It’s really only in the software bubble where people are able to prove themselves to break into it, due to various factors including engineers being in very short supply relative to demand for over a decade now. Sure nobody asks for my grades now that I’ve been out of college for a while, but they still look at where I went to college (based on high school achievement) and my first job (based on college achievement) and subsequent jobs (much easier to get because of where I worked at my first job), etc.

I just see this argument as very tone deaf because there are hundreds of millions of us regular people out there, and academic achievement is the most surefire way to get noticed and be given opportunities if you aren’t lucky enough to come from an important/influential family.

It’s not only about the grades themselves but how they pipeline the rest of your career and credentials. Rich people can shmooze and scheme to get some of those credentials and opportunities for their kids without the grades, but not us regular folk.

The trick is to get a job without a recruiter looking at your application. The only way they'll help you is to speed up the trip your resume takes to the bin. Your task is to bypass them.

However, once you get your first job in the Valley everything changes. Suddenly the very same recruiters will spam you with offers. They operate like web scrapers: ingest resumes from top 10 CS school grads OR employees of SV companies :)

So how does one get such a job? You'll probably have to take a chance on a small company that doesn't have a wall of recruiters yet and talk to the people who actually need to hire someone. Show them a project that will impress them.

PS: there are probably good recruiters out there, but the chances of meeting them are slim. Personally I'd go with the "bypass" heuristic for the first job.

If you look back, all industries start this way. The most heavily-credentialed and tightly-regulated field you can think of today started off as a bunch of hustlers making it up as they went along.

It didn’t last for those other industries and it likely won’t last for software.

Medicine, Law or consulting are services, not actualy creating any actual new value. They build their moat by making the license very hard to obtain and making one's status and prestige the most important thing. You do need licenses to do certain trades but they are usually not that hard to obtain and the prestige of the institute giving them is less important.

How do you know that? Do they mention it? I'm really curious on this one.

Other than the rare alum, I haven't had anyone comment on my undergrad more than a year or two out of it. Recent jobs and projects make up the vast majority of any conversation.

No one has ever asked me about my schooling and I haven't had a school on my resume in over 10 years. Do they look at it because you put it on your resume?

For those from traditionally working class background, differentiating from your peers through grades is essential to unlocking funds that can take you where you want to be.

That's why through the pandemic school grades (in the UK at least) have been so sensitive; they deployed an algorithm last year which probably mostly got it right but also (because it was averages) didn't pluck out those from the poorest backgrounds who would have managed to differentiate themselves.

Being good a learning matters. Being good at executing matters. Being good at communicating matters. Being good at leading matters.

Grades and credentials are just gatekeeping invented by people that are worse than talented people. Grades are for status not for wealth and even much less for creative and fulfilment. It's a losers game. I played it and it was stupid I will never allow my children to play that game.

Finding non traditional ways to demonstrate your value can be hard and is a skill that isn't really tought. If you're going to not care about grades you better be sure you know some alternative way to show your potential value.

I can see not forcing them to play the game, but "will never allow my children to" always struck me as a weird tone.

Sounds like a weird tone?

You can feel that way regarding status vs talent if you want. Reality to me indicates that learning and execution are only important if you can get yourself into a position where you can use them. If you are a peon it’s quite hard to make a difference in the world even if you have those in spades. The way you find yourself in such a position might vary but going through the well worn path is tried and true.

Good grades aren't the goal. Good grades are an indicator other people can use to gauge your preparedness for a job or opportunity.

(I think I'm basically paraphrasing another PG article here, but this opinion mostly comes from my own experience working with both people from higher education and early drop-outs)

If there was a better measure of learning, executing, communicating, and leading than "grades" at the pre-collegiate level, then I'm sure we would've found it by now and used that instead. For me to be convinced that grades don't matter, I'd have to see proof that there is no correlation between successful people and good grades at a population scale.

That’s simply not true in many cases. There are tons of parents out there to whom the grade matters more than the learning. Those aren’t good parents, and mine weren’t like that (I would’ve been destroyed, frankly), but many of my friends’ were. I suspect the proportion is much higher than you’d suspect.

Not really, while its generally better to have a qualification than no qualification 48% of people with a degree are in a job that don't require it.

Qualifications don't matter if everyone has them, this is because employers care about the skills some one has not the lectures they sat through. Skills are difficult to develop lectures are easy to sit through. If every one has those qualifications supply/demand kills the need for those jobs.

If you sacrifice building up skills to chase grades you have a near 50/50 chance of ending up working behind a till with €50k in debt, not a good position to be in if you are not mega rich.

I learned to program in zero period at Wilson High School in Portland, Oregon.

It was a self-taught course but I didn’t have to hide the work—-no one really cared. Not that my parents didn’t care, they were glad I was doing something I enjoyed.

But that no one had any idea how deep I was going into writing code.

The assignments were given once a quarter or so by Veryl Smith. We had far ranging latitude to figure it out on our own and gold plate projects as much as we wanted.

By the time the game of life assignment was due I had added a mouse interface and vga, color display of the cells and grid, all in Pascal.

I often lost points due to things like shadowed naming or other bad patterns.

But that didn’t really matter too much. I made up for it getting “A” grades working as a teacher’s assistant for the attendance office, writing hall passes and absence slips for myself and others as necessary. That was a great hack.

Anyhow, this essay resonates deeply with me. It has good ideas in it.

It turns out a lot of what they were doing while "playing video games" was learning how to make really complex and unique game scenarios using minecraft command blocks and redstone -- essentially creating both a RPG PvP arena and a multilevel party dungeon crawl w boss fights.

I run a small minecraft server for them to play and experiment on and I've resisted the urge to try to teach them anything about setting up and running servers, backing up data, or using text editors with syntax highlighting or source control to edit and preserve their command block commands.

I just show up for demos and let them know how cool what they're doing is and backup and reboot the server as needed.

I've messed up plenty as a parent but i think not trying to turn their interest in programming within minecraft into a learning experience has been one of my better decisions.

I mean sure, don't force them into them, but I don't think hiding what's underneath is fair either.

I actually learned to program for the first time while playing Minecraft around 2011, and I started programming without my parents even knowing.

There was a mod for Minecraft called ComputerCraft that allowed you to program inside the game (using virtual computers) with Lua. This led to me on a path to Java to mod Minecraft, then Python to script things and many tools and projects later I ended up becoming a programmer.

For me, Minecraft opened me to a world full of wonders; something I never knew was possible, and I definitely don't regret it.

i think if i try to push them to learn programming, they will lose interest because i will be turning their 'fun' into 'work'. it is better for them to go at their own pace where their interests take them. if they ask for my help (they both know i could teach them programming), i'd be delighted to help them.

and minecraft is really fantastic. from the base game, to advance features like command blocks, to the ecosystem of plug ins and online multiplayer adaptations. really an impressive creation.

I wrote about my dad playing games with me, making a GB emulator and my mom dying. At the time I figured that's what most of them were. Grandma/Uncle/My pet fish died and that was sad. I broke my leg / struggled with grades / couldn't make friends blah blah blah. I built something or wrote something or did this charity thing. The occasional military / older adult.

Would really be curious how those have changed. Plus the difference in Ivy League vs Public schools.

Fifteen years after escaping, I still haven't published anything real, and I can see the pattern. I saw the pattern ten years ago, even, but deep conditioning is really hard to break. Only being able to finish things for other people is kind of a disaster, especially when you wind up in the “need experience to gain experience” trap.

¹ Who, again without too much detail, was Asian. ² Which never happened. She never put any actual energy into it, I had no framework for approaching it as a child, and I'm not sure the surrounding environment contained people who were willing to do that sort of thing anyway.

Nobody ever asked me anything about my education.

Maybe you need to find the right workplace. And this is still if you're doing the employee way. You can find other ways to create value in society and make money out of it.

Outside the west coast, it's much, much harder. I ended up back in SF when an east coast company retracted their offer after a high level exec found out about my degrees and freaked out.

Yes, you can find places that don't work like this, but the vast majority of the market absolutely evaluates education. You need to fit into every interviewer's idea of what constitutes a reasonable path to qualification.

Anecdata: am doing interviews with prospective new people right now.

Things I care about in my software engineer hires (for whom this is not their first job):

* that you're able to talk about stuff you've done in the past, involving diving into technical detail at will, and showing some understanding of what was happening one level of abstraction below/above whatever bit you were working on. (I don't actually care what you did. Don't tell me proprietary stuff. I want to know that you understood what you were doing, why you were doing it, what it depended on and what depended on it, and that you are able to communicate this to me.)

* that you're familiar with the languages/tools/environments you said in your CV you are, and are able to communicate this to me

* that you have some general data structures+algorithms awareness, and ability to apply this knowledge to at least trivial problems rather than merely recite the textbook contents on demand

Wasn't even asked about them for my first job.

I have a kid, and it's an ongoing challenge to limit the screentime. But I'm also impressed by the creative projects and the rapid skill development that sometimes is the result of being glued to the iPad.

Good luck actually doing it, though.

But I had no real hobbies or passions of my own, other than playing card games.

It wasn't until my twenties, after I already graduated college with degrees I wasn't interested in and my dad's health failed, that I first tried programming. A decade earlier, my dad was attending the local Linux meetings when away from his machine shop.

Programming, and especially performance optimization/loop vectorization are now my passion and consume most of my free time (https://github.com/JuliaSIMD/LoopVectorization.jl).

Hearing all the stories about people starting and getting hooked when they were 11 makes me feel like I lost a dozen years of my life. I had every opportunity, but just didn't take them. If I had children, I would worry for them.

To be totally honest, most of us who start programming when we are <some small age> don't really get that large of a head start.

I'd probably count all of my programming experience from ages 10-20 before I switched from math to CS as "no more valuable than 1-2 years of dedicated undergraduate experience".

The biggest value of early programming experience is learning if you enjoy it well enough to not hate a career at it.

I was around 14 when I first heard about Haskell, I didn’t know anything about it, functional programming, type theory, lambda calculus or anything related. I just knew it was a programming language. Nowadays I see people around that age programming relatively fluently with it.

All the actual programming I ever did as a kid was make terrible websites, console apps that did nothing useful in particular and a few desktop app shells that did the same. I was probably around 17 before I did anything “serious” and even at that point it wasn’t great.

Now I’m not very old, so I’m not sure if it was simply the environment I was in, but I didn’t know that many other people that were into programming when I was a teenager, even with the internet and all I was normally the youngest guy in every chat/forum/site/group I was on. Nowadays though, I know several teenagers that could code circles around me.

Also, there's no use in regrets. Only lessons learned.

The cable TV I watched as a kid was just garbage. I know it's still all ad driven, but the stuff kids watch now seems much more useful. Roblox is programming.

You can get a lot of mileage out of it this way and never touch the programming side. It is an all time bestseller for good reason.

There is an in game material called redstone that is used for simple electrical engineering and circuitry. The devices can play music, push blocks around, open doors, fire arrows, run train cars, and other applications.

The programming starts with command blocks, which can use redstone triggers to execute keyword commands.

There are a bunch of mods that can add automation through programming. For instance, programming a mining robot to drill out a tunnel, using Lua.

Mod programming itself would often be in Java, and add new game entities or systems. This can get fairly advanced and there are some total conversion mods (eg some Pokemon clones).

There are other fun games that are more like programming, like those from Zachtronics. So why Minecraft? It's fun and familiar, and provides a massive canvas for creativity that fires the imagination.

Zachtronics programming[1] games: Spacechem Molek-Syntez Opus Magnum Infinifactory

And probably the rest of them (but for the rest of them, I cannot speak from direct experience)

[0] As in "part of the game is writing assembler code" [1] As in "you are configuring state machines"

Sifting through garbage for discarded electronics was another favorite hobby of mine.

The way I found to overcome that was to excel academically and technically, giving me that clear advantage I need... Unfortunately, many companies will only check your basic technical skills and then focus massively on "cultural fit", and to succeed here there's nothing much I can do other than try to show that, yes, I am a social person and I do like to work with other people and so on (things they will never be able to objectively measure). But to really have a good chance here, let's not kid ourselves: being white, male, good looking and from a wealthy background will get you way ahead before you even say a word.

My strategy served me well while I was relatively junior... but now that I am reaching a second decade in the industry, I again don't seem to have a clear advantage that I can objectively prove, and back to square one: getting a good job is a real challenge again.

On the side note. There is a great book which makes easier for parents to make piece with themselves: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35457692-the-self-driven...

Isn't that how young people end up with liberal arts degrees saddled with debt they have little chance of ever repaying? I guess it might be a full life still but I haven't met many people in this position who enjoyed it.

I think the main issue is parents are largely ignorant of what’s important for a new generation - especially when things are undergoing radical technical change.

My fiancée is reading Walden - and there are comical similarities to a modern day van life Silicon Valley programmer. The industrial revolution left parents at the time clueless - something similar is happening again.

Have a liberal arts degree from a small liberal arts college (<2000 students), had no problem at all breaking into tech or FAANG tech internships, anecdotally I think it helped me get my foot in the door.

Most of my peers also have degrees in liberal arts, and most of them are living successful and fulfilling lives, both professionally, socially, and even monetarily; some went into tech and finance, many are not.

I think something important to realize is there’s many paths to success — even the same idea of success that many in tech seem to have (financial security) — and someone who is passionate and talented will find one; following a pre-set college curriculum churning out STEM majors is just one way to get there.

Sometimes, but sometimes it’s the direct opposite. People let their lives get consumed with the game of “go to school, get good grades, receive certification of having gone to school and gotten good grades” until they find out there’s nothing left for them at the end of the road.

It’s a shame because there are people who are obsessive nerds about academic subjects. And maybe there are more of them than there is a need for professional, full-time academics, which is sad. But I think there are a lot of people for whom formal education is a cargo cult, and these people crowd out the obsessive nerds.

If children just loved reading classics and writing their thoughts on great works and thinkers of the past, I don't think their first thought would be to pay for a degree.

I dropped out of college and was ~4 years into a successful career before it clicked with parents and other "adults" of what I had done and what I had "thrown away".

Having been through 3 serious tech jobs and dozens of interviews only one company rejected me due to my lack of a degree - Capitol One.

All said however I do think about going back to complete my degree at some point as I expect as my career progresses to upper upper management it might get in the way.

I've been tempted to say something to him to make sure he balances his time appropriately and fulfills his other commitments.. but maybe I'll let it go a little while longer. I think he's getting a lot out of his project and I don't want to discourage him.

I suppose ultimately he's an adult and should make his own decisions and suffer his own consequences. But I worry.

Fair enough, you're right that I'm showing my biases. I appreciate the feedback.

Coined by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua who have Chinese parents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Chua

The book mostly centers around the mom pushing her two kids to be world-class violinists and her pushing causes one of her daughters to abandon the instrument. [1]

If, anything, it’s a cautionary tale.

[1] the violin is an incredibly difficult instrument to begin with and becoming a world-class violinist requires a metric fuckton of effort...Amy Chua’s experiences w/r/t raising her children are hardly unique in the classical music world.

A largely Chinese-American concept, the term draws parallels to strict parenting styles ostensibly common to households in East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. (wikipedia)

The idea behind tiger parents is that Asians earn more money. And it's true, but not the whole store.

But the problem is that average Asian incomes are pulled up by Indian-Americans. Chinese-Americans earn less than many European-Americans. So the whole concept is based on flawed logic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

These are the people whom Amy Chua is talking to and about.

The average Chinese-American income reflects relatively fewer of these highly successful immigrants, because there are many more Chinese-Americans who arrived in the US poor and with few options. That doesn't disprove what she said.

On the page you link, Chinese-Americans have a lower per-capita income than Americans of Macedonian, Russian, Latvian, British (not otherwise specified), Lithuanian, Slovene, Australian, and Austrian ancestry.

They have a higher per-capita income than Americans of Scottish, Czechoslovakian, Croatian, Romanian, Hungarian, Slovak, Belgian, Swiss, Welsh, Danish, Israeli, Ukrainian, Canadian, Scotch-Irish, English, European (not otherwise specified), Bulgarian, Polish, Norwegian, Italian, German, Finnish, Irish, Dutch, French (excluding Basques), Yugoslav, Portuguese, American (not otherwise specified) and Pennsylvania German ancestry.

I am curious to hear how you define "many".

Source: I'm from Cleveland, aunt married one of the (many) Slovenian-Americans there

I define 'many' as a number, such that it is sufficient to disprove the thesis that "Chinese parenting" (if that is even a thing, China is very diverse) results in higher incomes.

Saying this is about flawed logic is a mistake as the idea is not based in logic but rather on the wild variation exhibited during the process of raising children.