17 ms·

Cool Kids Lose, Though It May Take A Few Years

80 points by sizzle 12y ago

mantrax5 12y ago
Random statements alert: - "Cool" fuzzy term, no specific definition given. - "Lose" fuzzy term, no specific definition given.
- epi16 12y ago
  From the abstract of the actual study: - "Cool" => "Pseudomature behavior—ranging from minor delinquency to precocious romantic involvement" - "Lose" => "Early adolescent pseudomature behavior predicted long-term difficulties in close relationships, as well as significant problems with alcohol and substance use, and elevated levels of criminal behavior."
Spooky23 12y ago
The little secret is that nobody really thinks they are the cool kids.
- epaladin 12y ago
  There's a little imposter syndrome in everyone?
- ssully 12y ago
  What do you mean? Deep down no one actually thinks they are cool? In both my high school and grammar school there were kids who were self proclaimed 'cool'. They were seen as such too. I don't think this was out of the ordinary.
  - Spooky23 12y ago
    In a fishbowl like a high school, people are really driven by their insecurity.
- Nursie 12y ago
  Some people do. Hell, I did at times.
josephschmoe 12y ago
From Abstract: Early adolescent pseudomature behavior predicted long-term difficulties in close relationships, as well as significant problems with alcohol and substance use, and elevated levels of criminal behavior.
ianstallings 12y ago
"Look everyone, I've proven mathematically that I am now the cool one. Told you." Pathetic.
- Zikes 12y ago
  Some sociologists have decided to tackle studying the concept of "cool" and how it affects peoples' lives. They clearly stated that their definition of "coolness" is based on pseudomaturity, for which they also defined criteria. The paper and study are published, and may provide interesting insights, but are unlikely to be accepted as canon without sufficient followup study and peer review, which by publishing the study these sociologists are clearly inviting. Now, are you saying it's pathetic for people whose fundamental focus of life is to try to better everyone's understanding of the human psyche and in this case psychological development in early years? Are you saying it's a subject not worth studying at all? Are you saying that it's impossible to conduct an unbiased study on the subject? Are you saying that it would be better for the study to be performed by someone who would identify themselves as falling within the "cool" group in their childhood? Or are you saying you'd rather just dismiss the study and disparage the scientists on the basis that you do not agree with the results of what appears to be a properly documented scientific study? Skepticism is encouraged in science, dismissiveness is not.
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    As a study on pseudomaturity it's fine (I assume). But defining coolness as pseudomaturity is problematic. The most cool/popular people at my school were mature and did well academically and athletically.
  - ianstallings 12y ago
    I'm saying that this is a thinly veiled revenge of the nerds. And I'm not a scientist, so my discouragement shouldn't harm anyone. It's called an opinion and it doesn't require a peer review.
    - Zikes 12y ago
soperj 12y ago
Seems a little biased, considering he actually says "I would say I was part of the not-so-cool kids."
- mtdewcmu 12y ago
  You nailed it. This would be a good title: "It's better to be un-cool, finds study by former un-cool children." I'm pretty sure there's no accepted definition of cool. They seem to have chosen early signs of delinquency as their definition. If you pried, you could probably find out the names of the children from these researchers' own pasts who the study participants were based on.
- Zikes 12y ago
  Which is why the scientific method was invented and is taught in grade school.
  - soperj 12y ago
    I wish they continued to teach it through out High School too, since there seems to be a significant misunderstanding of how science actually works.
shanecleveland 12y ago
I'll never forget a peer of mine slapping me on the back and saying "nice guys don't win." This was as we were leaving class our senior year after the homecoming court was announced. He made it. I didn't. Fifteen years later, we are both doing well. But he definitely took a nose dive after high school; drugs, alcohol, legal trouble, dead-end jobs, etc. And I went to college, started a career and consider it the best time of my life. But, it was not a death sentence for him, and I'm not a millionaire or anything ;) We both still live in the same town and are married with kids and have good jobs. And there are many more examples of both of us, but some "cool kids" continue their downward spiral or continue to ascend to great things as they shed their earlier un-coolness. It definitely didn't take a study to see this. In my opinion, many "cool kids" find that doors get closed through their riskier behavior or poorer results in school and are no longer able to get by solely on good looks and athletic prowess. While hard work and education open up more opportunities for others, particularly as popularity is taken out of the equation. EDIT: I should note that the king and queen of homecoming were very attractive, but not necessarily "cool kids." It was very refreshing, and perhaps an indication of things to come.
- mtdewcmu 12y ago
  "Nice guys don't win." -- He sounds like a Jeffrey Skilling type character. The guys that say things like that in high school probably are the ones that go to Wall Street and become white collar criminals.
  - shanecleveland 12y ago
    I am sure that is true in some cases. Had he pursued higher education, that may have happened. In this case, he was athletic, good looking and charming; in a word, popular. But he was also very good at being an asshole. I think there was the thought that "if this is working for me now, then it will always work for me." We were friends in that we hung out with the same group of people. I made a point to hang out with this group of people and do the things they did so I could try to be popular. Luckily, I realized at some point that being myself was preferable.
klunger 12y ago
I'm getting tired of this "nerds" vs "cool kids" narrative. It is a false dichotomy. Kids fall all over the map in terms of behavior and social groups as they grow up. Case in point: I was a quiet "nerd" all the way through high school, but really found my element and became a social butterfly in college. Some other people have the opposite trajectory, or zig zag all over the place. Kids are kids. All of them do stupid things at some point, and all of them have potential to grow and change their personalities to a large extent. But, it seems to be popular in various circles these days to set up these labels of "cool" and "nerd" and it leads to pointless tribalism.
- shanecleveland 12y ago
  You just labeled yourself as a "nerd" in high school and demonstrated that it didn't forever cast you into a life of loneliness and despair. You excelled! Likewise, the cool kids won't be cool forever. That's the point. Who you are in high school doesn't define you.
  - matwood 12y ago
    Who you are in high school doesn't define you. But it does for a lot of people. I know people who have the same friends from HS, listen to the same music and generally act the same way. They graduated HS, but never really left the mentality.
    - hyperliner 12y ago
      Maybe not to a lot of people. All you know is that some people were affected. But you are not accounting for all the people who were not affected. Yours is a common bias.
    - hyperliner 12y ago
      Actually, didn't we just see somewhere that your first name affected the possibility of getting an interview? Something along the lines of identical resumes, where names were stereotypical African names vs. stereotypical "American" names, and the latter would get more interviews, in statistically significantly higher numbers.
gatehouse 12y ago
From personal experience the path-of-least-grief is to assume that attractiveness, intelligence, personality, and diligence are all uncorrelated.
- hyperliner 12y ago
  Very good. However, I also remember that some things do affect the outcome. For example, there are studies that being tall or attractive provides some advantages, or that being short or bald provide some disadvantages in controlled experiments.
  - gatehouse 12y ago
    Since people value attractiveness for its own sake I think it makes more sense as outcome itself.
josephschmoe 12y ago
This doesn't address whether psuedomature behavior is the cause of these problems. It could simply be a effect of problematic life circumstances: parental divorce, child abuse, neglect, etc. that are pervasive across economic classes. This is much more likely correlative than causative.
jawns 12y ago
The study that this NPR piece reports about is focused on the outcomes of kids who were, as middle schoolers, pseudomature, which I suppose could be described as having mature interests but not mature behavior. (So, interested in drugs but lacking the ability to regulate themselves, or interested in sex but lacking the ability to engage in healthy relationships.) The study found that pseudomaturity was associated with "short-term success with peers." That stands to reason. You know how kids look up to their older siblings? Well, in a way, pseudomature kids are acting the way older siblings act, and I can see how that might lead to peer approval. But what I think bears mentioning is that in addition to kids who are pseudomature, you have kids who are genuinely mature and kids who are immature. The kids who are genuinely mature are those who (unlike pseudomature kids) have mature behavior, and either have interests that are appropriate for their age or, if they have mature interests, are smart enough to know that they shouldn't act on those interests. The kids who are immature are an interesting bunch. There are some (like I was in middle school) who do not have mature interests, but have mature behavior. There are others who neither have mature interests nor mature behavior. The more you think about maturity as having to do with two spectrums -- one for interests and one for behavior -- the more the results of this study make sense, and the less it makes sense to use the "cool kids vs. nerds" narrative. The results make sense because kids who get into adult situations but aren't able to handle them in grown-up ways are likely to end up in various forms of trouble, and it doesn't surprise me that the effects of that early trouble may persist into adulthood. You can also infer that kids who have mature interests are probably more likely to be exposed to mature themes at home, perhaps because of a troubled home life, which probably influences them as adults as well. The reason the "cool kids vs. nerds" narrative doesn't make sense is because, really, what we're talking about is not popularity influencing outcomes but behavior influencing outcomes. Kids (whether they're cool or not) who aren't good at regulating their behavior in middle school are more likely to be bad at regulating their behavior in adulthood; kids (whether they're cool or not) who are good at regulating their behavior in middle school are more likely to be good at regulating their behavior in adulthood.
- shanecleveland 12y ago
  But these labels mean something to teenagers, and it doesn't matter if it's society's fault for creating these labels. Kids know who the "popular," "cool" kids are, and they know who the "nerds" are. Likewise, they know where they stand. And it matters to them, and it has an impact on them. The result will vary, of course, and there will always be exceptions. So the study is asking "what happened to the kids who their peers considered 'cool' or a 'nerd'?"
joeyspn 12y ago
Nerd is the new cool...
sillysaurus3 12y ago
Most people lose, whether they're nerds or cool kids. They end up in unhappy jobs or unhappy marriages for the rest of their lives, which is a kind of prison that can be hard to escape.
- mtdewcmu 12y ago
  True. You can always eschew the nerd/cool argument and choose realism.
interesting_guy 12y ago
Misleading title. Also not surprising you nerds at hn brought it to the front page.
noname123 12y ago
Tangential but for peeps who're in their late 20's and early 30's in tech, do you feel like we have peaked and now are in the decline? When I first got out of school, was feeling like a shiny new penny as most of my other peeps were going for law school or doing their gap year in life sciences or other prep for graduate school. Basically leading life as struggling students. So relatively, I had relative high spending power, living in the city with discretionary income and splurging it on un-necessary latte /gastro-pub/trendy lounges and going to feel-good rock-climbing/hiking trips on weekends (posted on FB obviously) and believing in the mission of the startup/corporation same as mine. Now in my late 20's, I feel like both my programmer peers' buying power and personal power are waning. Financially, most of my friends who're going for medicine and law are now in residency/associate training and will soon over take me in earnings. For my friends in finance/ management/accounting, there is a well-defined path to promotion where I feel like I have capped out and they're gonna start making more and having more power in comapnies. Applying to accelerators and doing hackathons and making business cards for startup's seem awfully empty to me now. In terms of personal agency, my friends who have pursued graduate research are wrapping their degrees and are either going for post-doc's or joining industry as Associate Scientists doing much more self-directed research than the off-the-shelf web CRUD and "Big Data" that I'm doing. My friends who are musicians or artists or film-makers, albeit still poor are pushing out their albums and films in festivals and galleries; not so much critical success but having something they made by themselves and persevered to show for. I just made a bunch of cogs tick in a number of corporations and a few vanity project that I call "startup's." I feel like I followed the cult of PG kinda of like the cool kids in high school have followed the cult of "cheerleaders and football QB" and bought in the hype. When I don't really care about consumer web, whether Angular.js or Macaw or whatever is next is better than Backbone.js, or the next message queue performance metric's or the next startup mantra about "pivoting" and "increasing your luck surface area" so all I was doing was looking for personal validation or trying to get rich without a cause. Oh well, youth is wasted on the young and I hope to learn and from this experience to recoup my loss.
- BSousa 12y ago
  Not really, but I guess depends on where you live. I'm from Portugal. Programmers here are seen as normal white collar jobs and paid not much more than other white collar jobs, and probably peaking (earning wise) at about the same as them. If you go for a normal company and not a startup, the path to management is usually quite clear as well. Doctors make more (2x-10x depending on experience/specialty) and lawyers is so so. But here it is still probably one of the professions that have less unemployment (and salaries are almost always higher than the average) But in other areas, London, NY, SF, you can probably see programmers being much higher in the pay scale compared to doctors and most lawyers (remember, most don't go to the top firms, only very few). But the advantage you as a programmer have compared to your peers is that it is much easier to supplement your income or find another job.
api 12y ago
Also known as "peaking in high school."
squozzer 12y ago
Moral of today's story - sit down, shut up, and do as you are told by authority figures who are morally and socially superior to you.
pessimizer 12y ago
The definition of "cool" defined as "Pseudomature behavior—ranging from minor delinquency to precocious romantic involvement" seems designed to detect poor kids and kids from dysfunctional and abusive homes. It's only the word 'cool' that's getting this into the media rotation. If the headline was "Poor kids and kids from dysfunctional and abusive homes lose," I'm not sure that anybody would be interested in reading the story. Too bad the public isn't allowed to read the study, so I can't actually see all of their metrics for defining cool other than petty crime and early sexual behavior - things that plenty of clearly not-cool kids get into.
badman_ting 12y ago
Talk about burying the lede - the most important sentence in the whole article is the final one.

80 points by sizzle 12y ago

Random statements alert: - "Cool" fuzzy term, no specific definition given. - "Lose" fuzzy term, no specific definition given.

epi16 12y ago
From the abstract of the actual study: - "Cool" => "Pseudomature behavior—ranging from minor delinquency to precocious romantic involvement" - "Lose" => "Early adolescent pseudomature behavior predicted long-term difficulties in close relationships, as well as significant problems with alcohol and substance use, and elevated levels of criminal behavior."

Spooky23 12y ago

The little secret is that nobody really thinks they are the cool kids.

epaladin 12y ago
There's a little imposter syndrome in everyone?
ssully 12y ago
What do you mean? Deep down no one actually thinks they are cool? In both my high school and grammar school there were kids who were self proclaimed 'cool'. They were seen as such too. I don't think this was out of the ordinary.
- Spooky23 12y ago
  In a fishbowl like a high school, people are really driven by their insecurity.
Nursie 12y ago
Some people do. Hell, I did at times.

josephschmoe 12y ago

From Abstract: Early adolescent pseudomature behavior predicted long-term difficulties in close relationships, as well as significant problems with alcohol and substance use, and elevated levels of criminal behavior.

ianstallings 12y ago

"Look everyone, I've proven mathematically that I am now the cool one. Told you." Pathetic.

Zikes 12y ago
Some sociologists have decided to tackle studying the concept of "cool" and how it affects peoples' lives. They clearly stated that their definition of "coolness" is based on pseudomaturity, for which they also defined criteria. The paper and study are published, and may provide interesting insights, but are unlikely to be accepted as canon without sufficient followup study and peer review, which by publishing the study these sociologists are clearly inviting. Now, are you saying it's pathetic for people whose fundamental focus of life is to try to better everyone's understanding of the human psyche and in this case psychological development in early years? Are you saying it's a subject not worth studying at all? Are you saying that it's impossible to conduct an unbiased study on the subject? Are you saying that it would be better for the study to be performed by someone who would identify themselves as falling within the "cool" group in their childhood? Or are you saying you'd rather just dismiss the study and disparage the scientists on the basis that you do not agree with the results of what appears to be a properly documented scientific study? Skepticism is encouraged in science, dismissiveness is not.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  As a study on pseudomaturity it's fine (I assume). But defining coolness as pseudomaturity is problematic. The most cool/popular people at my school were mature and did well academically and athletically.
- ianstallings 12y ago
  I'm saying that this is a thinly veiled revenge of the nerds. And I'm not a scientist, so my discouragement shouldn't harm anyone. It's called an opinion and it doesn't require a peer review.
  - Zikes 12y ago

soperj 12y ago

Seems a little biased, considering he actually says "I would say I was part of the not-so-cool kids."

mtdewcmu 12y ago
You nailed it. This would be a good title: "It's better to be un-cool, finds study by former un-cool children." I'm pretty sure there's no accepted definition of cool. They seem to have chosen early signs of delinquency as their definition. If you pried, you could probably find out the names of the children from these researchers' own pasts who the study participants were based on.
Zikes 12y ago
Which is why the scientific method was invented and is taught in grade school.
- soperj 12y ago
  I wish they continued to teach it through out High School too, since there seems to be a significant misunderstanding of how science actually works.

shanecleveland 12y ago

I'll never forget a peer of mine slapping me on the back and saying "nice guys don't win." This was as we were leaving class our senior year after the homecoming court was announced. He made it. I didn't. Fifteen years later, we are both doing well. But he definitely took a nose dive after high school; drugs, alcohol, legal trouble, dead-end jobs, etc. And I went to college, started a career and consider it the best time of my life. But, it was not a death sentence for him, and I'm not a millionaire or anything ;) We both still live in the same town and are married with kids and have good jobs. And there are many more examples of both of us, but some "cool kids" continue their downward spiral or continue to ascend to great things as they shed their earlier un-coolness. It definitely didn't take a study to see this. In my opinion, many "cool kids" find that doors get closed through their riskier behavior or poorer results in school and are no longer able to get by solely on good looks and athletic prowess. While hard work and education open up more opportunities for others, particularly as popularity is taken out of the equation. EDIT: I should note that the king and queen of homecoming were very attractive, but not necessarily "cool kids." It was very refreshing, and perhaps an indication of things to come.

mtdewcmu 12y ago
"Nice guys don't win." -- He sounds like a Jeffrey Skilling type character. The guys that say things like that in high school probably are the ones that go to Wall Street and become white collar criminals.
- shanecleveland 12y ago
  I am sure that is true in some cases. Had he pursued higher education, that may have happened. In this case, he was athletic, good looking and charming; in a word, popular. But he was also very good at being an asshole. I think there was the thought that "if this is working for me now, then it will always work for me." We were friends in that we hung out with the same group of people. I made a point to hang out with this group of people and do the things they did so I could try to be popular. Luckily, I realized at some point that being myself was preferable.

klunger 12y ago

I'm getting tired of this "nerds" vs "cool kids" narrative. It is a false dichotomy. Kids fall all over the map in terms of behavior and social groups as they grow up. Case in point: I was a quiet "nerd" all the way through high school, but really found my element and became a social butterfly in college. Some other people have the opposite trajectory, or zig zag all over the place. Kids are kids. All of them do stupid things at some point, and all of them have potential to grow and change their personalities to a large extent. But, it seems to be popular in various circles these days to set up these labels of "cool" and "nerd" and it leads to pointless tribalism.

shanecleveland 12y ago
You just labeled yourself as a "nerd" in high school and demonstrated that it didn't forever cast you into a life of loneliness and despair. You excelled! Likewise, the cool kids won't be cool forever. That's the point. Who you are in high school doesn't define you.
- matwood 12y ago
  Who you are in high school doesn't define you. But it does for a lot of people. I know people who have the same friends from HS, listen to the same music and generally act the same way. They graduated HS, but never really left the mentality.
  - hyperliner 12y ago
    Maybe not to a lot of people. All you know is that some people were affected. But you are not accounting for all the people who were not affected. Yours is a common bias.
  - hyperliner 12y ago
    Actually, didn't we just see somewhere that your first name affected the possibility of getting an interview? Something along the lines of identical resumes, where names were stereotypical African names vs. stereotypical "American" names, and the latter would get more interviews, in statistically significantly higher numbers.

gatehouse 12y ago

From personal experience the path-of-least-grief is to assume that attractiveness, intelligence, personality, and diligence are all uncorrelated.

hyperliner 12y ago
Very good. However, I also remember that some things do affect the outcome. For example, there are studies that being tall or attractive provides some advantages, or that being short or bald provide some disadvantages in controlled experiments.
- gatehouse 12y ago
  Since people value attractiveness for its own sake I think it makes more sense as outcome itself.

josephschmoe 12y ago

This doesn't address whether psuedomature behavior is the cause of these problems. It could simply be a effect of problematic life circumstances: parental divorce, child abuse, neglect, etc. that are pervasive across economic classes. This is much more likely correlative than causative.

jawns 12y ago

The study that this NPR piece reports about is focused on the outcomes of kids who were, as middle schoolers, pseudomature, which I suppose could be described as having mature interests but not mature behavior. (So, interested in drugs but lacking the ability to regulate themselves, or interested in sex but lacking the ability to engage in healthy relationships.) The study found that pseudomaturity was associated with "short-term success with peers." That stands to reason. You know how kids look up to their older siblings? Well, in a way, pseudomature kids are acting the way older siblings act, and I can see how that might lead to peer approval. But what I think bears mentioning is that in addition to kids who are pseudomature, you have kids who are genuinely mature and kids who are immature. The kids who are genuinely mature are those who (unlike pseudomature kids) have mature behavior, and either have interests that are appropriate for their age or, if they have mature interests, are smart enough to know that they shouldn't act on those interests. The kids who are immature are an interesting bunch. There are some (like I was in middle school) who do not have mature interests, but have mature behavior. There are others who neither have mature interests nor mature behavior. The more you think about maturity as having to do with two spectrums -- one for interests and one for behavior -- the more the results of this study make sense, and the less it makes sense to use the "cool kids vs. nerds" narrative. The results make sense because kids who get into adult situations but aren't able to handle them in grown-up ways are likely to end up in various forms of trouble, and it doesn't surprise me that the effects of that early trouble may persist into adulthood. You can also infer that kids who have mature interests are probably more likely to be exposed to mature themes at home, perhaps because of a troubled home life, which probably influences them as adults as well. The reason the "cool kids vs. nerds" narrative doesn't make sense is because, really, what we're talking about is not popularity influencing outcomes but behavior influencing outcomes. Kids (whether they're cool or not) who aren't good at regulating their behavior in middle school are more likely to be bad at regulating their behavior in adulthood; kids (whether they're cool or not) who are good at regulating their behavior in middle school are more likely to be good at regulating their behavior in adulthood.

shanecleveland 12y ago
But these labels mean something to teenagers, and it doesn't matter if it's society's fault for creating these labels. Kids know who the "popular," "cool" kids are, and they know who the "nerds" are. Likewise, they know where they stand. And it matters to them, and it has an impact on them. The result will vary, of course, and there will always be exceptions. So the study is asking "what happened to the kids who their peers considered 'cool' or a 'nerd'?"

joeyspn 12y ago

Nerd is the new cool...

sillysaurus3 12y ago

Most people lose, whether they're nerds or cool kids. They end up in unhappy jobs or unhappy marriages for the rest of their lives, which is a kind of prison that can be hard to escape.

mtdewcmu 12y ago
True. You can always eschew the nerd/cool argument and choose realism.

interesting_guy 12y ago

Misleading title. Also not surprising you nerds at hn brought it to the front page.

noname123 12y ago

Tangential but for peeps who're in their late 20's and early 30's in tech, do you feel like we have peaked and now are in the decline? When I first got out of school, was feeling like a shiny new penny as most of my other peeps were going for law school or doing their gap year in life sciences or other prep for graduate school. Basically leading life as struggling students. So relatively, I had relative high spending power, living in the city with discretionary income and splurging it on un-necessary latte /gastro-pub/trendy lounges and going to feel-good rock-climbing/hiking trips on weekends (posted on FB obviously) and believing in the mission of the startup/corporation same as mine. Now in my late 20's, I feel like both my programmer peers' buying power and personal power are waning. Financially, most of my friends who're going for medicine and law are now in residency/associate training and will soon over take me in earnings. For my friends in finance/ management/accounting, there is a well-defined path to promotion where I feel like I have capped out and they're gonna start making more and having more power in comapnies. Applying to accelerators and doing hackathons and making business cards for startup's seem awfully empty to me now. In terms of personal agency, my friends who have pursued graduate research are wrapping their degrees and are either going for post-doc's or joining industry as Associate Scientists doing much more self-directed research than the off-the-shelf web CRUD and "Big Data" that I'm doing. My friends who are musicians or artists or film-makers, albeit still poor are pushing out their albums and films in festivals and galleries; not so much critical success but having something they made by themselves and persevered to show for. I just made a bunch of cogs tick in a number of corporations and a few vanity project that I call "startup's." I feel like I followed the cult of PG kinda of like the cool kids in high school have followed the cult of "cheerleaders and football QB" and bought in the hype. When I don't really care about consumer web, whether Angular.js or Macaw or whatever is next is better than Backbone.js, or the next message queue performance metric's or the next startup mantra about "pivoting" and "increasing your luck surface area" so all I was doing was looking for personal validation or trying to get rich without a cause. Oh well, youth is wasted on the young and I hope to learn and from this experience to recoup my loss.

BSousa 12y ago
Not really, but I guess depends on where you live. I'm from Portugal. Programmers here are seen as normal white collar jobs and paid not much more than other white collar jobs, and probably peaking (earning wise) at about the same as them. If you go for a normal company and not a startup, the path to management is usually quite clear as well. Doctors make more (2x-10x depending on experience/specialty) and lawyers is so so. But here it is still probably one of the professions that have less unemployment (and salaries are almost always higher than the average) But in other areas, London, NY, SF, you can probably see programmers being much higher in the pay scale compared to doctors and most lawyers (remember, most don't go to the top firms, only very few). But the advantage you as a programmer have compared to your peers is that it is much easier to supplement your income or find another job.

api 12y ago

Also known as "peaking in high school."

squozzer 12y ago

Moral of today's story - sit down, shut up, and do as you are told by authority figures who are morally and socially superior to you.

pessimizer 12y ago

The definition of "cool" defined as "Pseudomature behavior—ranging from minor delinquency to precocious romantic involvement" seems designed to detect poor kids and kids from dysfunctional and abusive homes. It's only the word 'cool' that's getting this into the media rotation. If the headline was "Poor kids and kids from dysfunctional and abusive homes lose," I'm not sure that anybody would be interested in reading the story. Too bad the public isn't allowed to read the study, so I can't actually see all of their metrics for defining cool other than petty crime and early sexual behavior - things that plenty of clearly not-cool kids get into.

badman_ting 12y ago

Talk about burying the lede - the most important sentence in the whole article is the final one.