Around 2005-6 I went from tech support $12/hr to syadmin $40k and got stuck in the 60-80s for a long time. I started doing really well (say $100k+ now $250k+) around (2014-2015) 28-30 then 35+ respectively but I really feel like having to climb the ladder the way I did (tech support to linux admin to SRE+) took way, way, way longer than it should have.

My previous partner (2019-2020) has her Bachelors in UX Research, her first job was $80k and her 2nd two years later was $160k. Obviously different markets, it isn't the 2000s. But man was that eye opening.

My biggest mistake, IMO, was focusing on network engineering and linux administration instead of finally learning software engineering.

15-21 was hell. I worked so many menial jobs for an hourly wage. Pizza delivery, chicken wing delivery, odd computer jobs.. I didn't think I'd EVER dig myself out of that.

The chaos I had was mostly at home. School was my calm place.

Similarly, I had enough positive attention that I wanted to continue and make it to college.

Edit: bad-> intense. I need to stop minimizing what I went through.

Edit: resisting peer pressure shouldn’t be worried about because it’s “the spice of life”? Yikes

The author seems to have put in a lot of thought. And would be open to putting in more thought if you illustrated where he is incorrect or missing info. Otherwise the content is appealing to a lot of people.

> I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories.

doesn't that somewhat justify the anger of the parent comment (who presumably "knows enough")?

If the author doesn't know enough about the topic, why the need to pontify? They could just stfu and have an opinion in topics on which they do have meaningful contributions. Not everyone needs to have an opinion on everything.

The parents are dysfunctional people churning out the next generation of dysfunctional people. It’s an intergenerational cycle that is nearly impossible to break.

You don’t know what’s wrong or where to look for help and in my case I was even proud of my parentification for making me “strong and resilient” while minimizing the bad things as a coping mechanism.

Parent didn’t say so explicitly, but there’s really no blog post you can write that is “how to escape from poverty as a teen in high school.” Thus, the problems with this one are not fixable. Off top:

* what’s the opening line of Anna Karenina, again? There are so many disparate challenges that poor kids can face that are more urgent than “get good exercise and send cold emails for jobs” that you couldn’t even fit them in their own book.

* even writing the blog post at all assumes these kids are reading hacker news which is, uh, cavalier. there are zillions of people hawking advice that these kids would need to sift through to even decide to follow this blog. Parents, friends, teachers, influencers, Andrew fucking Tate are all prescribing life strategies, why would they listen to your blog? Moreover, if you’re an impoverished kid who has somehow found HN and for some reason values its advice, you’re already on a better track than your peers, and you likely don’t need the advice!

* in fact, this blog is anti-advice for these people. Probably the single most valuable decision I made in my youth was to always refuse all peer pressure no matter what until I was out of my hometown. Peer pressure is INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS for these kids. They’re not Brock Turner, they’re not getting off easy and free because of daddy. one mistake can derail their whole lives. To read this guy say “don’t worry about peer pressure, it’s the spice of life” frankly pisses me off.

The real answer for these kids, again, is to get lucky until we get our shit to get as a country to make life less treacherous and unforgiving for those with less means. Unpopular here on HN, I guess, but the US is not a meritocratic libertarian tech utopia, some situations don’t have a reliable self-directed escape strategy, and not everything can be fixed by the perfect blog post.

edit: also the audacity to be like “here are some advantages of being underprivileged that you can leverage” is its own headache entire… “you won’t have to unlearn as many wrong ideas about the world”? Absolute nonsense

That's sort of the definition of hubris. Coming to a topic they don't have anywhere near enough knowledge but assuming they know it all because they put some thought into it.

> genuinely awed by the hubris it requires to just plow ahead

that tone sounded more like hubris plus other expletives.

Sometimes abrasiveness is warranted.

Hubris? No, I don't have any amount of confidence to drive me to offer big, system-wide solutions. Because schooling and its issues are incredibly complicated and bring into play much, much more than just what happens inside the walls of a school building. One trivial example: students in Title I schools (read: poverty) have much higher rates of chronic health conditions. That's not really an issue in our wheelhouse, as a school, and yet we very much have to deal with it continuously. Pretty much everything in a student's environment, including their past, affects school, since school is where they spend most of their day. Yet people think you can just ignore all that and focus on teaching specific content or skills. Like kids are, academically, brains in vats, untouched by environment or circumstance.

Sustained initiative from people like yourself, backed by policy and support from the government can do wonders. And I and most people in this thread are grateful for what you do on the ground level already.

Like I can imagine a whole set of specific examples where “there are also advantages” would be incredibly offensive to say so handwavily. If someone tried to tell a teenager their experience with being sexually abused as a prepubescent child “has advantages” I would promptly try to remove that person from being near that or any other child for example.

Are there any good books on this topic that you would recommend? I don't expect you to write a point-by-point rebuttal to every blog post like this that comes along, but I'd sure love to do some of that work myself and well-regarded popular books on the subject are a good place to start.

The Amazon results from a search on "books about systemic issues in inner city public schools" are all over the place. Bonus points if you have a more left-leaning recommendation, because I'm already familiar with the arguments from Lukianoff, Haidt, Sowell, et al and would like to read a good counter to them.

Cptsd, parentification, and physical/emotional/social neglect (abuse too, but it’s more obvious than neglect) are the biggest things to solve based on my lived experiences.

Solving those would solve most of the “school” issues I believe.

The next level would be at the “nickeled and dimed” [0] level. Poor opportunities and little mobility is all most of these kids can look forward to. So instead they spend their downtime distracting themselves from how shitty their lives are or will be.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed

It wasn't all as bad as that, not all of the time, but that characterizes much of it.

You know where & how I "escaped"? With dumb luck and public University scholarships & federal grants. The dumb luck was some quirk of genetics that put enough horsepower in my brain that I could get away with awful learning habits. So I learned fast enough that grades & test scores needed for scholarships & grants allowed me to significantly cut back on the low-skill job hours. Then during college I learned enough that I got a semi-skilled job during the end of my college years, and went on from there.

I've done the research on populations of kids that come from these backgrounds vs. others, and success rates are shitty. And yeah, when I did into the qualitative side I usually see a bit of determination on the part of those who were successful but there's always a lot of dumb luck too.

This genre of pontificating that amounts to "Anyone can do it if they just try hard enough!" completely ignores the fact that the ability to try is itself highly influenced by outside factors beyond an individual or family's control. Problems of this sort can't be solved merely by attempts to motivate the individuals, they have to be accompanied by environmental changes and interventions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36630576

Would also be interested to hear from anyone else who's taught at or attended a high school that's poor or in a rough area, re: those questions.

I’m one of the kids that “made it” out of these situations and it took me until I was over 40 and making FAANG money to START thinking in terms other than “not being like my dad” or “ending up poor”.

> preserving your safety in some way

Even a comment as small as this is assuming a lot in poor areas. The only safety I had was in my own head or in my STEM classes because I could immerse myself in them enough to forget about life outside them.

Look up the problems associated with complex-ptsd, childhood neglect and parentification.

It was all about racing as hard as possible away from where I was, not about looking forward in any way. For most of my twenties my timeframe in planning was weeks or months if I felt confident.

I just got lucky I got hooked on computers and had a couple teachers that praised me for that and math.

In fact, I nearly dropped out in 9th grade to work at a Burger King so I had access to some kind of money. Instead I called CPS and moved in with my narcissistic mother who was at least financially stable. But it was a coin toss at the time.

My first job was in a factory and then in the Army, I didn’t have a plan or wants other than stable living situation and enough money for basic bills.