happiness and render unhappy.
  • cheald 14y ago
    Almost everyone makes money. The trick isn't to make more, it's to spend less. Some of the best advice I was ever given was that if you want to be rich, live like you're poor. Most people, left unchecked, will live to the extent of their means, which is a tremendous contributor to debt, because a) when you want something above what you already tend to buy, you do it on credit, and b) credit is carefully constructed to take forever to pay off if you are only paying what you have to. So, the advice could better be stated "spend less, put what you don't spend towards eliminating your debt".
    • 14y ago
• ahoy 14y ago
  So the author's point is that debt is restrictive and stifling? And his advice is to just "eliminate your debt load"? Is this supposed to be satire?
  • graeme 14y ago
    People sometimes need to be told. Right now, countless college students with $X0,000 of debt are considering law school and masters degrees without a clear idea of how the added credential will improve their prospects. I tend to think that almost all good advice is cliche for most and a revelation for some. We all have different blind spots.
  • cheald 14y ago
    You'd think it was obvious, but there's immense cultural pressure to take on debt for an immaterial promise which may or may not actually be of any benefit to you in the future. Student debt has eclipsed credit card debt in the US, and Americans aren't exactly known for being stingy with credit.
  • redwood 14y ago
    Was thinking the same thing... I assume he means "continue working consulting" ?
• hkmurakami 14y ago
  I personally think #2 (Rubber Stamp Syndrome) is the most problematic long-term, since it doesn't have a readily-visible, actionable way to fix it (our entire upbringing and society around us reinforces it). I hoped that this HBR article would have addressed ways to resolve rubber stamp syndrome. Alas, no. I am consistently disappointed by the (poor) quality of ideas presented in "HBR Blog" articles. I stopped following the HBR twitter account after a few weeks since all the links I was clicking were links to HBR Blogs and every single one of them disappointed me.
  • Evbn 14y ago
    HBR, like many orgs, uses "blog" as its down label brand, like Gap uses Old Navy and Intel uses Celeron.
• martinced 14y ago
  "You're not the XXX, you're the product" Oh boy that one we're going to hear for a long time apparently :( I know lots of people who paid $$$ for MBAs. And then they went on to make more $$$ than they would have without their MBAs. In a matter of two to three years they'd have make back what they paid their MBA. How are they the "product" of the business school? To me they're the customer: they paid $$$ for the opportunity to then get $$$$$. But it's sooooo easy to try to knock people down by repeating that "you're the product" mantra as if people were merchandise and the web is so full of people who just love to try to diminish others that I'm pretty sure we'll keep reading "you're the product" for a long time...
  • deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  • samatman 14y ago
    The motto is, "if you're not the customer, you're the product". This applies to colleges and universities as much as anything else. The entire discourse is muddled by the vast chasm between reputable MBAs and diploma mills.
• davidroberts 14y ago
  I think people seriously over-estimate how much marginal happiness (if any) that expensive graduate degree will bring. Many people seem to continue studying out of inertia and through encouragement of academics who have a vested interest in maintaining a large number of graduate students. I'd suggest they take their undergraduate degree and go test the waters of where they think they want to work. Spend a couple of years in the field, even at a lower level, pay off a little of the debt they already have, and then if they like the field, and want to continue in it, they'll have a much clearer idea of the benefit/cost ratio of an advanced degree, and a better idea of which school and program will give them the best value. And if they decide the whole field is wrong for them, it's much easier to start afresh somewhere else. Undergraduate degrees are much more transferable from field-to-field than advanced degrees.
  • GuiA 14y ago
    I went through grad school once (PhD, dropped out, left with a MSc), am now doing the startup thing, and intend to go back for a PhD because I do love some things in research and academia (and I have some R&D-type ideas I'd like to work full-time on which require me to be in an university setting). What I suggest to friends asking me for advice re:grad school is to go to grad school IF AND ONLY IF they get an assistantship of some sorts (those usually come with a tuition waiver). When I applied to grad schools, I didn't get in my top 2 programs of choice; I did get in decent programs, but which wouldn't pay me (or not enough to cover my various expenses). I ended up choosing a lesser program, but one that gave me full tuition waiver + a teaching (and later, research) assistantship. Grad school is a great experience, and I believe most people will get something from it. But it's not worth getting in debt for it (even if it's your top choice- you wouldn't pay Google/Apple/[insert your favorite company here] to go work for them). Now of course, this advice is easier to follow for the scientific fields; but I have friends who got into liberal arts programs with full tuition waiver + a decent assistantship. The bar is just much higher for these (as it should be).
    • eropple 14y ago
      > What I suggest to friends asking me for advice re:grad school is to go to grad school IF AND ONLY IF they get an assistantship of some sorts (those usually come with a tuition waiver). I think this is key. Every professor I ever had said "if you have to pay for a grad degree, don't go." Which I would have, which is why I didn't!
• peterjancelis 14y ago
  So true. Grab a couple of beers with an ex-consultant when he's out of the system, open up about your BS experiences first and before you know it you end up spending all night sharing all the BS either of you had to go through. Worked every time so far.
• moron4hire 14y ago
  It's amazing how few supposedly educated people understand the concept of sunk costs. What's the best time to stop flushing money down the toilet? Do you think we should continue longer because we have been doing it for so long, or would it be better to stop now?
• SiVal 14y ago
  I think university credentials are holding all of society back. For a thousand years, universities had little to do with making a living for most people in society. They were for training academics, churchmen, and lawyers, and for the scions of rich families to get to know each other. The majority of households became able to support themselves by mechanisms other than going to college. It is only in the last generation (VERY recently in the thousand year history of the system) that universities have become almost the monopoly source of employment qualification. How ironic is it that as economic activity diversifies, qualification for entry narrows into a single queue? One result of the university being the only door into the entire economy is that people assume that the way to do the best in the economy is to do the best in the university system. Get the most elite degree possible, and you'll have your pick of elite careers. But it doesn't work that way. The university and the economy are two different worlds. People with PhDs in Etruscan history from Harvard are elite in the university system, and for every ten of them, there will be one academic job available. The other nine will have to leave the system and be no more qualified than people with far more ordinary degrees to be of value in the real economy. But they'll think they deserve more because, after all, they were the winners of the system that everyone has to go through to qualify for a job. What a mess. The sooner we can diversify the training and credentialing system to match the diversified economy, the better.
  • rjzzleep 14y ago
    it is the very reason why a lot of really smart people drop of out of the universities. essentially the only thing it really proves is that you're very good at doing what you're told, the way you were told. yes, there are very smart professors. I have met many. I have met equally if not more really dumb professors. they're not stupid per se, but they can only think in the procedures they have been taught to think. chomsky made the argument that by the end of your academic career in general you are already chewed, so that you are part of the system, unless you have strong enough peers that keep you from getting assimilated. gatto in his book the underground history of american education made the argument that the education system is really made to generate a class society. personally I think it's a system that nurtures mediocracy. the university system wants is based on the most common denominator to get as many "well enough trained" workslaves out as possible. to do that efficiently you essentially have to cut out the top and the bottom, and keep the rest. i recently sat in a room where they wanted to introduce the new head of development. some random dude, not particularly interesting, but just got a ph.d in computer science, associate professor in a random university. If I was running the show, he wouldn't even have made it past the first interview. but i just sat still nodding and making a note on how I could use a ph.d right now
• richo 14y ago
  As a developer (These days, DevOps engineer) without a uni degree I can tell you absolutely that for better or for worse you're probably still better off with a degree. Note that I'm saying this is how it should be, but just that to say "your degree is holding you back is absurd". You may choose to do stupid things to justify the money you spent at uni, but in the last 24 months: * I was unable to secure a badass job as a pen tester, due entirely to an upstream policy of not hiring people without degrees. I was told that an exception could be made, but I'd already been screwed around for 2 months by them and needed work. * The process of working or moving over seas is diabolically complicated already, and made borderline impossible if you don't have a piece of paper to prove that you do what you do well. My take on the article as that any barriers that a degree imposes are psychological and self-imposed, whereas there are still realworld issues you can't get past without one.
  • redwood 14y ago
    I'd be curious to hear your perspective as someone who didn't do college: do you feel you missed out on anything (other than the credential piece)? For me the experience was probably more valuable than the credential... at least in terms of values that this article is espousing: 'finding myself' etc. My degree was valuable in terms of money too...but for me the quality of life I had in college became a real ideal, an almost idyllic vision of cooperative living, good and bad, that has stayed with me. I'd never give up that experience, not for the world. In fact my feeling is college is the beginning of a trend whereby we're going to all start living lives of greater freedom and less hand-to-mouth... that is if we can find a way to share in the plenty that our times have created.
    • richo 14y ago
      Not really. Some odd stuff you don't think about like how to structure a meeting or how to write a research paper. Generally speaking, I spent the equivalent time a) gainfully employed and b) writing fucktons of code. This certainly isn't general advice and I don't know that I'd recommend doing this to other people, but for me specifically it seems to have paid dividends.
  • xyzzy123 14y ago