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As a young person in the United States, the main concern is that if you aren't one of the greatest at what you do, you'll be doomed to a life of increasing pove

As a young person in the United States, the main concern is that if you aren't one of the greatest at what you do, you'll be doomed to a life of increasing poverty: food derived from vegetable oils and chemically bleached wheat, apartments of grey laminate flooring and concrete, crime, people who derive their actions from social media, a 60 minute commute---as the real world: nature, people who are present, quality food, becomes increasingly out of reach.

chr15m 1y ago
"the greatest at what you do" is by definition a zero sum framing that will lead 99.999% of participants to view their lives as a failure. It is literally madness to make this your goal. The alternative is to choose to be very good at what you do, which has a good chance of success if you try hard at something you care about.
- kaiwenwang 1y ago
  I feel like very good isn't enough as employers want the best candidates but not the average candidates, and if you're sort of in the middle then the so-so companies don't want you either because they think you'll leave. Something about the increased social stratification of our times, which also has to do with increased transportation and communication. Might also depend on your locale. Plumber in Germany might be better than SWE in Texas.
  - chr15m 1y ago
    Hiring is not a zero sum game (growth of the company/economy through good hiring means more positions are created). I've hired software developers before and what I was looking for was somebody who commits code that works and is good quality. I don't care about their ranking on some imaginary programmer hierarchy. You probably don't want to work at a company where they do.
    - kaiwenwang 1y ago
      No, not a fan of Leetcode either, nor imaginary measures of social prestige. We may not necessarily disagree with any of each other's points, but lack of mutual context and having different lived experience makes our words have different meaning.
      - chr15m 1y ago
        Yeah true. Thank you.
    - raddan 1y ago
      Not to mention that motivated humans are amazing learning machines. The supposed trend of replacing entry-level programmers with AI is pure insanity. Sure, code of indeterminate quality (let’s assume for a moment that it is good) will get written. But a company is its people, and you are shutting the door to new ideas. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the neophyte, who was maybe considered a bit of a dope after they were hired, in their second or third year stumble on a great idea that energizes everybody. People can change. A good organization recognizes this and nurtures them so that both change for the better.
      - chr15m 1y ago
        Good point. Good hires have the potential to become even better.
  - hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
    >employers want the best candidates but not the average candidates, This is just flatly false. Employers want candidates at all ability levels given a competitive price. You can be pretty bad at your job and still have a steady stream of work if you're cheap, for example. The Hacker News crowd loves to poop on these guys because we are almost by definition a quasi-professional platform, but we are far from the median take on this. >Might also depend on your locale. Plumber in Germany might be better than SWE in Texas. If you truly believe this, and think the difference is substantial, make a 5 year plan and move to Germany. Talk is cheap.
    - kaiwenwang 1y ago
      Added you on LinkedIn if you'd like to chat about your experiences moving to Finland. Yes, I might've been too non-specific with my wording. My communication style tends to link disparate topics together, which seems too hyperbole when people read into the words themselves.
      - hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
        I'm always happy to talk about it. For the benefit of future readers with less context, you can model my move to Finland and Europe more generally to a first approximation as a trade. I gave up somewhere in the ballpark of $500,000 in expected post-tax income over the first ~5 years of my career by moving away from the US right after graduating from college. In exchange I married the love of my life a few years earlier than I would have otherwise, and we got our little family started a few years earlier too. To me this was and is a fantastic way to spend $500,000. To most other people their heads would explode merely by realizing such a trade could be on the table, and so they never get serious enough about either money or love to face it head on.
pragmatic 1y ago
Woah that’s bleak. You don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other people the bear is chasing. The bar is so low in corporate America you could trip on it. Just try to be halfway competent, do something useful at work, read a book or two about your industry. You’re already way ahead. Don’t fall for the hacker news bs. Lots of millionaires out here that never had a successful startup.
- kaiwenwang 1y ago
  I've tried to be as accurate as I perceive it, and the descriptions of the environment are accurate to the locale of most of the United States. If the bar is that low, then the environment is sure to be like the first place I described.
  - danparsonson 1y ago
    "Most of the United States"? You're covering an awfully big area there - how much of it have you actually seen for yourself vs learned about second hand through news and social media? As for the skills bar, if you're intent on being hired by the likes of OpenAI then sure, you'll need to aim high, but for the majority of jobs, being reasonably good, friendly, and reliable will definitely be sufficient; the challenge is then mainly about seeming slightly more appealing than the other candidates for a position.
    - asdf6969 1y ago
      Sufficient is irrelevant when the interviews are 10x harder than the actual job. Employment is a competition. How else can you explain the credentials arms race for low skilled labour?
    - kaiwenwang 1y ago
      As an adult I lived in Georgia, South Carolina, Ohio for internships and visited the major cities: Seattle, SF, Chicago, NYC, Boston, DC, Dallas, Philly. Most of the United States is suburbanized, and if you want to rent an apartment near the city it tends to be that gray laminate style I've described for $1500/mo with roommates. Most of the people who managed to have a family in a major city area are doing well for themselves, prior to asset and rent inflation because they have accessible goods and knowledge to them. I didn't even know what IKEA was until age 18. Because the national system of laws and transportation forms a certain culture, Costco regardless of the location is the same. The STOP signs in the United States are all the same. The processing of foods all follow certain guidelines. There are certain stores existing up to the limits of the locale, and only certain producers because society has centralized so heavily. So I think my claim of generality is reasonable.
Aurornis 1y ago
> As a young person in the United States, the main concern is that if you aren't one of the greatest at what you do, you'll be doomed to a life of increasing poverty In psychology there’s a concept called splitting, or dichotomous thinking, where a person only thinks of things in concepts of their extremes. Either the most extreme good outcome, or the most extreme bad outcome. They might see people or public figures as either amazing or evil. The Wikipedia page has a primer on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology) But you don’t need a Wikipedia article or psychology concepts to realize that there are more outcomes than extreme success or increasing poverty. I’m fascinated by how these concepts that were once relegated to psychology and therapy have started to become commonplace among young people on the internet. They’re not seen as failure modes in thinking, but rather an obvious conclusion from whatever they’ve been consuming so much of online. The comment above is a prime example. Even the obsession over “food derived from vegetable oils and chemically bleached wheat” is a confusing conclusion for me, someone who has had no problem avoiding wheat products and eating healthy on a budget with even minimal effort. The food topic is particularly strange because it’s not that hard to learn basic cooking skills, buy cheap vegetable, and cook quick and easy meals. Yet I continue talking to young people who simultaneously fret about food quality while filling their diets with nothing but processed and fast foods, many of which are more expensive than cooking basic fast meals. I don’t know what else to say, other than the above style of thinking is, in my experience, indicative of what happens when someone collects too much perspective from the internet and not enough from the real world. Given the context of this comment section, I can only recommend trying to reevaluate, disconnect from the internet a little more, and make an effort to reconnect with the real world
- zub-twin 1y ago
  It is not a new outlook, soylent green—is people.
- alexslobodnik 1y ago
  The binary perspective gives an excuse to give up. The reasonable perspective does not. It demonstrates that though agency is limited it does exist. Our life outcomes are connected to our actions. For many their circumstances make this an unpleasant thought, thus binary thinking protect their self-image. For some that's all they have left.
iddan 1y ago
I’m not from the US, but from my visits there and continuous reading of the living conditions in America this comment seems painfully true. As someone living in Israel I’m grateful we don’t live in those extremes.

chr15m 1y ago

"the greatest at what you do" is by definition a zero sum framing that will lead 99.999% of participants to view their lives as a failure. It is literally madness to make this your goal. The alternative is to choose to be very good at what you do, which has a good chance of success if you try hard at something you care about.

kaiwenwang 1y ago
I feel like very good isn't enough as employers want the best candidates but not the average candidates, and if you're sort of in the middle then the so-so companies don't want you either because they think you'll leave. Something about the increased social stratification of our times, which also has to do with increased transportation and communication. Might also depend on your locale. Plumber in Germany might be better than SWE in Texas.
- chr15m 1y ago
  Hiring is not a zero sum game (growth of the company/economy through good hiring means more positions are created). I've hired software developers before and what I was looking for was somebody who commits code that works and is good quality. I don't care about their ranking on some imaginary programmer hierarchy. You probably don't want to work at a company where they do.
  - kaiwenwang 1y ago
    No, not a fan of Leetcode either, nor imaginary measures of social prestige. We may not necessarily disagree with any of each other's points, but lack of mutual context and having different lived experience makes our words have different meaning.
    - chr15m 1y ago
      Yeah true. Thank you.
  - raddan 1y ago
    Not to mention that motivated humans are amazing learning machines. The supposed trend of replacing entry-level programmers with AI is pure insanity. Sure, code of indeterminate quality (let’s assume for a moment that it is good) will get written. But a company is its people, and you are shutting the door to new ideas. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the neophyte, who was maybe considered a bit of a dope after they were hired, in their second or third year stumble on a great idea that energizes everybody. People can change. A good organization recognizes this and nurtures them so that both change for the better.
    - chr15m 1y ago
      Good point. Good hires have the potential to become even better.
- hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
  >employers want the best candidates but not the average candidates, This is just flatly false. Employers want candidates at all ability levels given a competitive price. You can be pretty bad at your job and still have a steady stream of work if you're cheap, for example. The Hacker News crowd loves to poop on these guys because we are almost by definition a quasi-professional platform, but we are far from the median take on this. >Might also depend on your locale. Plumber in Germany might be better than SWE in Texas. If you truly believe this, and think the difference is substantial, make a 5 year plan and move to Germany. Talk is cheap.
  - kaiwenwang 1y ago
    Added you on LinkedIn if you'd like to chat about your experiences moving to Finland. Yes, I might've been too non-specific with my wording. My communication style tends to link disparate topics together, which seems too hyperbole when people read into the words themselves.
    - hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
      I'm always happy to talk about it. For the benefit of future readers with less context, you can model my move to Finland and Europe more generally to a first approximation as a trade. I gave up somewhere in the ballpark of $500,000 in expected post-tax income over the first ~5 years of my career by moving away from the US right after graduating from college. In exchange I married the love of my life a few years earlier than I would have otherwise, and we got our little family started a few years earlier too. To me this was and is a fantastic way to spend $500,000. To most other people their heads would explode merely by realizing such a trade could be on the table, and so they never get serious enough about either money or love to face it head on.

pragmatic 1y ago

Woah that’s bleak. You don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other people the bear is chasing. The bar is so low in corporate America you could trip on it. Just try to be halfway competent, do something useful at work, read a book or two about your industry. You’re already way ahead. Don’t fall for the hacker news bs. Lots of millionaires out here that never had a successful startup.

kaiwenwang 1y ago
I've tried to be as accurate as I perceive it, and the descriptions of the environment are accurate to the locale of most of the United States. If the bar is that low, then the environment is sure to be like the first place I described.
- danparsonson 1y ago
  "Most of the United States"? You're covering an awfully big area there - how much of it have you actually seen for yourself vs learned about second hand through news and social media? As for the skills bar, if you're intent on being hired by the likes of OpenAI then sure, you'll need to aim high, but for the majority of jobs, being reasonably good, friendly, and reliable will definitely be sufficient; the challenge is then mainly about seeming slightly more appealing than the other candidates for a position.
  - asdf6969 1y ago
    Sufficient is irrelevant when the interviews are 10x harder than the actual job. Employment is a competition. How else can you explain the credentials arms race for low skilled labour?
  - kaiwenwang 1y ago
    As an adult I lived in Georgia, South Carolina, Ohio for internships and visited the major cities: Seattle, SF, Chicago, NYC, Boston, DC, Dallas, Philly. Most of the United States is suburbanized, and if you want to rent an apartment near the city it tends to be that gray laminate style I've described for $1500/mo with roommates. Most of the people who managed to have a family in a major city area are doing well for themselves, prior to asset and rent inflation because they have accessible goods and knowledge to them. I didn't even know what IKEA was until age 18. Because the national system of laws and transportation forms a certain culture, Costco regardless of the location is the same. The STOP signs in the United States are all the same. The processing of foods all follow certain guidelines. There are certain stores existing up to the limits of the locale, and only certain producers because society has centralized so heavily. So I think my claim of generality is reasonable.

Aurornis 1y ago

> As a young person in the United States, the main concern is that if you aren't one of the greatest at what you do, you'll be doomed to a life of increasing poverty In psychology there’s a concept called splitting, or dichotomous thinking, where a person only thinks of things in concepts of their extremes. Either the most extreme good outcome, or the most extreme bad outcome. They might see people or public figures as either amazing or evil. The Wikipedia page has a primer on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology) But you don’t need a Wikipedia article or psychology concepts to realize that there are more outcomes than extreme success or increasing poverty. I’m fascinated by how these concepts that were once relegated to psychology and therapy have started to become commonplace among young people on the internet. They’re not seen as failure modes in thinking, but rather an obvious conclusion from whatever they’ve been consuming so much of online. The comment above is a prime example. Even the obsession over “food derived from vegetable oils and chemically bleached wheat” is a confusing conclusion for me, someone who has had no problem avoiding wheat products and eating healthy on a budget with even minimal effort. The food topic is particularly strange because it’s not that hard to learn basic cooking skills, buy cheap vegetable, and cook quick and easy meals. Yet I continue talking to young people who simultaneously fret about food quality while filling their diets with nothing but processed and fast foods, many of which are more expensive than cooking basic fast meals. I don’t know what else to say, other than the above style of thinking is, in my experience, indicative of what happens when someone collects too much perspective from the internet and not enough from the real world. Given the context of this comment section, I can only recommend trying to reevaluate, disconnect from the internet a little more, and make an effort to reconnect with the real world

zub-twin 1y ago
It is not a new outlook, soylent green—is people.
alexslobodnik 1y ago
The binary perspective gives an excuse to give up. The reasonable perspective does not. It demonstrates that though agency is limited it does exist. Our life outcomes are connected to our actions. For many their circumstances make this an unpleasant thought, thus binary thinking protect their self-image. For some that's all they have left.

iddan 1y ago

I’m not from the US, but from my visits there and continuous reading of the living conditions in America this comment seems painfully true. As someone living in Israel I’m grateful we don’t live in those extremes.