27 here, working at Google and loving it, saving close to 80% of my monthly take-home pay. Debt free, with investments relatively intact.
However, I've got a friend from college (history major) who's about to turn 26. She's ensconced in grad school now, but previously had a string of temp/secretarial jobs. She wrote this lately:
"What's really got me bugged is the possibility that I might do everything right, I might have been a good student, good friend, good worker, good citizen, and still might not ever have a home or a family. That I might have done everything a "successful" person does,
yet end up with none of the things I truly wanted most. It's not that I have a specific image of that "picket-fence" life. I'm not worried about "having it all"; it's the fact that I might not be able to swing any of it.
"If I knew this in high school, I'd have done more drugs."
It seems like one's success in today's world is directly proportional to your ability to believe that all your elders are lying to you. I was always pretty contemptuous of authority, so I did the end run around all my teachers and school administrators and taught myself stuff - stuff that was useful outside of school, not just inside the academic bubble.
Perhaps this is as it should be - I remember in one upper-level physics class, the professor said "You should be getting most of this out of the textbook" and a student helpfully added "Or in class." The teacher said, "No. If you're only learning from class, you're in trouble. I should be mostly superfluous." The students were basically flabbergasted.
But if your success is proportional to how much you believe authority figures are lying to you, what does that mean for the authority figures? "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." What happens to the social structure when people realize their leaders are basically lying, cheating, and stealing from them?
It seems like one's success in today's world is directly proportional to your ability to believe that all your elders are lying to you.
Rather than outright lying, much of it is due to the generation gap. Parents and other elders are just suggesting what worked for them. Doing everything right by being a good student, good worker, and good citizen was almost a surefire way to a successful, stable life until "Generation X" started to come of age.
But will people my age see it that way? Well-intentioned or not, it's still wrong. All that many of my friends see is that they do exactly what their parents said to - in some cases, spending years of their life for it - and they're doing worse than people who ignored it all and happened to get lucky.
This is a more banal explanation, but majoring in something more useful than history might have helped. My sister is about to graduate with a BA in history and she can't find a job either.
Put another way, I study CS and I've never had a hard time finding work...and I don't owe it to mistrust of my elders.
When I was looking at schools, the advice I got was "Just get a degree. It doesn't matter what it's in - employers like liberal arts as much as technical fields because it shows that you know how to think. While if you get a degree in something specific like engineering, your job will probably end up outsourced to India."
Luckily, I happened to like computers anyway, and learned quite a bit of programming on my own. Plus, by sophomore year I'd basically figured out this was bullshit and employers really do care about concrete skills. But had I not been interested in programming as a hobby, things could've turned out very differently for me. I considered majoring in sociology, after all. ;-)
I have a friend that works at Google Pittsburgh that was a CS major from the University of Pittsburgh. I think Google will interview people from state schools as like as they have a 3.75 GPA.
That's an interesting point. I suspect it depends a lot upon their concrete programming skills as demonstrated in the interview. It's funny how my first reaction - even as someone who always says "Your degree doesn't define you, and talent will find jobs no matter where you went to school" - was to assume that the Stanford history major is much smarter than the CSU Chico CS major, and just happened to pick the wrong major. But that's not necessarily true: maybe the guy from Chico is a Zawinski-class programming genius that happened to grow up in a family with no money and no college expectations. The point of the interview is to tease out circumstances like that so talented people from bad situations can rise to the top anyway.
It's also interesting because I know some Amherst history majors that I could never imagine getting a job at Google. But I also know an Amherst Asian Languages & Civ major who does work at Google, albeit in a non-technical position. Yet I don't know anyone at Google from a CSU: my friends here are from Rice/Brown/Brown/Amherst/Stanford/Berkeley/ Stanford/UChic/Cornell/Berkeley/Berkeley/ CMU/Duke/UCSD.
I got into Google from Iowa State. But then, I was an employee referral because of someone I met interning at Microsoft. I don't think I would have gotten the Microsoft interview coming from Iowa State if I wasn't a girl. Microsoft hired four interns from Iowa State that year, all female.
My thinking is that the CSU grad won't even get an interview unless he or she knows someone at Google. Whereas the Stanford history grad will get an interview just on virtue of being a Stanford grad. However, I have no idea and wasn't trying to make a point - was genuinely curious about their filtering process.
They both have poor chances, but I'd say the CS major has a better chance, unless the history major has taken enough CS classes to be able to be useful to Google.
Studying history gives you perspective. You don't need to major in it, but the heart of historical research consists of analyzing all the known evidence from a time/event and trying to logically argue a case for why things happened as they did, and/or finding the weaknesses in others' interpretations. It's not about memorizing dates.
The mainstream in computer science is incredibly ignorant of its own history, and burns a ton of energy reinventing the wheel every few years. (The old school Unix tools still work, for example, they're just fast as heck now because they were written to work on computes with about as much processing power as a bar of soap has these days.)
I'd go so far as to say unix command line tools work much better than the window-based alternatives. Or at least I use them more as time goes on, and use nautilus less.
However, I've got a friend from college (history major) who's about to turn 26. She's ensconced in grad school now, but previously had a string of temp/secretarial jobs. She wrote this lately:
"What's really got me bugged is the possibility that I might do everything right, I might have been a good student, good friend, good worker, good citizen, and still might not ever have a home or a family. That I might have done everything a "successful" person does, yet end up with none of the things I truly wanted most. It's not that I have a specific image of that "picket-fence" life. I'm not worried about "having it all"; it's the fact that I might not be able to swing any of it.
"If I knew this in high school, I'd have done more drugs."
It seems like one's success in today's world is directly proportional to your ability to believe that all your elders are lying to you. I was always pretty contemptuous of authority, so I did the end run around all my teachers and school administrators and taught myself stuff - stuff that was useful outside of school, not just inside the academic bubble.
Perhaps this is as it should be - I remember in one upper-level physics class, the professor said "You should be getting most of this out of the textbook" and a student helpfully added "Or in class." The teacher said, "No. If you're only learning from class, you're in trouble. I should be mostly superfluous." The students were basically flabbergasted.
But if your success is proportional to how much you believe authority figures are lying to you, what does that mean for the authority figures? "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." What happens to the social structure when people realize their leaders are basically lying, cheating, and stealing from them?