Our laws and bureaucracies haven’t caught up to life from 50 years ago, and that is something young people today have to deal with too. There are a lot of incongruities in programs offered. One example is Federal Work Study. In college I qualified, it was a benefit, and my attitude was to not leave anything on the table. In reality the money I made was not enough to make a difference and the time I spent working could have been spent taking another class. If I didn’t do work study I could have graduated a semester sooner and that would have been much more valuable financially. The only reason to work in college would be at a job that is directly related to your field.

And of course the adults don’t get it. Every once in a while you’ll hear about a congress person or a business leader say that college students aren’t pulling their own weight in society. The friends of your parents will ask you how you like going to college parties. Reality is you have a deep backlog of work from 6 classes, which are related but have very different concepts and you need to master them all in four months.

Unfortunately, if you live somewhere where this is the culture, it's very difficult to opt-out. Parents don't have full control, because students absorb expectations from their peers and their peers' parents as well. Everyone agrees that the situation is out of control, but no one can "unilaterally disarm".

The personal cost was immense, but I'm glad I did. I got to do fun and high-impact work at a fast-rising startup while my title and TC leapt up by $50-$100k each year. I got to meet friends from all over the world, travel, hike, run outdoors year-round, never shovel snow again, walk to everything I need from my high-rise apartment.

At home I'd be lucky to have made Help Desk Technician II for $17/hour, lucky to have a car that starts, lucky to know a single personal socially who had ever voluntarily read a book. Most of my classmates who stayed aren't working at all. The only ones really thriving had guaranteed slots at family businesses.

It's not a poor place. Everyone's parents made a decent living. But the firms at which they did so were in either stasis or decline, not desperate to hire 22-year-olds.

The delayed gratification story is very much real.

However, it ignores a few things. There is always an advantage to being ahead, even at state schools.

Come in with more AP credits or college credit plus? - Get priority scheduling over your peers

Get priority scheduling - More likely to be able to graduate in 4 years

Come in with more credits, take less gen ed requirements and get into a major earlier - Build relationships with faculty in your major sooner, more opportunities come your way, internships, etc.

It's compounding, but instead of for interest in your bank account, it's your life.

On the other hand, in my past life I was a lawyer. I worked my ass off in high school to get into a top journalism school, worked hard in college and studied my ass off for the LSAT to get into a top-20 law school, and that STILL wasn't enough for me to get anywhere close to a high powered legal job.

The worlds are very much different. I obviously prefer the more merit-based environment that's still found in tech, where "can you do the job" still trumps most things. But things are much much different in other environments.

Probably inevitable given devs are making "real money" (biglaw or higher) in Silicon Valley, and having real influence, but still, I agree something may have been lost.

Going to a upper tier college for grad school showed me that only the percentage changes, going from maybe ~50% to ~75%

I think you'd be surprised how many 8th graders across the country are already stressing about SAT/ACT scores in places like southeast Ohio or Branson, MO.

I just pulled Branson out of a hat and here's their recommendations for ACT/SAT testingv[0]. I've seen a lot of schools across the U.S. This schedule matches up with offical recs, but it's half the story.

Goodhart's Law is in effect here. Those who are ahead will try to cement their leads. So official recs are ACT/SAT round 1 junior year. Those at the head of the pack find ways to test as early as middle school. These students know the game and feel the pressure, even when their families aren't pushing that hard.

This culture is institutionalized in places well beyond the coasts and major metros.

[0] https://www.branson.k12.mo.us/Page/3011

Not trying to start a generational food fight but realistically the world has changed since the boomers grew up. The US is facing major great power rivalry from China, we're much more internationalized (I read in the economist that only ~5% of US citizens had passports around 1990), and probably something almost nobody is talking about, the financial condition of the country is vastly different today -- our national debt just passed 100% of GDP, our state and local governments are financially stretched, GDP growth has slowed down, and environmental causes are consuming more attention, and money.

It'a almost unfathomable how much debt the US piled up at every level, from households to state and local to federal, over the past 50 years. It's a double-whammy: they weren't properly funding pensions/infrastructure/etc then, and now we have to both keep these things in good repair, AND make up for all the debt that's been accumulated (both financial and otherwise) by them not doing it over last generation.

The decline of manufacturing EMPLOYMENT (not value created) is also a big part of this. There used to be this demand for high school graduates where you could just walk into a place and get a job. Nowadays, that's a lot harder to do. Just look at how many hours of work is required to afford the basic necessities of life (food, healthcare, shelter), it's gone up a lot. Not going to pontificate on why that is, but I think it's worth acknowledging as being true.

Kind of hard to see how things wouldn't be more stressed, and stressful, today than 40-50 years ago.

I read a paper that said value created down everywhere except computer equipment. And even then that's probably an accounting fiction. The US is employing less people in manufacturing and we're making less stuff across the board.

The US makes me think of a description by a GI of a German Army surrendering at the end of WWII. First there was the top echelons, generals, their staff. Along with their wives and mistresses. Followed by the troops and equipment assigned to protect HQ. All in a state of perfect order. Followed by a rump army of totally broken men. And then nothing.

If you occupy the right position in US society you can believe everything is fine. If your a smart kid from a formerly working class family in Ohio, you know by the age of 12 that you need to escape.

But that's... common sense for ambitious people to dream then (at least attempt to) "escape" to a greener pasture. That's how things rolled since the dawn of humanity. What's really different here/now?

I agree with the rest of your comment so I don't want to generally detract, but I think the qualification of major coastal metro areas includes a lot of places where your comment doesn't apply and excludes a lot of others (e.g. the upper Midwest).

I think there are aspects where major coastal metros are outliers, but grade school and public university quality isn't one of them.

I’d also note that I think “school/university quality” != “a high pressure environment”. There are plenty of places that have one but not the other. In particular, there are lots of places where high schools are providing excellent education and public university options are good, but students don’t feel like they are in a pressure cooker.

It was like what I was qualified for was better, Ivy League was a pipe dream and unnecessary, and everything else was a joke.

Around my sophomore year, I was interning in a Federal Work Study program, pushing pencils right next to someone studying a Princeton. When I realized this fate was still intertwined, I immediately transferred to a cheaper school with a less coveted reputation, and also took summer and winter community college courses to get a few extra credits to just get out of there faster and cheaper.

My current thoughts are that Ivy League is a world of its own (along with a few others like Stanford), and then everything else. Nobody cares about how good your state school is at Journalism/Business/Finance/Econ/Computer Science, at that level you either have the degree or not. At Ivy League, the network and opportunities are totally different, and the association is more important since you just go there to drop out anyway and say you went. The faster you drop out the cooler.

All I can say is that the cards I had available to play became very clear.

Big tech companies are sweat shops, offering just enough pay to have the TOP end of an upper-middle class lifestyle (after sufficient robbery by the tax man, since you're not quite rich enough for any of the Trump-esque tax loopholes to apply), in exchange for the expected 60-80 hour weeks. You still have to work for a living, and you're competing in Stack Ranking with the majority of employees who are visa workers (hiring visa workers is a PLUS for these companies) that will happily sacrifice their family life and weekends to avoid deportation by being slotted into the "bottom 10%" during the bi-annual performance review (which means you get fired). Sure, it's a local optimum for a lot of people (work insanely hard and sacrifice your health to drive a Porsche/Tesla and own a house/luxury condo in a top-tier city), but make no mistake, it is a second-tier lifestyle.

On the other hand, people from Harvard and Yale are UPPER class -- not upper-MIDDLE class. This means they have last names like Bush or Clinton, get ushered into upper management or C-level at their father's companies, go "work" for cushy jobs at rentseekers like PE/VC/real estate with corporate credit cards, run for office, repeatedly start failed companies, or go indefinitely "exploring" or "finding the next thing to do" (courtesy of their trust fund).

Meanwhile, the vast majority of my graduating class is slaving away as entry-level rat racers at FANG, investment banks, legal, Big 4, medical residencies, etc.

Jeez - that is awful. Since you're anonymous, will you say which FANG this was? I don't always hear great things about FANGs but sacking the bottom 10% of employees every 6 months does raise some eyebrows.

What's the situation like in smaller companies?

And in what way exactly is Amazon different?

Second, I know several people from a generation born it the 50s and 60s whose parents either directly forbade them going to the university (rural France, woman's place it at home) or had to put up with conditions unfathomable to most of undergraduates today. The last 2-3 generations are historically unbelievable privileged. But sure, 'It is no party'.

Not sure I'd want to go back to the 1970s, but - yes, it is definitely no party, and "privilege" is a skewed way to look at it.

I think the documentation of a persons entire life from birth has removed the opportunity for kids to make mistakes and learn while they are young. It's unfortunate because I did a lot of dumb things as a kid, and while none of it was too serious, I was able to learn lessons without having it necessarily follow me around the rest of my life. Now they are all just entertaining stories.

But I think you hit the nail on the head mentioning the current "your life is on file, no mistakes allowed" setup. To me, it is critical to let kids try things, including stupid things, and learn from their mistakes without having those mistakes affect every job search 20 years later.

I think the pendulum will eventually swing back, but the generation growing up in the current setup will have to try the same stupidities and learn similar things as adults, at a much higher cost. My 2c.

I was a teen in the late 90s, and was friends with a lot of the druggie/stoner/party crowd. By and large, these people do not have kids, because they can't afford to. A good many of them are dead now, either from overdoses, or drug-related accidents (like crashing their car while going 100 mph while high), or suicide.

The 55 years of American history post-WW2 was a bubble, where people could get away with a number of not-very-adaptive behaviors because the whole country was on top of the world. The last 20 years has rapidly exposed this as a bubble, and the folks who were swimming naked when the tide ran out didn't leave offspring to be part of the next generation.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3449224/

If you look at only populations who were likely to go to college in the first place - say, white (formerly) middle-class two-parent households, which is what the bulk of my high-school friends were, there's a positive correlation between educational attainment and fertility. Simpson's Paradox strikes again...

At least in the Bay Area teens appear to be way more buttoned down and smart than my generation. Don't get me started on the boomer generation. My teachers said my and even more my younger sisters generation were a very welcome relief from those guys.

But no, it's because they're rowdy kids doing 'bad things'.

And then there is the other 2/3 of society, who have been going downhill economically for decades.

Now kids grow up in an environment where much of their lives take place online, where dumb things you've said or done are available somewhere, forever, to be used against you. Is it any surprise kids are the way they are when they are shown that even something they said 10 years ago can be brought back and used against them to destroy their lives?

Is this common? What's the measurement? State testing methods? Seems nebulous.

I absolutely don't think the ranking was meaningful, but it at least says something about how many of my classmates had affluent parents who put a lot of pressure on them to succeed.

People have been true to their schools since at least 1963.

High school (and I'd argue undergrad) for 80% of people is a joke and a waste of time and for me was a time to learn how to network without networking. Always felt kinda funny sitting next to people in my hs,college, and now workplaces who had 'done everything right' their whole life but lo and behold were in the same place doing the same thing for the same pay. But thats probably just me being a douchebag more than anything

That's easy to explain: You don't have to talk about these things anymore, because of IM & co.. It's all still happening, but it's easier to hide it from the "dweebs". I've seen both sides, and it's really surprising how well this unwritten system works. At best you realize a few years or decades later.

The stuff I didn't realize until decades later -- there was lots of dark stuff, but one surprising thing in front of my eyes every day was one teacher had been habitually drunk in class and I never knew.

There's not much going on in high schools, 15 years old kids living at their parents who can't even buy alcohol.

I was doing hard drugs in house parties at 15 and I was one of the older ones. I had a friend who had to have his kidneys replaced by the time he was 16 and knew of 5 girls who had abortions before they were 18.

There is plenty going on in high schools.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/trends/2015_u...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/teenpregnancy/about/index.htm

Saying "it just happens virtually now" doesn't change the results of the studies. We aren't measuring by listening to hallway conversations, we are measuring by directly asking teens "are you sexually active?", in a safe, anonymous environment.

http://recapp.etr.org/recapp/index.cfm?fuseaction=pages.Stat...

> nobody's f*ing or even dating at all.

while your link claims

> In 2015, 41% of high school students reported having sexual intercourse.

Mind giving more details for someone who was last a teen more than a decade ago? :-)

Do you need to do this? No. Is that the perception? In some places.

My friend is a high school principle in Washington state. He tells of fist fights between girls over a “diss” on Snap, girls (minors mind you) using social media to sell themselves (prostitution). I don’t know whether you’d call that more hedonistic or not but these are new twists on old problems.

Likely none of these kids at his school have much chance of getting into a T2 school.

One thing that has not seemed to change: people are entirely focused on doing well at the same game, usually the one where the winners were decided long ago. This is funny/weird because often the idols they seek to emulate rejected the main game of their time, pursued something different and were the successful survivors in a completely new field. We seem to miss this point.

You self-realization and understanding of the crazy aspects of your situation is something that sets you apart from the masses; don't lose this perspective.

Not too long ago, my company sent out teams to interview students from Stanford. Without fail, all of them mentioned some feeling of alienation from their peers due to the ridiculous status games. One foreign student who was relatively poor talked about dorm-mates who would fly first class back to LA or NY for the weekend and boast about it. It was a kind of revolting illustration.

Helping your fellow human beings and living a life of service to them is what is ultimately important. I think this generation may actually be primed to give us a lot of hope in this regard, but I hope that you can listen to it. And if I may be so bold, I believe that many would be well-served by realizing that out there beyond the cosmos above us is something that deeply loves each of us.

Unfalsifiable claims like this one tend to have a bit of baggage like eternal punishment. IMO that's one thing plaguing plenty of teens in rural parts of the US. They need fewer overseeing eyes, not more.

Here's something that is falsifiable and true: the teen suicide rates in the oppressive and orthodox 1950s were much lower than they are in the "liberated" times today. I cannot and will not claim that this can be reduced to belief in a higher power (I would tend to be skeptical of such a just-so argument that fits my worldview without additional data). And in fact, my main point in the GP was not that people should believe in a higher power (though I do think that), but that I hope the younger generation can learn to reject these destructive status games that undeniably cause immense suffering and deprive children of their childhoods.

Furthermore, our culture today routinely indulges in unfalsifiable claims that carry heaps of baggage. What is worse: eternal punishment that you are quite certain is not real, or the very real temporal punishment that can and has ruined lives in response to even inadvertent stumbling through cultural minefields?

> IMO [baggage like eternal punishment is] one thing plaguing plenty of teens in rural parts of the US. They need fewer overseeing eyes, not more.

This may be true as a trend, and insofar as it is, it is lamentable. But it is not nor has it ever been my way. I am here to show love and mercy, to serve and to desire justice; I am not here to pass judgment or hector. And part of that is speaking to what I believe and what I have experienced.

> Here's something that is falsifiable and true: the teen suicide rates in the oppressive and orthodox 1950s were much lower than they are in the "liberated" times today. I cannot and will not claim that this can be reduced to belief in a higher power

You don't need to. Whether or not a result can be attributed to a belief has no bearing on whether the belief itself is true.

They were judged unfairly by a broken, hypocrital and insane system and now they flip the table and judge it back harshly. The failure of the previous generation's systems of morality is literally a meme "Ok boomer" - and it certainly wasn't the first to judge back.

There is still plenty of status shit in various forms going on top which matters to varying degrees subculturally if they give a shit or not but there is still a recognized objective moral "line in the sand" roughly where excuses aren't tolerated. "Everyone was doing it" as an excuse only further indites a complete lack of morals. A standard which evidently terrifies many who were alivr during the judged segment part of the everyone given the jump to embracing moral relativism.

Interesting that you admit that PC culture (or "new morals") is explicitly reactionary.

> The failure of the previous generation's systems of morality is literally a meme "Ok boomer" - and it certainly wasn't the first to judge back.

Also, the existence of a meme is hardly dispositive, unless 4chan and reddit are really our moral overlords (perish the thought).

> There is still plenty of status shit in various forms going on top which matters to varying degrees subculturally if they give a shit or not but there is still a recognized objective moral "line in the sand" roughly where excuses aren't tolerated. "Everyone was doing it" as an excuse only further indites a complete lack of morals. A standard which evidently terrifies many who were alivr during the judged segment part of the everyone given the jump to embracing moral relativism.

This is not quite right. If there really was an objective "line in the sand," then presumably we'd all know what that line in the sand was. The problem, of course, is that there is no objective line in the sand. A couple years ago after the heat of #MeToo had turned up, did the line in the sand say that Sen. Al Franken should go or stay? Were his unwanted advances less or more harmful than losing a reliable progressive in politics? Different people within PC culture came to different conclusions.[1][2] The same thing is happening right now with this slow-rolling story about Joe Biden. The media writers and personalities who have been extremely eager to create a frenzy in this #MeToo era and were very eager to #BelieveAllWomen during previous scandals (with 'R's after the name instead of 'D's) are now very reluctant to even acknowledge that Biden has been accused and that his accuser has indirect contemporaneous evidence of her claims. What's the objective rule that determines who is right or wrong? There is none: the "objective rule" depends on the consensus of those in the culture. The consensus can (and does) change moment to moment. Thus, the "new morals" are no more objective than the ones they're replacing. Rather, they are the exact same as those you claim they are reacting to.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/1... [2] https://www.vox.com/2018/5/21/17352230/al-franken-accusation...

If I may be so bold, could I interest you in hearing the good word of dialectical materialism as interpreted through category-theory according to Robert Harper Thought?

I wouldn't describe this as exibitionist or even pathological; it's not something that kids are simply choosing to do in a vacuum, but something that they've been encouraged to do all their lives. And it's not an unusual situation historically either. Without careful attention, it's easy for the education system to devolve into something like the Imperial Chinese system, where careful memorization of a fixed set of beautiful but useless classical poetry forms would be required to qualify as a provincial administrator in a system in which the social mobility of adults was almost zero.

For all the effort you're making know this: you'll eventually be evaluated by a Gen-X or Millennial hiring manager. We largely don't care where you went to college. We've learned that name recognition means very little. It'll get you a job, but if you're one of those kids who "does nothing" on an extracurricular team, it'll show through on the job. You won't get promoted. We fucking hate micromanaging Ivy League grads who are too scared to take initiative and possibly make mistakes.

Sincerely,

An engineering manager who went to one of the "second-tier" schools you listed.

On the hiring front, undergrad school can sometimes tell you a bit about who a person thought they were in high school, and about their penchant for overachievement. Some schools might help instill different perspectives on engineering and the role of technology. But if you're not hiring right out of school, I'm with you on focusing on demonstrated ability to get things done.

This is actually a really amusing thought. Yeah I could be a manager in 5-10 years hiring current high school kids when they're older. I barely made it through school(failed out at my first shot at engineering) I could realistically be hiring at one of the companies New grads stress out about getting into. I couldn't tell you about ivy league schools without looking it up lol

You don’t seem to be afflicted by the indeterminate side, which is good, but it also means this dissonance is not going away anytime soon: the majority of most of the institutions (read: 75% of <school>) that you’re trying to get in to are equally as determinate and character-forming as the one you find yourself in now.

They won’t challenge you to commit or reward you for vertical growth. Their communities will encourage you to seek out internships that will not challenge you or make you rounded, but are rather designed to “keep your options open”. When postsecondary graduation comes around, they will encourage you to pick a career path that matches those internships. It is very hard to escape those social pressures.

You have a good head on your shoulders and you should feel proud of that. Don’t let others’ anxieties be your own.

And the stuff about sexual intercourse - really? Such a far cry from my own high school years (in the seventies), I can hardly believe it. Sounds more like the stuff I would try to convince my mother, with mixed success.

Otherwise, kudos for such mastery of language at 16.

I was also in one of the first schools that issued laptops to all students. The use of them was similar to how the parent post described smart phones. The honors/ap kids would either type notes or just not use them. The CP kids would be on... whatever the unblocked site of the day was (people figured out pretty early on that google docs/google wave were good ways to chat). The weirdos like me were playing cat and mouse with the tech people hosting proxies, imageboards, and meebo (IM client) repeaters. I'll never forget the day we went to the stupid url we used for it, and it redirected to barney.com. We also had a rather robust sneakernet set up for distributing giant packs of flash games and early versions of minecraft.

I'm surprised to hear you compliment my writing style. I always thought it was subpar - too many clauses, a slew of unnecessary qualifiers and weasel words, no shortage of kludges for things I can't express very well. I tend to be better at it after I've been reading a book for a while and have "effective rhetoric" somewhere in my brain's cache line.

Your comment had me on the edge of my seat, like a report from the trenches.

I'm sure you're sick of hearing it, but your generation does give me optimism for the future. I believe you'll have to do more with less than your predecessors, and for my own failures in mitigating that you have my apologies. But you do make it plausible that we might just muddle through the upcoming troubles.

I am the same when I speak Norwegian: When I get a compliment, I feel as he does.

Maybe that's unfair, but in the context of the author's prior description of being involved in trying to achieve, or join, or do things to stand out, the interpretation I gave feels more plausible.

It seems much more polite and appropriate to me to not react that way.

I'm trying to be charitable and not over-interpret the juxtaposition of "LGBT" and "lower achievers". I'm surprised you have so much time to study who is having sex. Quite remarkable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And there's definitely evidence that lower academic investment is correlated with higher sexual activity; I've been up for dozens of hours now so forgive me for not throwing some papers in your direction, but they shouldn't be hard to find.

I don't think it's healthy for anyone to really analyze this stuff for any demographic, but acting like what he said was so awful was really out of line, and pretty clearly breaking HN's guidelines.

Also rainbow, but I don't quite see that. The straight kids are already thrown together in all kinds of ways and for the most part know that each other are straight. On top of that, there's the issue of numbers. If there are, say, 20 out gay kids of a given gender in a high school, it's quite likely that there are no mutual attractions between any of them.

Honestly, I think the bigger reason is that there's no chance of pregnancy in gay relationships, so one big barrier is just gone.

I guess you just need to write assertively and nobody will question it.

For me high school was full of sex and parties. And by far the most sex and partying was via robotics club, believe it or not. Which is also where I learned the most about engineering and really developed a hunger to go to university.

For my kids I want high school to be a whole experience. Equal measures social, sports, and academics. Maybe less sex.

We didn't all have websites or talk about buzzwords or "branding" ourselves, but we definitely were branding ourselves for colleges even if we didn't call it that. It was incredibly stressful, TBH. More than college itself. Sounds like it's only gotten even more intense.

It's funny: the tech gold-rush didn't start until a couple years later, so our computer science class was actually a small, tight-knit group mostly free of people who were just trying to boost their college credentials. Everybody who was there wanted to be there, and we'd do extracurricular projects and even road-tripped to a programming competition once. It was really great.

This may be a silver lining in an otherwise very gloomy comment page? When I was in HS (though not in the US), popularity was highly correlated with wealth and/or political activism.

There were some extremely smart people in my high school that ended up being sold that siren song of humanities major in small expensive new england private school, only to end up in an an irrelevant career due to a lack of networking opportunities. Those that made it out alive had a fund in their name set up at birth.

My advice is to take active steps to improve your chances. You want an opportunity, so go where there is more of them for you to chase at a large school in a large city to increase your odds of running into one of these opportunities, both within the school or in the local economy. It also makes it easier to pivot into another field if you really don't like where you started. Chances are, that niche liberal arts school in rural Maine might only be really strong in that one department, but the state school will be decent in 10 because larger state schools have an easier time securing funding for more departments (unless the private school is Harvard).

I hate to come at it from this angle because I'm so exasperated by the parents who write off all degrees without a clear economic angle as worthless. Passion matters. But so does prudence. Choose your path carefully, and then figure out what you need to do to make it happen. The vast majority of degrees aren't get-a-job-for-free cards.

Odd how the perception among high schoolers differs from that of industry.

In the software engineering industry, CMU is considered top-tier, along with a few others probably not on this group’s radar like University of Washington.

Also, fwiw, Cornell is Ivy League too, and afaik Duke is considered effectively same tier as Ivy League.

As the years have gone by I've realized two things:

1. The other behaviors are there, but they get filtered and harder to notice. Many of the situations you see in dramas are just...less dramatic, and more ordinary in real life. People don't want to bring it up, they want to stay in their routine, and when you have a ton of structure(as is the case in these schools) things move on too quickly to reflect on anything or become self-directed, so it gets repressed. The media version goes out of its way to highlight it, in contrast.

Many years after I graduated, the popular physics teacher at my high school was caught fooling around with the girls and doing favors for them. Apparently this had been going on for many years. You never would have known. He was a good teacher.

2. At a young age, even if you've encountered these things, you aren't necessarily sensitive enough to accurately judge what is happening to you or to others. Since teenagers struggle with this they start looking for easy ways to provide themselves with an identity - and media is happy to supply you with a stock identity that is, in rough approximation, true to you. But of course, they are all a mismatch on some level. And when young people socialize they are often prone to projecting on each other in an unhealthy way, drawing boundaries and defining characters out of thin air.

Which, if I were to turn that into advice, it would be: Stay focused on the ordinary stuff. Keep a diary so that when you notice something, it gets recorded and you can reflect on it and challenge it. It's the one thing that is most missing when you get caught up in feelings of urgency.

I was in honors and AP programs in high school in the 90s and I’d have described a similar dynamic at my school, until one year my ADHD got the better of me and I failed english and had to go to summer school. It turns out a whole lot of kids in my high school were doing drugs and having parties and having sex. They just aren’t in your classes at your school.

That was the best summer of my high school experience, FWIW.

As far as I can tell, the big difference between then and today, at least here in metro DC, is the competitiveness of admissions to the top-tier state schools. UVA, VT, and W&M used to be sure things for anybody with a B+ GPA, some AP coursework, and 4 years of consistent extracurriculars. These days, everybody has a better-than-perfect GPA (due to AP bonuses) and a lifetime of hyper-focus on one or two extracurriculars. Doesn't seem to be any time for exploration and just having fun any more.

https://www.google.com/search?q=fake+ivy+university

There’s definitely a hierarchy to Ivy League schools, but it varies depending on which one you went to.

(Source, one of 3 in my immediate family who went to an Ivy.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15543371

The notion that FB/Amazon hire primarily from the top 5 universities is so totally unrelated to reality that I feel like I'm watching people discuss the consequences of the fact that the earth is flat.

Perhaps to some extent some are optimizing for social class (staying in the one they grew up in).

Big tech companies tend to have interesting work. Why would anybody jump through the hoops to go to a top university to get an ordinary coding job?

A common "feeling" among many of my classmates at the time, was that most of us went to CMU because we couldn't get into MIT.

This sickness was around a decade ago when I was in HS but it sounds like its gotten worse.

I'm not sure it's about exhibitionism, or some ego-driven motivation, but rather a profound fear about being left out of the group.

We know humans have biological social behaviors like cooperation but until social media we didn't really have ways to measure how others reacted to us. Seeing a number of likes, shares, upvotes, etc, is the ultimate drug for the social animal.

Cornell is an ivy league school, and calling the likes of cmu and Duke "second tier" schools?? by any metric they're on par or. better with ivy league schools

I'm mostly just entertained that in a discussion like this, MIT is completely absent. For obvious reasons, granted, but it's still funny.

As a CMU undergrad in the 90s, most of us in technical majors talked and thought about the school as a deliberate act of self-flagellation. I don't imagine Harvard students fell into similar ways of thinking.

It still has many of the same flaws the rest of them do.

In Texas, there's stuff like Stanford and Cornell, which is ivy league -- 1-2 kids might do that. Then we have 2 top tier state schools, then it's the other stuff.

Everyone else I work with got some degree from an Ivy League. Half have PhDs. It carries some weight and I think we get better VC funding and it's easier to get customers, but I don't think the degrees do much beyond that.

I did an IB magnet program in high school, graduating ~2008, and I don't know anyone from even that self-selected sample of people who went to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. One girl went to MIT.

The overwhelming majority of these people, who again, were a much brighter sample than the average teenager, ended up at either the U. of A. or ASU (A=Arizona).

You may want to blog anyway https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/you-should-write-b...

And it is kind of funny that I'm linking to another blog to make my point since "it has been written about have been written about more eloquently by others"

- effective async networking with entire internet

- you'll think deeper about the things you care about learning/studying/achieving

- you can express ideas more reliably

- you can open source your knowledge

https://twitter.com/jborichevskiy/status/1252652698614198272...

Predictively on point[1]:

> We fucking hate micromanaging Ivy League grads who are too scared to take initiative and possibly make mistakes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22987935

> the "second-tier" schools (Carnegie-Mellon, Rensselaer, Duke, Cornell, etc.)

I love this. And I'm not putting you down, I didn't know Cornell was an Ivy until I was 22. It reminds of the funny jokes at Andy Bernard's expense on The Office.

If you don't want to be a part of the bullshit show, you've got to learn to distinguish between problem-driven projects and show-driven projects. The former are scarce, and the latter are intentionally disguised to pass for the real thing, but unless you learn to see the difference, you'll be stuck in a rather depressive loop of being a prized trophy sitting on a shelf.

My bet is that the COVID-19 pandemic will bring enormous attention to biomedical research, vaccine development, immunology, etc. New discoveries will be made, that would also apply to many less critical conditions. Of course, there will be a fair share of Theranos-like scams, so have your bullshit detector up and running.

It is a horrifying notion that you are only valued based on the output of your blog / FB / twitter account. I used to think that for every cultural movement there is a counter-movement that tries to invert the values of a previous generation. Are there people in your circle that explicitly reject this notion of self commodification and exhibitionism?

Now everyone feels obligated to "learn computers" and pursue the academic path after HS. Sadly as a whole we're not being successful; we're essentially customers of both.

I sure hope some kids are rejecting the current culture and creating something new that will up-end the current path...

But this: "Enjoying your life and doing things that you take pride in are secondary to the all-encompassing drive to impress people who know nothing about you. "

I'm sorry to say is a vicious new Anglo/American trend that used to be only for specific groups 30 years ago and has metastasized ... sadly into everything.

Please don't let it steal your youth.

Consider that most of it doesn't work, that people have pretty good subconscious BS filters. Just be yourself. At the office, obviously a little more than that, but even then worry less about 'personal brand' there is nothing to gain.

Taken at face value I’d say stay steady, ‘tis a good path you’re on

IMO, you are well above it all, or may be you will get there in a couple of years. You are doing fantastic for someone who is 16. Most people do not achieve this level of self-awareness even when they are 60. But there is a dark side to this precociousness. You are not ignorant, and that will often drive you to despair when you observe the simians around you. Like they say ignorance is bliss.

It seems that you're implying I'm a massive cunt.

?? Nope, I'm not, the opposite actually.

With regards to smartphones, I find that I have almost the opposite experience. My high school has the same three tiers as yours: IB/AP, Honors, regular classes. I find that smartphone use is generally the same across classes, yet it is done more openly in regular classes, under the table in Honors, and in the IB/AP classes, they resort to using their smartwatches to type (generally because the IB/AP kids are richer, another bad part of high schools in the US).

Also, wow. Your school doesn't have anyone dating? In my school there are many carnal relationships among students who take the regular classes.

Louisiana has this amazing program called TOPS that pays 100% tuition for any in-state college, so most people take advantage of that and go to LA Tech, ULL, or LSU. Because of that, I had no admissions problems because even though those schools have incredibly good engineering programs (stupid hard course load and small classes with a high student to teacher ratio and very good chance of jobs and internships), the barrier to entry is pretty low and you just need a pretty average ACT score. The hardest barrier for most students (like most colleges) is room and board.

Like you mentioned, I think maybe 8% of my class was dating, only 2% probably smoked weed, a lot of people were into sports, music, and academics. However, STEM programs only showed up in my area a few years later (FIRST, Arduino stuff... etc). The schools which already had STEM programs had students which made great grades freshman year as they already had learned basic programming, electric circuits, and other engineering basics without having to learn everything from scratch like the rest of us.

I'm sure it's even more competitive now. Being a teenager in 2020 must be rough. I mean, in some ways it's a lot better (no WW2 or Vietnam clouding over you), but there are also no easy jobs leading to a house and car with 1 income.

Calculus and chemistry are very relevant to physics!

With less time used taking classes like Psych 101 (which is generally a waste of time for engineering and science majors) you have more time to study and complete assignments in your core classes. The university says it wants you to take these classes to be "well rounded", but honestly, they just want more money from students.

Regarding Calculus and Chemistry (all important to physics of course);There were several students I knew that clipped out of all of the freshman/sophomore chemistry and calculus classes and just started with organic chemistry and differential equations. This meant freshman year was a little rougher, but they were done with all of their non-major courses by sophomore year, so they were able to take a lower course load in their next three years and better absorb the core classes. I majored in electrical engineering, and still really struggled with all my calculus classes despite taking AP Calculus in high school. So instead of just focusing on circuits, coding, control systems...etc, I had to split my time with stuff like chemistry/calculus/random classes like Psych, so there was a lot less time to use for homework, projects, and harder subjects (assembly and microprocessors aren't too bad by themselves, but when you're mentally sharing that same space with a bunch of other classes it is brutal). Of course, most colleges are like this, but I think I'd rather have less required subjects, but time to go into them in additional depth.

In my experience, every STEM class in college is just paint over a math class. The stronger your math skills are, the more you can concentrate on the paint rather than struggling with the math.

I agree it's a good plan, however, to take AP courses outside of your major so in college you can take more stem classes. My college offered so many exciting stem classes I was a bit frustrated to have to take some non-stem classes to satisfy the degree requirements. No, I don't think that requirement was to make more money, it was genuinely believed that those were needed for a well-rounded education. That idea isn't entirely without merit.

For example, I really wish I could've only taken EE classes relevant to power systems + public speaking + several comp sci electives (programming, databases, etc) and as much statistics as I possibly can. The standard major was still good though and set me up to learn on my on.

With what you've done over the past couple of decades (I assume you're the guy that has written one of the first C++ compilers and invented D), would it not have been better for you to take more classes on compiler design or other computer science/computer engineering related courses? Did jet engine analysis (I assume you're a mechE) ever help you once you found your niche?

Btw...you've seemed to accomplish far more (technically speaking) in your life than me :), so I'm genuinely asking and not trying to lecture you.

Edit: I think pretty much all knowledge I've learned has had some use, but surely the applicability would've been higher for you with more computer hardware, compiler, and algorithms related coursework?

My experience at Boeing has been surprisingly useful in writing software.

Besides, perhaps you don't realize how cool jet engines are? :-) Taking that class was very satisfying for me.

I will say that I left Louisiana and all of my coworkers have $50k-$100k in school loan debt that I don't have to worry a about, so I definitely benefited from the program and would be paying another house note without the program.

Do a little more work up front, and you can do less/easier work for the same pay down the line. It was mainly a test of deferred gratification.

Now if you are lucky enough to get a good credential, your skids are still greased to some extent.

However I say that credentials used to be a shortcut because now the amount of work it takes to get a decent credential is way higher than it used to be. Is it really a shortcut if getting to the shortcut takes more work than just taking the more common path?

You can look at it from a supply-demand perspective. The easier path is the one with the same demand and less supply. Thirty years ago most people had still not caught on that credentials were the easier path. Now they have so credentials are no longer the easier path.

There is nothing intrinsic about any line of work that makes it always a better option than another. You have to weigh your personal preferences and the supply and demand for each job.

I remember in high school how powerful peer pressure was, but once you reach your late twenties none of that matters anymore.

Somehow this is made to work in other countries. Many of them have competitive university entrance exams where people are ranked in order, and nobody or nearly nobody gets a perfect score.

This was college for me. I went to a tech university, not MIT but a good one. It was all about simultaneously impressing your professors and scoring internships with big-name tech companies. And the most driven, type-A of the whole lot? Women (of which there were few) and minorities (of which there were a lot). Don't mess with a Jersey kid from the 'hood when they have their eye on a job at Microsoft or Intel. Their lack of privilege only makes them hungrier.

I got tired of it -- and poor -- and eventually dropped out. Went to state school. There, the professors taught. I seemed to do much better, both academically and spiritually.

Having read it, I feel kinda stupid. My teens were all about just getting through HS, parties, bonfires and generally all sorts of stupid things you do as a kid. I did not think thoughts on the level of 'my generation'. That level of abstraction did not even occur to me.

I was just very lucky to have cohort full of very smart kids, so even with all HS drama, I managed to learn a lot.

I dunno. In a sense, we had it easier. Mistakes were not live streamed. At worst, they were remembered.

I do not envy the pressure teens feel today. Not participating in this at all risks missing out on a chance to 'stand out'.

You have IBM, Package Bell labs, Microsoft, Google - doing tech in general.

And then way out there researching neurolink fungi-based mesh materials: Carnegie-Mellon.

Doesn't align with my high school experience at all, where there were several pregnant girls and coke was commonplace.

Maybe each high school is just different?

2 things: Don’t be fooled by the price of attendance, Rensselaer is a mid tier school.

Well said about exhibitionism as a pathology.

I on the other hand was a total loser by age of 13.

Key takeaway one experience of no drugs no body fucking etc. . Can't appear to be total reality to one person and not others.

In my high school class the students who got into Ivy Leagues were either legacy students or the ones that took as many AP classes as possible and had other activities to boost their resumes. (Without legacy, this was not a recipe for admission, but if you didn't do it then you wouldn't get in except in the most exceptional circumstances.)

Since band (and marching band) were not considered AP or Honors, some students had parents that would forbid them from taking these, as it would lower their weighted GPA.

I was a straight-A student for all four years in high school, but focused on the AP/Honors/community-college classes I was genuinely interested in (physics, math, computer science, etc.). Unlike many of my most competitive peers, I also made time for things I enjoyed that may not be the most appealing thing to colleges, like marching band and the computer programming club. I had a deep interest in computer programming, and had numerous side-projects to show for it. I also got a 36 on the ACT. I did not get accepted into any private school I applied to, but had my pick of top UC schools.

Would I do anything differently (perhaps take those extra APs, drop out of band, or focus more on artificially building up my resume) for that chance I might get into a more prestigious college?

I don't think so. My peers struggled with anxiety and depression, and school morale in general was laughably low. From my contact with friends who graduated after me, it appears the situation is only getting worse. Activities like marching band were the only things that kept me sane and their enrollment numbers are becoming anemic. Despite my attempt at having a balanced life, there were countless long nights filled with anxiety and stress as I worked to keep my GPA spotless.

My first semester in college was a relative breeze compared to high school, and many of my peers from high school agreed. But college can be as hard as you make it, so the next semester I doubled up on technicals and am on track to double major. I also got some great internship opportunities and a chance to do research. My high school math teacher would often tell worried students that college is what you make of it, and where you get in (or not) need not define who you are.

As for my future career, college names do mean a lot on resumes, but not getting into an Ivy League is not the end of the world. Recruiters still come to campus, and my friends at lower-ranked colleges have gotten internships at FAANG companies. I think the college name just dictates how much harder you have to work to be noticed by a recruiter.

But what exactly is the end goal in all this? A life in an insanely expensive area working long hours to stay to competitive? Is there another path? These are still questions I ask myself, and I don't think I have the answers. I suppose this is where each person needs to look deeply within and figure out what is best for them, and thank goodness I didn't lose sight of my real self in high school in order to build up an artificial resume. Some of my peers did, and immediately enrolled in the CS program despite having barely touched a computer program before college. I really hope they find what makes them happy, and don't get stuck in a career they hate. Perhaps someone a few years ahead of me can share some wisdom.

It's not an Ivy but I would think a UC Berkley diploma would get you practically as much access as any of them. UCLA and maybe UCSB to a great extent as well.

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/

I can assure you, kids have been doing extracurriculars that look good on college applications for longer than most of us have been alive.

Nailed it better than I ever could.

> All that building your brand and trying to convince people of your identity in place of actually having one

Well, that's because college admissions value seem to value identities like robotics / programming club president more than identities like having fun with friends and trying different things together (secondarily to the friendship), which seems to be a more mentally healthy pursuit and better for cultivating a healthy identity but not what admissions are looking for.

I don’t think it would have shown if they hadn’t mentioned their age and chosen this as their subject matter. There’s a lot of people on Hacker News that are teenagers, they just never disclose themselves as one.

> You describe how people are obsessed with credentials and don’t take pride in achievement anymore. That’s conflicting rhetoric.

Not really. You can try hard to look good in a college application but not really be into the things that you work hard to do well in.

> You’re trying too hard to make a point.

I disagree.