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Re:The Amazon worker: paid £18,000 a year to shift 250 items... by fogzen on Saturday January 20, 2018 @01:16PM (#16194530)
Sure, he could have it worse in that he could be like many others in his position but without parental support. How would he be able to work 50 hours a week and physically go to school 50 hours a week? Amazon controls his hours not him. School controls course hours not him. School also doesn't necessarily lead to a better job. It also costs money. If he wasn't living at home it would cost at least the same amount he's making from Amazon.

What do you do for a living, may I ask? Do you have a college education in your field of work? Who paid for it? Who paid your rent, food, and other expenses while you attended school?

Re:The Amazon worker: paid £18,000 a year to shift 250 items... by jsjohnst on Saturday January 20, 2018 @01:34PM (#16194645)
> School also doesn't necessarily lead to a better job.

Right, because a degree is worthless if you didn’t learn something applicable to the job you want afterwards. To many kids these days go to college, party and have fun, get a b/s degree, then wonder why they are basically screwed afterward and in a mountain of debt. Not everyone should go to college, trade schools have a bad stigma when really they are the right avenue for many young people.

> Do you have a college education in your field of work?

Yes

> Who paid for it?

Me, and without loans too. Admittedly I went in the mid 90s when prices were more realistic, but I also chose to go to a not big name state school and I worked my ass off in a job while in school to pay for it.

> Who paid your rent, food, and other expenses while you attended school?

Me, myself, and I. It wasn’t easy, but I also was raised with a strong work ethic and realized if I wanted to advance I had to do more than others, not just be average.

While GP’s tone was a bit confrontational, I feel yours is just as toxic. Putting in 50 hours in classes on top of 50 hours work is unrealistic for most, but 15-20hrs isn’t. Yes, it’ll take longer to advance, but it’s still doable. Many of the points GP made re: how young male generations were raised are sadly very on point and you should try to have an open mind and not just snap back.

Re:The Amazon worker: paid £18,000 a year to shift 250 items... by linkmotif on Saturday January 20, 2018 @03:27PM (#16195234)
> Admittedly I went in the mid 90s when prices were more realistic

They were nonesense then too.

Re:The Amazon worker: paid £18,000 a year to shift 250 items... by UncleEntity on Saturday January 20, 2018 @03:48PM (#16195344)
$6 a credit with a $60 cap to do almost all my lower-division coursework before I went off to university isn't all that bad if you ask me.

Yep, the '90s were "gangsta" as the kids say...

Re:The Amazon worker: paid £18,000 a year to shift 250 items... by zaroth on Saturday January 20, 2018 @03:03PM (#16195136)
I worked full time, while living in an apartment (which I shared with 2 other people) since I was 18. From 19-25 I took classes, about half of them online and the other half on campus — since at the time it wasn’t possible to earn a true Bachelors degree fully online.

My company paid for a portion of my tuition, the rest I paid myself as I went. A semester of courses cost, by my recollection, about $10k. But that would be regardless of if you took 3, 4, or 5 classes. So naturally I went to the Dean and got special permission to take 6 classes per semester. Combined with transferring half my credits from dirt cheap online classes I graduated after only paying for 4 semesters, about $50k total, $20k of which was expensed on the corporate card, all spread over 5-6 years.

My job at the time was technically an “internship” at Cisco Systems, paid $14/hour. I would typically log about 80 a week though, and it was all time-and-a-half after 40 and double-time after 60 hours a week, so effective pay was higher.

My GPA was shit, but it didn’t matter. No one has ever asked, and I got the degree. The amount of learning from being in the labs at Cisco working with core routers and coding IOS dwarfed anything I learned at college anyway.

Everyone told me I needed the diploma. But since then I’ve never had to so much as write a resume, after that first fluff piece I wrote to get into Cisco. In my case the degree was a massive waste of time and money, but so it goes.

Obviously I was massively lucky and privlidged to get into Cisco at 18, but staying there full time for several years and having them pay part of my tuition was because I worked my ass off for that $14/hr and was one of the most productive members of my team. By the time I left they had all but shut down the internship program and HR was afraid I was going to sue them for misclassifying me, but I was very happy to have had the opportunity.