I swear, there should be a basic course in the fundamental concepts of supply and demand required as a part of graduating middle school. I overheard a kid (teenager) talking the other day about how he was going to work for a big record label finding talent. I wanted to shatter his little world by asking him: "do you know how much d--k you're going to have to s--k to work your way up in that kind of job?"
The job market is weak, but there are jobs out there. Not just programming. Nursing, accounting, etc. Tons of baby boomers getting ready to retire means opportunities for young people. But those opportunities are not in oversubscribed professions like media and music.
Before we had our daughter, my wife, being from the west coast, was like 'oh, you shouldn't put too much pressure on kids--they should be what they want.' I, being Asian, thought exactly the opposite. But now that the baby is here, my wife has done a total 180. "Penn undergrad then med school" is her new plan. Like a good little half-Asian.
This comment really rubs me the wrong way, probably because I was raised by two foreign parents who had a similar plan for me. From the day I was born, their wish was for me to carry on the torch of physician-ship to the point where I was threatened to be cut off from all their support if I had chosen to pursue a career I was more interested in.
Medicine is great and interesting, but I'd be lying if I said I don't obsessively regret exploring my other interests on a daily basis. I'm now $200k in the hole and trying desperately to incorporate my current medical education with my other self taught skills that I wish I'd gone to school to study. And lately I've been stressed out beyond belief as I need to make the decision whether to fully commit to this career and dedicate another 5 years of my life to grueling medical training that'll yield a comfortable living, or to jump ship after graduation to follow a dream that might very likely leave me broke, and maybe happier. All because my folks had a plan.
It greatly bothers me that rayiner's post is showing up as 'dead', presumably because it was either downvoted too much or just flagged too much.
Anyway. So while we're all giving out examples and anecdotes, here's mine: I'm from an Asian family of 5, I was the only one who was given the 'follow your dreams!' advice out of the 5 (there's a long/funny story behind this). I did end up being the only one who went to school for a non-STEM field (literature/music).
Guess who's the only one unemployed out of the 5. Guess who wishes who was forced to stick to a STEM field? If I have children, damn right I'll force them toward STEM field, enroll them to a school with reputable robotics programs, expose them to folks who're in engineering/medical fields, etc.
And lastly, because the idea of censorship doesn't sit well with me, here is what rayiner posted:
My parents had a plan for me and my brother growing up: I'd be an engineer and he'd be a doctor. At some point when we were old enough, we asserted yourselves, and I went into law and he went into banking. But in retrospect I'm glad my parents didn't just tell me "follow your dreams!" If it were up to me as a teenager, I'd just sit around all day masturbating and eating Cheetos. Kids need more direction than that.
Here is the thing about kids: they're not very smart. And they don't know it. My infant is convinced that if she sucks hard enough on my arm milk will come out. At 17 I was no less misguided just about different things.
You can always quit your professional job that puts food on the table to follow a more capricious path. But when your teenage dreams collapse against the hard ground of reality, you can't usually do the opposite.
Couldn't that have been easily avoided with "Follow your dreams, but here's what you're likely to get paid with each of your career choices..." advice?
My sister and I are both good little half-Asians. My (white) mom eventually won the childrearing battle, so we were raised under the "Follow your dreams, we just want you to be happy" advice. Guess what? We both ended up in high-paying STEM careers anyway. Why? Because we both liked science anyway, and we were aware of (but not beholden to) average career salaries for the various fields we were looking at.
Now, there were a lot of times this could have gone otherwise. My sister almost double-majored in anthropology; I almost majored in philosophy or sociology. Oh, and I almost dropped/flunked out of college twice. But we didn't, because we had this background knowledge of what the real world was like and were somehow able to make smart decisions anyway.
There seems to be this assumption in this thread that teenagers are stupid. I reject that - I certainly wasn't stupid as a teenager. Of my teenage friends that were stupid, it was usually because their parents were stupid, and so the parents wouldn't be able to make better decisions than them anyway. Rather, teenagers are ignorant - they lack life experience, so they often don't have the full picture. The cure for that is to provide all the relevant information and then let your kid make their decision, it's not to make the decision for them.
I think a lot of Asian parents in particular have good intentions in this regard but don't understand the realities of a career in medicine. The hours in medicine are brutal, the pay is much less than most people believe, and virtually everyone goes massively into debt to finance their medical educations. Going into engineering or computer programing is a much surer route to financial success.
Still, these parents' hearts are in the right place. "Follow your bliss" is a great plan when you don't have to pay for it. A more responsible plan, if you don't want a profession like medicine or law, is "Develop a useful trade for income and pursue your passions on the side." If your trade involves things like computers, sales, or marketing, it can often contribute to success in your passion projects as well.
Just curious, are you $200K in debt from going to both public undergrad and public med schools?
In general, many people complain of high med school debt, but if one looks closely the reason is that they choose private over public and not with their choice to go into medicine per se.
My wife (is younger than I am) graduated within the last 8 years from PUBLIC medical school and has roughly 200k in debt when we got married although I'm not certain what that debt is from or how much was already paid off etc.
I had asked about both PUBLIC UNDERGRAD and PUBLIC MEDICAL SCHOOL.
State University of New York Undergrad including all expenses is about $22K per year (just checked) or about $90K
The NY State Med School Tuition is about $30K per year or $120K + living expenses.
So for around $250K one can get both Undergrad and Medical Education.
A number of people graduating from medical school have large debt precisely because they do not choose to go to both public undergrad AND public medical school.
4 years undergrad private school can be about $250 K for tuition and living costs. Thus, by choosing to attend public undergrad and medical school can cost the same as private undergrad alone.
He did say "200k in debt when we got married," which suggests to me at least that he is talking about all of her debt, from undergrad and medical school.
Still, $250k is a shitload of debt. Putting back a solid $2k/month towards the principal (not even counting interest here) would still take a little over ten years to pay it off.
Interesting what parenthood does to your thinking isn't it?
There is a high probability that at some point you wife will have to choose whether she wants a relationship with her daughter or she wants a daughter physician. I don't know how to characterize it but its especially hard on mothers and daughters in my observations. Of course your daughter could fall in love with the idea of being a doctor and poof, problem solved. Not to worry there is a lot of runway between now and then. Just keep your eyes open.
That said, there has always been an amazing amount of externalization (not sure if that is a thing) with kids who seem to go through the process of picking a future that would translate them into the person they want to be, for reasons that they may or may not accurately perceive. I did a Big Brothers thing in the early 80's with young men trying to find their way. They often aspired to being professional athletes. Some truly loved the game, they thought up strategies, they figured out shots they missed or things they could do better, some were focused on how many hot chicks really would just sleep with you because you were like, famous or something. Clearly, young men in the latter category weren't going to succeed against the guys in the first group.
To summarize my point, passion in a highly contested field, gives you the strength to reach your potential in spite of the setbacks. And when your kids start talking about what they want to be when they grow up, its always good to double check how they arrived at that answer.
Your daughter will have dreams, and passions, and misconceptions. As her parent your goal should be to let her find her passions, see through the misconceptions and realize her dreams. Doing that in the teen years is especially tough.
Your delivery is a bit crass, but I think your basic point is good: students need to hear about supply and demand in the job market.
I think they're mostly told "follow your dreams," "do what you love," etc. Those are good messages, too, in a different way, but they need to be given a realistic balance with what skills are marketable.
Personally, I learned that painful lesson by getting a post-college journalism job that paid exactly what my pre-college summer factory job had paid. "Yay for an education," I thought. And that was before the recession. For mostly unrelated reasons, I ended up in programming, but I don't want my kids to have to learn the same lesson for themselves.
One issue with my upbringing is that my parents told me to follow my dreams but failed to convey that following my dreams would still require intense dedication and endless hard work. I don't know if this is everyone's experience, but "follow your dreams" can sound a lot like "you can dream and want your way into wonderful things if you want it enough and you dream big enough." When in fact the appropriate lesson is more like "if your dreams are ambitious and in a glamorous profession there's a good chance you will have to work even harder than the med school kids unless you're incredibly lucky and don't count on being incredibly lucky."
I became a professional programmer for mostly pragmatic reasons (though I've always had an interest in programming), but I believe the lessons I learned as a programmer will serve me well when I eventually take another serious shot at arts/entertainment (if you can even call my first attempt serious). A lot of the hard work that goes into arts and entertainment are intentionally kept away from us, in part because it would strip away some of the "magic" and in part because a lot of people don't care how things work. As a younger person I would read books or watch movies and think I could write or direct works like that because I'm clever and entertaining and a good writer. After a few years hacking I know that being clever is worthless without great habits. I believe having that sort of mentality will take you a long way in most fields.
It's fine to encourage your child to excel. But please don't plan out her life. It's an exercise in futility, not to mention the fact that you usually get the opposite results.
My advice runs like this: find a trade. Find something that pays. If your parents and your personal net worth is not sufficient to not have to work at all, you really are not doing favors to your future self by getting a degree in something that won't give you a net bonus.
Doing what you love is nice. But let's talk about the reality, which is often, "Doing what you love as you sink into bankruptcy and having to take multiple jobs that exploit you so you can eke out some hours per week doing that hypothetical loved job". I heard a joke lately: a successful musician is one that only has to have a part-time job. (I have known multiple people in this situation).
Let's say you want to marry and have kids, or own a house, or travel to Africa/Asia/etc. How do you accomplish this by paying the student loans every month which eat up your savings? (They aren't wiped out via bankruptcy in the US). Do you defer your life? That's no good. Do you subject your family to poverty to fulfil your dreams? Do you just hope that your family doesn't wind up with a chronic medical condition(s)? In my opinion - and I admit, I'm a STEM person - it's irresponsible to not examine your desires and determine if you can pay the bills with this career at 35-40 years of age, with the usual responsibilities.
I'd rather see more people being plumbers, electricians, etc, and doing their dance, music, etc in the evenings than see yet another art/humanities major working three jobs and wishing their career would get started. I am all for education in the humanities, but it needs to be pushed back into high school more so that everyone gets a liberal (free person) arts education and has the freedom to pursue some 'higher' eduction or not without feeling as if they lost out on learning the 'soft & creative side' of things. At least that's my opinion!
I am truly blessed in that I can do something I moderately enjoy (programming) and get paid relatively well for it. That's a rare position to be in.
I see your point, but I think there's a danger in trying to prescribe too specifically. The risk is that you end up saying "hey, this field was in great demand and had great pay when I was your age, go do that!".
Things change, by the time your daughter is of work age there will likely be new field opened up that don't exist today at all and perhaps some that exist now will have disappeared, shrunk or become much less lucrative.
I think there's wisdom to encouraging kids to really think about their choices though in more detail than "this sounds cool!".
A good rule of thumb is to ask "what job would you want to get from studying this, and if that doesn't pan out what is the backup plan?" If the backup plan is "I will teach" then proceed with caution.
Med school is probably all right. Of course robotics and advancements in AI are going to take away some of these jobs (personally I'd prefer IBM Watson to look at my genetic data and results of the blood tests, rather than some human doctor), but there would certainly be some jobs in medicine.
Betting against AI has been a winning play since the history of AI. AI isn't any closer to replacing a human doctor today than it was in the 1980's. Maybe some day, but we're talking fundamental breakthroughs in the field, not incremental advances from existing techniques.
True, but look at the timeline for your daughter. Assuming she was recently born, and, given that few from a school like Penn would want to be a rural family physician, assuming she's going into an elite specialty (cardiology, neurology, oncology, etc), she's THREE DECADES away from getting started in her line of work. And that's a generous projection. More likely, she'll need to be hyperspecialized, an expert in some obscure niche area like cancers of the eye, in which case she would need more and more education, and I doubt Google's engineers are going to just chill out and wait for her.
Not trying to be a downer here. I'd rather the world have more aspiring doctors than talent agents, but let's also respect the march of progress, and acknowledge the cruel fate of all that stands in its way.
I understand the point your making, and I don't disagree with you, but let's say I'm skeptical of Google's ability to do anything other than help my find my porn more easily. AI has just been such a miserable failure for decades. Indeed, Google's big advancement came from incorporating human intelligence (encoding in the graph of links between pages) into the search process! I'm not saying it's not going to happen, but rather that it's like manned missions to mars. Always just 20 years away...
As an aside, being a rural doctor is amazing. They're in very short supply, and therefore the salaries are correspondingly quite high.
Watson is not AI. It can't reason. It's a very big, very fast search engine with access to a ton of documents. It's not based on any theoretical breakthroughs, just the natural advancements in computing power. It's very useful, but something that can't reason isn't going to create the sea-change people think will come out of AI, and Watson doesn't get us any closer to that goal than we were decades ago.
I'll give an example. Google's search engine has been a hugely successful application of certain AI concepts. But it is not AI. It can use the link structure of the web to help you find documents, but it could not, for example, recreate the link structure between a set of documents.
Well, you can call it whatever you like. But, I'd certainly prefer google self-driving car to a taxicab with a human driver. And I don't see how is that much different from a robot performing a routine operation by the way. So here goes these surgeon jobs, alongside with the cab drivers.
...no, you wouldn't. It is untested in plenty of environments right now, and being able to drive around Palo Alto guided without killing anyone is nice but not nearly enough.
One day, of course, it'll be amazing and safe. But AI has a history of its promising advances being perpetually pushed to the future.
I love this comment. This is exactly how parents need to be thinking. Yes, being a doctor is a relatively safe career choice now, but your kid is going to be graduating from college in a decade...
A decade ago, I was posting on web forums looking exactly like HN on a 1.9 GHz P4 laptop. My laptop has gotten smaller since then, and my cell phone faster, but the world doesn't look that different.
Expert systems of this kind have existed for decades now, and what Watson does could have been done, on a smaller scale commensurate with CPU/memory power of the time, in the 1990's.
It is a question not of system existence, but of performance relative to your average doctor. And once commercially deployed systems would start outperforming your average doctors these high-paying doctor jobs are bound to change somehow.
The answer to that question was a definite no, some 20 years back. And no, some 10 years back. Now, the answer is yes. And in some 20 years it will be resounding yes. Why? First, because medicine gets less and less 'shaman based' and more and more evidence based. Some 20 years back you could't scan a region of your DNA and figure out that you have a particular versions of couple of proteins that wrecking havoc in your particular case. Now you can. Second, there've been improvements in statistical models and natural language processing. To the level that computers can actually outperform humans in these murky areas. An IBM success with Jeopardy is a good example. Combine these two, take into account that computers are less likely to overlook hard evidence (like DNA data, incopatibilities with medications, etc), and you would also want an expert system to look at your health data, diagnose, recommend treatments and monitor the progress.
Either way. I still think that a "med school is probably Ok" could be a good advice to a kid.
I understand that this is HN and people are optimistic about the potential of technology, but betting against technology changing everything tends to be a winning bet more often than the otherwise.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an aerospace engineer. I read books in the 80's talking about how we'd have manned Mars missions in 25 years. I actually went to engineering school for aerospace, but by then I had realized humans wouldn't go into space in a real way within my career.
Is it possible that some derivative of Watson is going to replace doctors? Maybe. Or maybe it'll just change what doctors do for a living in the same way auto-pilot changed what pilots do for a living.
My bet is that 20 years from now isn't going to look that dramatically different from 20 years ago, in a fundamental way. I remember 1993 (a year before President Clinton's first term and a year before Amazon was founded) and it wasn't all that different. We made phone calls and sent faxes instead of using e-mails, there was no Twitter, Facebook, or smart phones, but life was pretty similar.
Dude, I look at 1993 and compare it to today and am totally amazed at how much life has changed.
In 1993, your circle of friends was pretty much limited to the people in your town. Maybe you had a pen pal, but that was considered to be a rare novelty and took real work to maintain. Now, I have friends all over the world, that I keep up on their day-to-day lives. When an earthquake hit SF in 1989, my reaction was "Oh, that's too bad, I feel bad for anyone who died. I'm sure we'll be talking about this in school today." When an earthquake hit Japan in 2011, my reaction was "Has anyone heard from Jennifer yet? Is she okay? I know she was in Sendai..." And I had friends all over the globe - India, Colombia, DC, Boston, Morocco, LA - asking the same thing.
In 1993, if you were meeting a friend for an event at an unfamiliar place, you called them up beforehand, specified an exact time and place that you would be, wrote down the directions or brought along a road map, and prayed they would be there when they said they would. If you got lost, you had to pull over until you could look at the map and memorize new directions. If you couldn't find each other in the crowd, you were out of luck. If you hit traffic on the way in, you'd hope they didn't think they were being stood up and apologize profusely. Now, your calendar pops open a notification when it's time to leave, taking into account traffic. You hit a button, and your cell phone navigates to the destination, automatically rerouting you if you take a wrong turn. You can't find your friend, you call or text them. You don't know what they look like, you call them and see whose phone rings.
In 1993, if you wanted to start a company, you worked your butt off for a big employer to learn the ropes of your industry. You spread your network as far as it could go. You sought out mentors. You begged for funding. And then you hired lots of people to make your dreams come true, and if your dreams were wrong, they all got laid off a couple years later. Now, you Google [startup]. You read a bunch of blogs. You download lots of open-source software. You build something, you launch it, you post it on Hacker News and a bunch of blogs, and if your dreams were wrong, you've wasted maybe a year of your life.
If your life isn't all that different from 1993, it's more likely because you're still living in the past than because the world is the same as 1993. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." For some people, the world is wildly different from what they expected 20 years ago.
Population aging and people will always abuse their body and create a need for medical care delivered by a human. And as people live to older ages the base individual becomes more likely to need medical care (wish I had a better way to put this) whereas in years past that person would have died at an earlier age and not required any medical care at all.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic with that last paragraph, but if you're going to forcefully mold your child like that it will either have the opposite effect or they will go along with your plan and grow up with no ambition and no self-determination. There is a balance between doing what will put food on the table and what their desires are, and if either of the two are out of balance, they will not lead a self-fulfilling life. Your method is essentially telling kids to think inside the box and do what will get you the most money.
And what's the deal with the weird Asian stereotype obsession.
Don't we also have a glut of doctors and lawyers? Going to medical or law school is no longer a golden ticket, especially considering the costs involved.
There is a huge shortage of doctors in the U.S. and it getting worse as the need for doctors goes up as the population ages.
There is indeed a glut of JD's and MBA's, but even within that supply and demand plays a role. There is no glut of say Harvard JD's or Wharton MBA's. You can tell, for the price of taking the LSAT or GMAT, what you odds of getting a job after graduation will be. No such assurances in fields like media or advertising, where luck plays a huge role in getting a job and no just pedigree.
There are shortages in areas, but often those are in smaller cities and rural areas. Primary care is probably the least palatable medical position to be in at this time. If you want to go into specialized medicine, there are indeed bigger opportunities, but often bigger time and money investment requirements. Nurses are also taking over some of the responsibilities of classically trained doctors.
Medicine is probably one of the more stressful work environment to be in, often with work/life balance suffering, so while positions may pay well, it may not actually lead to a happy life.
Politics and luck play a part in practically every career field. Having parents who can help support and bankroll you into a high-end medical or law school is lucky in and of itself.
> There are shortages in areas, but often those are in smaller cities and rural areas.
It's true there is no shortage of doctors wanting to live in Manhattan or San Francisco, but most of the country lives in smaller cities and rural areas. Even parts of Chicago have doctor shortages: http://www.uchospitals.edu/news/2013/20130227-doctor-shortag...
> There is a huge shortage of doctors in the U.S. and it getting worse as the need for doctors goes up as the population ages.
This is true to an extent - the shortage is in primary care, but at the moment there are two issues with the field: the huge costs of medical training in the US and the fact that the cost of healthcare in the US is twice that of the rest of the OECD nations, tendency rising. Something will have to be done, but it's impossible to predict what is going to give.
Combined with the fact that medical training lasts ten years, it is an uncertain proposition.
Shortages are often in poor areas, rural areas or smaller cities/towns which results in less pay. Shortages can probably also be found in specialized medicine. Nurses are encroaching on more general areas such as primary care, and there has been a definite upswing in the amount of people in nursing schools.
Parents should probably shift from just saying their child is going to be a doctor or a lawyer, and focus on what kind of doctor or lawyer their child is going to be, as that could influence their salary and quality of life many times over.
tldr; teach kids that they can't have it all; happiness is #1 in importance but money is a VERY close #2.
I'm a young Asian guy with very white-washed parents. Many statements below are generalizations.
Two lessons from my parents: (1) money is very important and (2) you must be excellent in your career (in that order).
Chinese, specifically, are all about wishing wealth onto one another. Although too much focus on wealth accumulation can be a bad thing, it is at least a "good problem". Many of my peers have the intelligence and ambition but villainize the concept of doing something for the money. The article itself implies that these 20somethings are the victims to their wealth-accumulating bosses (who, from the description of it, are entrepreneurs who run very high risk operations). Too many upper-middle children brought up in the early 90s have seen money's ugly side: divorce, Wall-Street, Jim Carrey's Liar Liar etc. These 90s kids are brought up by overworked parents, anti-money tenured teachers and non-profit workers. The media and the occupy movement have made it worse by victimizing these 20somethings encouraging more people to villainize wealth.
It's also important to note that the parents are out of touch with today's job market. Parents of today's 20-somethings feel like it was ONLY their hard work that got them there and consequently that their children are entitled to pursue their dreams. They forget that their generation had unions, pensions, government jobs, low interest rates and most importantly the creation of dual income. Today's 20somethings face those debts, specialized jobs, dying industries, outsourcing and lots of competition.
That being said, I think parenting for the next generation (or even re-educating 20somethings now) it's all about a balance. I don't think you have to push your daughter to be a physician necessarily. Young people just have to understand and appreciate the value of money which means teaching them about taxes, the value of health benefits, financing, leasing and investing. With that in mind, they can find a good solution or at least a compromise.
EXAMPLE USING ABOVE RANT:
Daughter wants to be a ballerina. Explain to her that the prima ballerina (#1 dancer) earns less than $140,000 per year and that her career is very short. The expected pay for a ballerina falls short of $10,000/yr. If she wants to do ballet, she can find her another career that has better earning potential and dance as a hobby.
It's unfortunate that the word "hobby" carries such negative connotations. A hobby is something that you do for the art, because you want to do it. The ability to engage in hobbies was once considered a mark of cultured aristocracy.
My advice to my kids would be: if you want to pursue something like art, dance, writing, music, etc., get a practical no-nonsense job. Look for something with sane work hours and that's a seller's market labor-wise. "Boring" fields like accounting are a good bet. Then live below your means, save, and pursue your art seriously. Make a commitment to it above other things. Then, if someday you advance to the point that you can support yourself via your art, you can dump the day job. But even if that never happens you didn't sacrifice your happiness.
What a utilitarian way of looking at things. Maybe the teenager won't be some top-dog talent scout, but you sure can find work in the music industry if that's your thing. Or taking care of sick dogs, teaching infants, whatever floats your boat.
It will make you less than an ideal cog, so you probably won't make as much money as you could in other professions, and you'll probably struggle at first rather than being recruited. You might struggle a great deal, in fact. But if your aim is not riches and you can squeeze to put food on the table, so what?
I hope that consideration was your reason for skipping the lecture on fellatio, and not mere propriety.
I think OP's comments about being a good Asian parent are pretty silly, but the kind of wishy-washy "everything works out in the end" reasoning that you use here is exactly what has gotten so many young people stuck in the position described in the NYTimes article. One must to consider the economics of things to plan for the future. You cannot get a liberal arts degree on the hope that things will work out. Well, you can, but then you're going to spend a decade in unpaid internships before you finally suck it up and learn to program.
It seems like snake-oil education is culpable, with folks enrolling in college for nebulous reasons. Young people are having problems because of student debt tied to degrees that aren't doing anything for them. The "everybody should aspire to college" ethos is dying quickly, but not without collateral damage.
I completely agree about useless degrees, but we're talking about 18-year-olds smart enough to get into college. They are responsible for wisely choosing what to study.
"But now that the baby is here, my wife has done a total 180. "Penn undergrad then med school" is her new plan"
Keep in mind that it's rather difficult to predict the job market (and payscale) 25 to 30 years in advance (assuming "baby" now, undergrad, then medical school, residency, intern etc, loans, then employment).
As an aside, back when I went to Wharton (undergrad) which was a long long time ago entrepreneurship (my major) wasn't exactly viewed as a serious path to take. And Wharton at the time had the number 1 UG business program.
The job market is weak, but there are jobs out there. Not just programming. Nursing, accounting, etc. Tons of baby boomers getting ready to retire means opportunities for young people. But those opportunities are not in oversubscribed professions like media and music.
Before we had our daughter, my wife, being from the west coast, was like 'oh, you shouldn't put too much pressure on kids--they should be what they want.' I, being Asian, thought exactly the opposite. But now that the baby is here, my wife has done a total 180. "Penn undergrad then med school" is her new plan. Like a good little half-Asian.