I started writing a comment to share my similar story of a blue-collar upbringing, but realised that other than a few chance encounters most of the relevant mentorship I have gotten was as a professional or read in articles/books. The best things I've learned in life through tough lessons - the trick is don't fail too hard.

The important stuff I learned before graduating my bachelors was things like:

1) It's better to be a small fish in the big pond (my career councillor told me this when I was 16, I think I disagreed with it in my first 3 years of uni but now I can totally agree.)

2) You don't owe anyone anything and you aren't tied to anyplace on earth (Mum - grew up moving a lot so when I had an opportunity to attend a more prestigious university my mum gave me a lot of support)

3) Always swap jobs every few years (my uncle worked for the same company for 18 years before being laid off - he has done well but nearly everyone he started working with are execs now)

Most related to your comment is something I was told a few years after university where I was pushing work to fast track my professional development as much as possible. A senior manager told me there is only so much other people can teach you, in the end you need to do the time and build the experience.

Small fish in a big pond? I've heard a completely opposite advice stating that "in a big pond" there's much competition, and dominating a small niche yields better results. What is the rationale behind being a small fish in a big pond?

It's happened twice in my career.

Once choosing to do more difficult courses at a more prestigious university. I don't think this was great on my well being in the short term (always feel like the idiot in class) but in the long term being associated with the brand has helped A LOT. So it was probably more beneficial to get worse grades at a "better" uni.

Professionally rather than being a gas data scientist in a small city, moving to a more competitive more established field of web analytics/marketing (with many more peers) in a larger city has lead to a much higher salary.

I can't see how either choice could be always correct. A small pond can have great rewards, but also great risk. Like if it dries up totally.

I've been in both ponds, and I can honestly say that the small pond was more interesting and personally satisfying. That was, until the pond did in fact dry up.

The big pond on the other hand, pays a bit more but is much less interesting. The big pond is almost certainly never going to dry up though.

I take away something different from both of you. To me, the question is about whether it's better to be the most impressive person in a shithole town or a nobody in an amazing place. I'm not even sure I know the answer for myself, and it probably varies a lot based on personality.

There are probably a couple ways to interpret the metaphor depending on your context. There's more competition, yes, but there are also more opportunities to grow.

A similar analogy is it's better to be the worst player in the best band than the best player in an awful band. You're going to learn less and learn it more slowly in the latter situation. I think this is more what the author was going for.

> It's better to be a small fish in the big pond

I'd actually recommend that young professionals try a variety of situations as they switch jobs. I learned much different lessons from different situations at different stages of my personal development. Though starting that growth path with a position at a large company isn't a bad idea if it's an option.

My single working mother had no bandwidth to help me with getting into college. Neither of my parents had a dime to give me. Despite both my parents being college educated and emphasizing its importance, they had little practical advice or assistance to give. I knew nothing. I ended up applying to one state university, in-state, commuting long distance, not taking any loan, and working 30 hours a week to afford it. I dropped out after a semester from the unmitigated strain and sleep deprivation. I owe my quite exceptional career to our industry being lax about degrees.

Most advice parents or anyone who went to college before say, the mid 90s or before is fairly useless anyway, unless it's study advice. The job market, costs of college, and many other factors are incredibly different.

Just as an example, I had a friend in your situation but whose parents encouraged him to go to an expensive school and not worry too much what to study. You can probably guess what would've happened if he didn't end up doing his own research instead.

Like anything else, they should be able to teach you to fish. I.e. find out where to get the info you need.

Most middle class parents who aren't first or second generation immigrants won't even know the answer to this. To them, the answer is "high school counselor" or another similarly uninformed high school individual. Maybe millennial parents will be the first to recommend internet forums or similar.

Again, for them, it was a very different world.

Industries use degrees as a comparison level when there is nothing else to compare. Through luck and skill you may have ended up in an incomparable position, but many white collars in the industry end up better off and more respected just on the merit of having a doctorate in a field.

For me it was the reverse. Parents that grew up poor and saw college as the way out but didn’t understand dynamics beyond that, so it was, “Go to the best (most expensive) college you can, study anything at all, and you’ve got it made” which is either OK advice or terrible advice depending on what college that is and what you happen to study.

I got similar advice from my parents and followed it, somewhat bitterly. My dad regrets dropping out of college, but he also paid $400/semester for tuition, not $20,000 like I did. I feel like "any degree == $$$" was much more true in the 70s and 80s than it was when I graduated.

A much smaller fraction of the population earned a college degree 30-40 years ago so it was more of a differentiator.

It's still pretty clear that a (4 year) degree changes access to jobs, I guess it's less clear that it will matter for a given person.

A 4-year still matters a lot. The issue is that a 4-year from a state school has almost as much value as a 4-year from an Ivy League. A prestigious university on your resume will open a few extra doors, but in most disciplines it’s just not worth the extra cost. The University of Washington is $5.5k/semester (resident tuition). If you’re spending 20k/semester, you better be getting a degree from somewhere very prestigious and you better have a plan to leverage the network you build there. Otherwise you’re just wasting ~90k on your 4-year degree.

And of course the less in demand your degree is, the more the math favors cheaper schools.

For people where the $15K difference matters a great deal, the tuition at the elite school is increasingly likely to be greatly reduced or free.

Such policy is even trickling down to public schools with big endowments:

https://goblueguarantee.umich.edu/

The place where people get killed is when they go to a private school that is expensive and not particularly an academic standout (of course there's many more mediocre private schools than elite private schools).

> For people where the $15K difference matters a great deal, the tuition at the elite school is increasingly likely to be greatly reduced or free.

This isn’t entirely true. Tuition aid for most students is based on the parents’ income. My parents are (and were when I went to school) upper middle class on paper. They have never been great with money, though, so they couldn’t cover tuition out of picket and hadn’t set aside funding in advance. They definitely helped with living costs but tuition was covered by loans (and scholarships partially). So I left with loans to cover virtually all of my tuition.

If your parents are middle class and can’t cover your tuition, you’re probably in a similar situation. Combined with a low-demand degree, this could easily result in crippling debt.

> The place where people get killed is when they go to a private school that is expensive and not particularly an academic standout

My sister did this. A couple of years at a private religious school before she transferred to a public school. The student loans from those couple of years are absurd and dwarf the rest of her loans. She’s still paying them off a decade later.

Exactly the same experience here -- my mother got a bachelor's right before my brothers and I went to college, which just ended up penalizing us because it looked like we should have a lot more savings than we really had. I think there's a very very small portion of the population who gets their tuition reduced enough to be comfortable. Loans end up covering the rest, so yeah, your average student really does pay close to $20k a semester at most schools if you account for room & board + tuition.

The real issue is that we want "means testing" for tuition but almost no students have significant "means". So you either make (at least public) universities free, or you make the rather strange assumption that a bunch of adults will be handed tens of thousands of dollars from their parents. In pretty much no other case do determine social program eligibility of an adult by means testing different adults.

This is a new thing (not the means testing but the idea behind it) AFAICT.

It was just assumed that if your parents were above the "means" they would help out any way they could because that's what was expected of them as parents.

College was also seen as an enabler and not an expectation for my generation.

Or...if your parents spent all the college fund sending your sister to UCLA you could join the army and emerge as an "adult" so your parents' income wasn't taken into account and get grants and loans on top of the G.I. Bill.

Of course when college was a stretch but not median-income-barely-covers-tuition expensive, the assumption that parents would cover it were more reasonable. And it was less of an issue if they didn’t since the debt load wasn’t insane.

True enough...

I don't think my parents could've afforded to send my sister to Stanford back then which is roughly the equivalent to your average state school today (completely guessing here). They probably would've found a way though.

My point still stands though, means testing was intended to get the best and brightest into college even if they're poor, couldn't even imagine Reagan/Bush entertaining the idea of giving middle-class kids a free ride -- in fact I can even picture Reagan on the TV saying "Uncle Sam ain't your baby daddy!"

Or we could do loans with repayment based on post-education income. There are various ways of doing that, of course, with their own sets of problems.

Note that the UK does exactly this, last I checked.

> Or we could do loans with repayment based on post-education income

The US already does this for federal loans, though it's not the default option, and the servicer (Navient) has been accused of actively steering borrowers away from the option, because it hurts the value of the loan-backed securities that Navient sells.

Ah, I did not know this had started happening. Thank you for the pointer!

When I started looking for answers on what to do, even when I found good ones, it wasn't always easy to do what they said. And I know I failed at this a few times. Just having the right advice isn't always enough, you need to be able to do something with it, often times that's what parents help with too.

Edit: my advice to my kids, get and stay educated (don't care how, college is one way), work hard and treat people decently. Don't need much more than that to succeed.

Edit: Dave Chappelle said in an interview that his dad warned him not to go to hollywood, "you might not make it." Dave said "..that depends on what making it is, dad." And summed up by saying that if he could "make a teachers salary as a comedian", he's made it. That's just awesome.

Worth watching this bit here: https://youtu.be/SyZsxCyoARM?t=1268

NOTE: He convinces his dad to support him going into comedy. It's brilliant. "I was the first person in the family 'not' to go to college, that had not been a slave." - Dave Chappelle

> Searching for relevant mentorship is a very very hard problem.

I completely agree. As someone just reaching a bit over 3 years out of a bachelor's program, I had no one that I could talk to for a solid 20 years of my life about computers, let alone what I wanted to do. Like a bunch of people here, computers were my "thing" but no one around me seemed to take much interest in them. When it came time to go through the college hunt in high school, my mother had no idea what to tell me since although she had a background in math, she worked as a lab tech, social worker, and teacher. I ended up railroaded onto a liberal arts education until I reached my community college, where I encountered people - not just professors - who knew that the magic hardware box could do other things besides send and receive email. I didn't even know it was POSSIBLE to get a degree in computer science until community college, and later interacting with people I met from video game communities. I still couldn't actually get my bachelor's in computer science for financial reasons (have a LibArts BA), and even with knowing about CS as a path, I didn't have anyone who could help me or even just talk to about what to do. Professors at my university didn't know what to do with me, and the university career center tried to shove me into roles like inner-city teacher, advertising, and camp counselor.

It wasn't until two years ago that I became good friends with someone who had been through a lot from his college to several jobs in industry, and he helped me get on track to doing something I wanted to do. Went from a dead-end job doing forced cowboy coding and data entry at a small insurance company to QA automation at a nice software company that works in the transport industry. Even now, I wouldn't really consider him my mentor because I know he's got a lot more work responsibility than I do and I don't like asking him questions that remind him of work, especially since he's my friend first. I firmly believe that if I had someone LIKE my friend as an actual mentor earlier in my life, I'd have been studying things I liked doing way earlier.

EDIT: Something that occured to me after I hit submit is that I still feel that I don't have an actual mentor, yet many articles/blogs and people I've spoken to insist that it's easy and almost natural to find and have one, be it at the workplace or somewhere else; any articles I've read or listened to (example of the latter being the Hello World Podcast) about people who have done it without mentors were people who grew up with computers/programming texts in the home. I'm still not sure if this is a reality or something that happens to maybe 5% of the programmer population.

> I ended up railroaded onto a liberal arts education until I reached my community college, where I encountered people - not just professors - who knew that the magic hardware box could do other things besides send and receive email.

True story: When I was in college, a girl came to me with a question: If she put Borland C++ on her laptop, could she compile programs on it just as easily as on her desktop? I replied that I don't see why not.

Then she asked: "But isn't there a chip in my desktop that does the compiling? Does my laptop have one, too?"

This was a CS major. And an A student. At a technical university.

I feel your pain, man.

And yes, for undergrad education, community or even state college may be more suitable to your interests. A hard-learned lesson for me. The goal of Ivy League undergrad, it seems, is to mold you into a "certain kind of man". "Harvard men", for instance, look and behave a certain way, and know and say the right things. So that when the Harvard men at the helm of power see you, they recognize you as "one of their own" and "good people".

Some of us already have some idea what sort of person we are, and don't want to become anything else. The good news is, we can get all the education we need for pretty cheap, even in the USA. The bad news is, Google is looking for "Stanford men"...

(I should have replied, "Yes, it's called the CPU. And yes, every computer has one.")

I was helping a math undergrad (senior, graduating with honors) from a top 50 university study for the actuarial exam. They were stuck on a question that amounted to "what's the volume of this circular cylinder?"

As I walked them through that, it dawned on me that the problem wasn't recalling or applying the formula, but that they had no idea what x = cos theta, y = sin theta, theta ranges 0 to 2*pi, z ranges 0 to 2 would graph. No idea and no idea how to even begin...

err this is level 2 technician stuff

I agree. I also think that knowing cosine and sine are unit circle X and Y coordinates is at a similar level for university math majors.

Maybe it wasn't clear I meant this is L2 plane mechanics tech i.e. year 2 of a 3 year to BTEC in no way a university level maths

Same here, only the opposite way. Anyone in my family have had degrees for at least 3 generations (majority had 2 degrees in different fields, and some pursued academic careers as well). Dropping out of university to do what I love is still something I feel guilty about - even 10 years later, being pretty much successful in the field I chose, I still feel like I'm a failure just because I don't have this damn piece of paper.

You can always get the paper later -- they are for sale. The main issue is just deciding to spend the time they demand.

Go to school when you feel you need something they can teach you, and not before.

I would gladly invest time into some graduate course, but they require undegrad degree - and getting an undergrad CS degree after programming my whole life, studying a lot of theory and making personal hobby projects in almost every field (from OS to db to compilers to 3d renderers to ML) seems like a total waste.

My advice to my kids "Find a career in something you enjoy. If you love it, it is not work".

What did they do instead? Both went into CS!

That depends on your parents class if your a bright working class kid whose parents didn't go to uni you don't get told the unspoken rules.

You also don't have access to the behind the scenes influence eg being a legacy at Harvard or similar, I was surprised to hear my mum saying I we had stayed in Brummagem they would have used my grandfathers influence to try and get me into King Edwards.