When I started professionally networking, I kept hearing that I needed to weigh the experiences of those close to retirement. I learned the most from people who I could tell would retire before 50.
I think the key(s), whether you're sixteen or sixty, are natural intelligence and a great work ethic.
I'm fifty and am full-stack in whatevers with a side of devops/architecting. I frequently have to walk into a room and in less than thirty minutes figure out what the hell is going on, how I'm going to add value, communicate that to the stakeholders and then deliver. People seem to dig it.
Fifty ain't so bad. What's COBOL?
FORTRAN, on the other hand, is used to melt compute clusters while trying to make things go boom, or model micro- or macroscopic properties to design various things. Damned language still optimizes or runs large scale better.
As you all know, few pay to rewrite code that works well.
Age has nothing to do with it, relevancy does, and some domain expertise is difficult to acquire without decades of experience, even on the bleeding edge.
Unpopular opinion: Silicon Valley is not the center of the universe.
Do you think migration trends into cities will continue unabated?
Do you think US population growth which drives much of the housing market will continue?
Those of us under 50 though? Much harder time ahead than this discussed cohort, all the juice has been squeezed and growth will be at a reduced rate as the population pyramid compresses.
My guess is a big war over resources will happen, e.g. https://asiatimes.com/2021/01/china-risks-a-himalayan-water-... . Worsening of the climate refugee crisis, even within the US itself, with people moving from flooded (due to sea-level rise) or dried parts or burning parts of the country to other parts. Dry or burning California also can't supply food, in 2010 Russia stopped exporting grains after big forest fires, and the rise of food prices pissed of many people and led to the Arab Spring.
Also there are plenty of 20 and 30-year-olds on Reddit (such as on investing and FIRE subs) and hacker news who have sizable investments in real estate and stocks. The post-2009 bull market is the biggest and longest ever ,surpassing even the 80s and 90s in terms of real returns. Plenty of young people have and are getting rich from that, plus also the rise of lucrative FAANG jobs and also online marketing, social media, etc. This is not representative of all young people obviously, but to say that young people are being denied wealth due to older generation hoarding it ,is wrong too. There are plenty of opportunities for young people to get rich.
Regarding luck, boomers did not have as many ways to become wealthy compared to young people today. Although homes were cheaper , mortgage rate were much higher, inflation was much higher, there was no employer healthcare, real stock and real estate returns were poorer, professional jobs did not pay as well, etc. Adjusted for inflation, college grads 40 years ago made less compared to grads today.Homeownership rates were not higher during the 60s, 70s, and 80s despite homes being cheaper, in part because mortgages were so expensive and wages were not that good.
Owning a house for 30 years in Berkeley in 2021 is a lot different than owning a house for 30 years in Gary, IN.
Edit: unless it’s changed recently, the ACS publishes their salary survey for chemists in the us yearly so you can look it up if you seek data on pharma salaries.
Can confirm. I was directionless in life until I read a comment on a message board about working from home on Google with the potential to earn $5,000/week. I made my first million in a year and a half by investing the earnings from that into meme stocks, pink sheets stocks and SPACs I found on Reddit while living at home with my parents.
In terms of the larger economic environment, the boomers were generally born and raised during the Golden Age of Capitalism [1], but they likely entered the workforce around the time of the early '70s recession. However, the '80s and '90s appear to have been good times to have a job, but as each year went by, it became less and less good to have non-college jobs as the stats above show us. For millenials, the non-college jobs have been objectively worse in terms of pay, and the job opportunities that did exist were hampered by the .com bust (more a Gen Xer hindrance), the '08 bust, and of course, the covid shit show.
[0] Wages: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45090.pdf [1] Golden Age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_econ...
When we put that in the context of the conversation, it does indeed seem like non-college earnings are lower, and the advantage of going to college has lessened.
[0] Premium: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/07/is-college-still-wor...
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-depressing-chart-show...
In 1989 (the first year in the Fed's data), the Baby Boomer generation held $4.33T in wealth, which would be $9.5T in today's dollars, while in 2021, the Millennial generation held $7.47T in wealth [1]. While that's a little bit less, it's important to keep in mind that the median age of the Baby Boomer generation was 34 in 1989, vs 32 for the Millennial generation in 2021. If you linearly extrapolate Millennial wealth growth, the generation would hold $10.5T in wealth at a similar age.
So what the linked chart really reflects is that the total size of the pie has gotten much larger in the past 30 years. Most of the increase has gone to older generations, but I think that's neither surprising nor undesirable -- after all, 30 years ago, the Millennial generation ranged from not being born yet to elementary school. Will the pie continue to grow over the next 30 years so that Millennials can see a similar increase in wealth (and hear complaints from the kids being born right now)? I'd imagine that's largely up to the decisions we make today.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
The chart also ignore the population share of each generation - Baby boomers made up a massive part of the US population - 70M out of a population of about 210M (1980) or 33% when they hit working age.
Millennials are slightly larger in numbers - 72M, but smaller part of the total of 330M (2020) or 21%.
Crude analysis and you’d have to assume everything else remains the same (it doesnt), but if all wealth was equally distributed by age you’d expect Millenials (of the same age) to have about 33% less share of the total wealth based on population alone.
Which isn’t far off from that chart if you assume Millennials track similar to Gen-X.
The oldest millennials are turning 40.
What degree/program were you enrolled in? And how much debt is 'sinking in debt'?
It seems to me that its been well known for years which degrees/careers are profitable and which aren't. Most school's graduation outcomes are publicly published so it shouldn't be too hard to do the calculus. That said I do understand how can easily get into a bad situation since most college decisions are made when you are ~18 plus a lot of people depend on parental assistance which can be unpredictable to say the least.
On another note, it is important to consider that owning a home prior to the modern super low rates had the opposite problem; the purchase price and corresponding down payment was easy but the payments are 'expensive'. Unless you had prior knowledge that interest rates were going to bottom out, there was little reason to think you would make much in real estate and for middle America making the mortgage payment was a constant struggle. In some ways the bull run on the stock market is an even better 'generational-specific-early-investment-strategy' for millenials because you can make 10%, 20%, even 30% YoY returns without any risk or upfront cost.
Really at this point, the most worse off are the last of the millennials and future gen-z individuals entering the labor force. Asset prices including both stock and real estate are at all time highs and pretty much everyone agrees both are in a bubble but both continue to give >10% YoY returns which makes non-participation very difficult to recommend.
And for a lot of people, they are strong academically to get a full ride to a less prestigious school but only get a partial scholarship to a more prestigious school, and then choose to go to the more famous school but then take on debt. Sometimes a lot of debt. So there are many people who go to the most prestigious school no matter the cost. I think that attitude is starting to change now.
There are also affordable state schools you can go to rather than more expensive private schools.
I went all the way to an advanced degree without any loans or personal spending (but I had to purchase books), just using scholarships and financial aid. But I didn't go to the most famous schools. In my high school I was in the top 10% in terms of both scores and grades, so that was enough to get admitted to most schools but not to get a full scholarship. So I got tuition waivers for the local state university and lived with my parents, and then for grad school I got full tuition waiver as well as a TA job that paid enough to live (barely).
But I know many other people who had the same high school grades and SAT scores as I did but went to Dartmouth or other places and took on huge debt. I didn't even consider those schools as I wasn't willing to take on any debt. I always went to the best school that was free.
If you don't go to university, then you have to find your own way in life. You can be very successful if you get a trade, but there is no good system of trade schools -- you have to find the trade yourself, and finance it yourself. Unlike the network of financial aid and scholarship for universities, there is nothing like that for trade schools. The US has no trade school system because it offends our sensibilities which say that everyone should go to college and that tracking is wrong. For the same reason, every high school styles itself as "college prep" but then they have to dumb down the curriculum to allow students to pass. Thus we have no gymnasium system where you are learning useful skills before (or instead of) college prep.
So it's really hard for people who are not college graduates because there is no equivalent support system to train them. The US has terrible problems with lack of skilled workers -- both a shortage of technical students in universitites and a shortage of machinists, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, etc. People in these fields find their own way. Many figure it out -- they meet someone who talks to them and shows them some options, or they have a friend who is an electrician and they find a school and borrow some money to attend, etc. But it's really random and it's easy to fall through the gaps and just take a series of unskilled retail jobs.