As a YC backed college drop-out, I think there is enormous character development value in a college education. It is a great segue into real/high-value commercial endeavors. It teaches you so much more than "something practical". It's not about the formal pedagogy per-se, but the community and learning to navigate it.
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> I think there is enormous character development value in a college education. It is a great segue into real/high-value commercial endeavors.
It's a great segue into real/high-value commercial endeavors if you're lucky. For others not so fortunate, they graduate into a Starbucks barista role.
Was there some shame in being a barista?
I'm just a lowly keymasher, but I have a college classmate who is a US Senator. Do I envy him? Why, no; no, I do not.
> Was there some shame in being a barista?
Does this job have compensation/benefits equal to being a lowly keymasher?
Well, no.
But that is a different question than the one of shame.
Barista itself is probably not a full career path, but there is nothing wrong with it as a waypoint.
Well, using Barista as a proxy for any job that a keymasher might regard as "nothing wrong with it as a waypoint", I guess a person might feel shame after long periods of time trying to get out of that waypoint, and not being able to because they're losing ground to recent graduates and the regular churn of the market looking for people with "more experience".
So yeah, I can see how someone would feel shame in that even if they didn't publicly admit it. An interesting question for you from here is, what do you think about the people who are in "nothing wrong with it as a waypoint" jobs?
The job is but one dimension of life, and it's really not my task to judge anyone based solely upon their waypoint of the moment.
What else are they doing? Do they have goals? Are they socially connected and building up those around them?
You might see someone, for example, busking on the corner and jump to a wildly erroneous conclusion about them... https://x.com/bluezharp/status/1822666701814608086
> The job is but one dimension of life, and it's really not my task to judge anyone based solely upon their waypoint of the moment.
You're not engaging with the real and acute problem of, 1) keypusher gets to look at barista and say "oof, no medical insurance, no investments, living paycheck to paycheck" must be their waypoint, hopefully at 10 years deep into that barista career they get their break as a senior ruby engineer, good thing they were "just at a waypoint"
2). > What else are they doing? Do they have goals? Are they socially connected and building up those around them?
Are they healthy? Have they been able to maintain the same level of fitness as someone who works 4 hours a week writing internal tooling vs dodging traffic and dealing with an equally financially unstable manager screwing their ability to pay rent the next week?
Really smitty