Naw. Adult life is so much easier with regards to competitive pressure compared to getting into a good college. The real world is Pass/Fail, much to the chagrin of plenty of HNers.
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> Adult life is so much easier with regards to competitive pressure compared to getting into a good college
You’re competing apples and oranges. Getting into a top college is similar to grinding to get into Big Tech jobs and then climb the ladder there.
Good colleges are easy. The top few colleges are very hard.
> The real world is Pass/Fail, much to the chagrin of plenty of HNers.
If by “fail” you mean lose your job in the next round of layoffs and have your career derailed, possibly.
You’re still comparing apples and oranges. The people who compete for top college spots usually continue competing for promotions and better paying jobs. The people who coast through high school look for jobs where they can coast and then get comfortable with whatever salary that provides them.
> Good colleges are easy. The top few colleges are very hard
Define "good" and "top".
Ivies, Ivy Tier privates (Stanford, MIT, Duke, Northwestern, Chicago, NYU, Caltech, Georgetown, CMU), and Ivy Tier public schools (Cal, UCLA, UCSD, Mich, UIUC, UW, UT, GT, Purdue, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA) all recruit from the same student body. Thanks to the Common App, UC App, Coalition App, and ApplyTexas it's marginal effort to apply to all the colleges above in addition to the "good" tier.
The Good tier of publics (the rest of the UCs, the rest of the Big 10, UTD, SJSU, CalPoly, NCSU, William&Mary, VT, Rutgers) and privates (Claremont Colleges, Seven Sisters, Vandy, etc) end up with plenty of kids who couldn't mkae it to the top which also makes them more competitive.
Outcomes at Good and Top are the same for most cases, but both are similarly competitive. The kind of profile that gets you into CS@UCR today would have gotten you into EECS@Berkeley a decade ago.
And we shouldn't expect adult/parent level of work out a 16/17 year-old. There's no time left any more to be a kid.
> There's no time left any more to be a kid.
I have several hobbies that are popular with kids (mountain biking, rock climbing, and some others).
I can assure you that there are plenty of kids with more time than I have to dedicate to these hobbies at every popular spot I go to. Many of them are ambitious, smart, and working toward top universities, too. It’s actually fun energy to be around.
The parent comment about students getting up at 6:30AM and working 15 hour days is highly unusual.
Your comment specifically compared it to the normal adult, my point is the normal adult who is a parent is very likely doing even more than your example of your kid. Even for adults who aren't in the elite high earner category, heck people who make less money are likely working even more hours per day just to make ends meet.
As adult with job and kids, I honestly don't work as much as a kid described in that comment. It is in fact way less competitive. I get a good pay, my job is reasonably interesting (ai can make it sux and probably will, but we are not there yet). There are parts that sux or where I am under pressure, but overall, it is better to be an adult then to be teenager trying to get to competitive school.
And for the record, I had to work less to get to good school back then.
How, exactly, are they working more? How many low-paying jobs offer overtime, if they are full time at all? Any clue how many jobs won't let you work a part-time job or won't work around another job? Can't exactly work for Uber if you can't afford a decent enough car. And this is assuming you have older children that don't need childcare.
The fact is that they aren't working extra, not for a job anyway. The extra work comes in the time making dried beans instead of buying canned, in repairing stuff poorly, in shopping around for a doctor that takes the state health insurance or an affordable option if you have none at all, in taking busses (if they are available), and other unpaid things. Your child will be lucky to afford the activities that gets them a 'good' education, especially if they have to work.
> not for a job anyway
That is exactly OP's point: for OP, if a child's "working hours" includes university prep and resume-padding sports activities, then an adult's "working hours" includes housework, grocery shopping, dealing with insurance and taxes, and commute/family chauffeur time.
16 year olds aren’t kids. My dad was in boarding school
in bangladesh at that age working 16 hour days (which is why I don’t have to live there).
Things change, thankfully.
Why should we change the practice of putting people to work to build civilization when they’re at their physical and energetic peak? In his early 20s my dad helped overthrow the Pakistani government, and by his late 20s and early 30s he was helping tackle the astronomical infant and maternal mortality in the country. Why shouldn’t our young people in America work?
Absolutely. I think some degree of competitive attitude should be developed, but admissions since the late 2000s have become hyper-competitive.
Pressure makes diamonds, but it also crushes everything else.
"It takes a ton of pressure to make a diamond". I read that in a game when I was a kid and took it as a guiding principle in my life.
Overcoming hard times absolutely made me a better person, but as I've grown I've seen many examples of the fallout you're referring to. Sometimes people just break.
Only if you make it so. Good college/university means little in many jobs. The best devs for example (and most paid correspondingly since they knew their value very well) I've ever met were either coming out of subpar schools or skipped university altogether.
I myself went through mediocre noname university in eastern Europe with OK grades and it didn't matter at all, now I get perm salary thats better than 99% of devs in whole Europe while doing just that and nothing more, while sporting 10 weeks of paid vacation yearly. Quality of life further down the line, success and happiness are extremely non-correlated with all this academic stuff.
Its just control freak helicopter parents, which, albeit with good underlying intentions, fuck up everything they touch, including mental health of their kids. So kids compete just to endlessly compete while winning less than nothing. This is how deep regrets later in life are made.
Sometimes I wonder where all these HNers work. The majority of "slightly below top companies" seem to consist of mediocre workers, which is fine. Employees are just doing their job and if they fuck up, even badly, it's not too difficult for them to get a new job. Meanwhile a student getting a few subpar grades, often for reasons beyond their control, should somehow be punished forever.
I don't get all this existential talk about college acceptance. Yes, elite schools should expect elite applicants.
Meanwhile, the state school down the road is a fraction the cost, teaches a lot of the same content, and will accept anyone with a pulse. In my state, at least. State universities are somewhat competitive to get into, but state colleges... wide open.
All of which is very real-world. Certain top firms recruit only top candidates. Everyone else works somewhere further along the spectrum.
> I don't get all this existential talk about college acceptance. Yes, elite schools should expect elite applicants.
As a non-US person who's worked for a bunch of US companies, my belief is that the Ivy League et al act as a class system, rather than a symbol of educational attainment.
I strongly disagree. I knew a number of people who were accepted into those elite schools (two at MIT, two at Harvard, one at Brown). All but one of them were lower-to-lower middle class and only able to attend due to the grants given by the school itself. The thing they all had in common was they were incredibly intelligent and hard working. The elitism definitely exists, but it's not the way you describe in my experience
I’ve known a lot of Ivy League graduates and they were all very smart. Most of them were very good people, too. A lot of them came from backgrounds that didn’t include wealth or social connections.
This goes against the stereotypes you read online, but many of them are motivated by a desire to sneer and cut down others’ achievements. Look up “tall poppy syndrome” for one phrase describing this phenomenon.
> I’ve known a lot of Ivy League graduates and they were all very smart. Most of them were very good people, too. A lot of them came from backgrounds that didn’t include wealth or social connections.
Again, the fact that entry to the class system can be meritocratic is entirely disconnected from the fact of it operating as a class system.
When I worked at Big tech I remember recruiters (US-based) talking about hiring from approved schools, which were mostly Ivy League.
Additionally, when we were hiring a candidate in Europe, our director wanted to know what school she had gone to. Fortunately, she was an Oxbridge graduate so all was well.
Again, even if all Ivy League graduates were in the top 1% of objective merit, the use of this credential in hiring/firing/other decisions is what makes it a class system.
I have worked with many Ivy League graduates and they were all super smart and mostly effective, but that doesn't change my point.
I was responding to this part of your post:
> rather than a symbol of educational attainment.
Your original argument appeared to imply that it was a system designed to separate people by class, not by merit or educational attainment.
In my experience the people who are that selective about university pedigree are either doing it out of laziness (outsourcing selection process to the university filtering mechanism) or they have a degree from that system and believe that hiring people from it will automatically grant them more allies, thereby improving their own power.
> Your original argument appeared to imply that it was a system designed to separate people by class, not by merit or educational attainment.
I guess my core point is that those people you note (and I've met loads of them too) would have been equally smart and educated if they'd gone to a less prestigious university, but conditional on their ability, they'll do better at getting higher status jobs because they went to an Ivy League.
> In my experience the people who are that selective about university pedigree are either doing it out of laziness (outsourcing selection process to the university filtering mechanism)
This was a HR level policy at a really fast growing tech company (Facebook, back in 2013). I remember it because I was so shocked that this was a thing (not being an Ivy League graduate myself).
>Employees are just doing their job and if they fuck up, even badly, it's not too difficult for them to get a new job.
This might be news to many people. Or do you mean it’s not too difficult to get a new job at Walmart?
If they had experience at good companies I think the odds are better than the student getting into a good university after fucking up some classes.
Building crud, bagging crud, greeting crud. All the same.
HN is centered around venture capital, which in college terms is the subtopic of branch Finance under Business Administration. SJSU, a top business school half an hour south of YC Palo Alto, has an intensely competitive Investment program that admits very few applicants for which students directly manage an investment fund; meanwhile, their Accounting under B.A. program is admitting anyone with a GPA of 2.2 or higher. That duality can be deeply confusing to people on the glamorous side of the fence: why would SJSU cheapen itself by admitting literally everyone it possibly can into Accounting by, when being highly selective results in such a high quality Investment program? That confusion fades rapidly when considered from the other direction: Investment is where the glory is, for those who seek that, and for the rest of us, there’s Accounting and Finance.
While HN, VCs, SJSU, and Tech are obviously not composed of the same population or applying the same restrictions, it’s certainly reasonable to highlight one similarity: the potential glory of one’s role at work directly impacts how competitive it is. That we’re currently in a nightmarish layoff cycle due to the ZIRP bubble popping and due to businesses replacing costly (and glorious) creative roles with more economical PREs (prompt reliability engineers) is amplifying this effect more strongly in Tech than in other industries, because Tech — just like the Investing industry that’s underpinned it for so long — has been saturated with glory and competitiveness.
I spent my career in tech working in the roles that do not offer glory — IT, rather than Product; Cost Centers, rather than Profit Centers — but even within IT, there were a couple of roles that had more glory and were much more competitive in their selection and evaluation criteria than others. At my final IT job, we were less strict about credentials and competitiveness with directors and vice presidents than we were about the high-glory role of enterprise architect. So while I do empathize with HN’s bias, having myself once pursued glory in tech, such competitiveness is abnormal in most jobs in most fields.
All of the AI companies are what I would consider top companies and all of them have had consistent outages because of bugs. OpenAI resets Codex limits almost weekly because of a major outage. Top companies have plenty of average employees.