That’s definitely true about teaching. There is a huge demand for piano teachers in the Bay Area. I think can support yourself that way though you are basically running a small business and it’s probably not for everyone.
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I happen to know a lot of musicians who are successful and make a decent living at it (own their own homes, etc) although not as well known as Yo Yo Ma. I also know a violin maker who is well regarded.
In fact, the point about music teaching suggests there may be a “pick and shovel play” to the “elite or bust” gold rush. Not many people are going to get into Harvard, but a lot of people are going to try. It seems like the demand for tutoring and test prep should be very high (and indeed there are Kumon centers all over the place). Piano lessons are in demand. Baseball and softball pitching coaches are in demand too. There are a lot of technology “camps” (overpriced and disappointingly staffed in my experience). There’s not a whole lot, sadly, on the literature side. They do have “Communication Academy” but its focus is speech and debate.
I hope that doesn’t sound like a horribly cynical take. Even in this case, the market is pretty saturated. However, it does at least open the possibility that nearly anything you can do with an “elite or bust” dichotomy opens up a middle ground of many contenders who are in demand of services whether their outcome is elite or not. It does require both business and people skills to take this route, and you’re unlikely to make a killing unless you discover some entirely new unmet need and open a successful business to address it.
I think I just really don’t agree with the premise of “elite” or bust. I mean yes, if your goal is to play in the NBA then you have to be “elite” but even if you aren’t that good you can do something sports related. It’s a matter of managed expectations. But I guess that might be viewed as a “bust” by the criteria in the OP.
There are plenty of opportunities out there for kids to get close to their dreams.
If you go back to the very first post, one example was journalism, and that’s probably true, but I’d have to guess. It’s definitely true that certain industries just don’t exist that existed 25 years ago. Travel agents (at least for routine travel) or film developers. What new industries have replaced them? I’m not sure. I am skeptical of everyone saying “computer science” because the wonder to me is that I’m still employable. It’s kind of a failure of software engineering that people still have to work so hard at it, and one day that too could change. There are lots of new and amazing things happening in technology: quantum computing, robotics, biotech (monoclonal antibodies and mRNA vaccines both proved their worth this year). But these don’t create a lot of new jobs and the jobs they do create, while not NBA-level, still have steep barriers to entry and just aren’t that labor-intensive.
I’m not convinced that “elite or bust” is anything very new anyway. I had a friend who went to college with me in the 80s. He switched from engineering to classics, because that’s what he wanted to study. He also worked at a fast food restaurant and moved up that ladder to a management job, eventually I think to something that supported him very well. As far as I know, that’s still what he does and he’s happy doing it. It’s totally reasonable. Other people get real estate licenses. Around here, many realtors are former tech people. So yeah, there are jobs and your job does not have to line up with your college degree. I think it is important, though, for everyone to understand what they’re getting into.
There is undoubtedly something of an attitude of superiority in California: everyone has to boast about the best climate and best nature (biggest mountain, lowest elevation, biggest, tallest and oldest trees, etc). Other places try to emulate the successes of CA (Silicon Alley, Slopes, Fen, Bollywood, etc).
In a way, moving to work here in tech is making a statement that you can compete with the best in the world (or at least pretend to do so - the dotcom crash showed there was a lot of faking it, and we’ll see more companies when this bubble deflates that are just like Theranos). I still remember a local TV ad (for the station itself, KRON4) in 1999 which talked completely unselfconsciously about being “in the place where miracles happen every day”.
Definitely agree it’s possibly to have a much more “normal” life elsewhere. But that the competitiveness here rubs off on kids upbringing is unsurprising.
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FWIW there are plenty of tech jobs and startups here in NC too. Apple just announced they are opening a big office here. Google has a presence here too. Lots of other brand name companies too.
I really didn’t get that comment about journalism at the beginning of the thread. I’m a J-school grad and while many newspapers are in their death throes there are lots of new opportunities in media and journalism.
I don’t know, I think I just really don’t get the concept of ‘elite or bust’.
Why? Because you expect software to build and maintain itself? I think that’s as unrealistic as expecting a bridge to maintain itself or a car factory to magically retool the making of cars on the fly without the input of human engineers.
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Yes. Of course I do. It already compiles itself from abstract higher level languages. The code running on the microprocessor looks absolutely nothing like the code I wrote. In fact, the compiler is itself the output of another compiler. (A bootstrapping compiler ultimately consists of pristine machine code and should not be the direct work of human programmers at all.)
The key stumbling block is getting from requirements that most human beings understand to the formal specification in some higher level language. I’m not saying that’s an easy problem, and there have been many failed software generation systems. However, its also clear that a lot of software is generated. Nobody writes a production quality video game from scratch in a language like C++ or Java. It is written in a game engine. Some of the logic is written in more conventional languages, but that’s not because it’s the best way to do it, just because it’s the simplest way that suffices.
Software should look more like declarative specifications, and the problem of getting from requirements to specifications is just one more AI problem. It’s not magic.
I recall a couple of years ago debugging a loop in Python that felt a lot like a loop that I had debugged, probably in BASIC, as a teenager. I don’t think that’s inevitable. I think it just shows a lack of progress (and most of the coding I do is not as bad; it was just one of those things).
Well, automation is constantly improving. I expect factories to be able to produce many things without constant monitoring. The technology for them to improve themselves is not here yet, but again, it’s not magic.
And a bridge that maintains itself is just another automation problem and sounds like a very good idea! Right now, it’s more cost effective to have a human construction crew, but if a robot can vacuum your rug then a robot can probably fix potholes. A robot could probably inspect bridge cables for evidence of wear right now. In the future, it could call other robots to do the repair. These robots could be built in robotic factories that produced all the mining and construction robots needed to maintain these factories. True, it’s not here yet and I am not proposing a timetable. I certainly “expect” it in the sense that we have failed as technologists if we can’t do something like that. It’s not magic.
(Added: I am not an Elon Musk groupie, but if we ever expect significant economic output in the asteroid belt or on Mars, then we had better figure out how to make self-maintaining infrastructure of at least the complexity of a bridge or car factory.)
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On a more down to earth note, and in keeping with the original topic, I do not believe that software development is by any means immune to becoming “elite or bust” and I have observed skills going from being in demand to being entirely obsolete over the years. This is sometimes just because languages and products change. Other times, though, it’s because a task has been automated.
Continuous build systems are highly automated now, whereas 30 years ago, a build engineer might have done a lot of this process manually. 40 years ago when writing code for a microcomputer, it was useful to know how to write assembly language sometimes to get things to run fast enough. Today it’s a waste of time. In fact, an optimizing compiler will usually give you better machine code, but even if it didn’t, the processor is fast enough that you’d be wasting your time optimizing something that didn’t matter. Testing cannot always be automated, but it can be automated much more effectively now than in the past.
One of the keys to career survival in software is to look at what you’re doing and observe whether it is becoming obsolete or could become obsolete through automation. If so, then you better get busy learning the next thing to come along. This is a lesson my department head emphasized to all incoming undergrads back in 1983. I dismissed it as kind of generic pep talk at the time, but since then I have grown to appreciate how true it is.
In fact, the tasks that are hardest to automate are often some tangible service or labor. It may be a long time before a robot is giving you a stylish haircut. The easiest thing to shuffle around in a machine is “information” so it is the “information workers” most likely to be put out of work by a machine.
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Plumbing.
Not becoming elite-or-bust anytime too. The systems are all too idiosyncratic (and the spaces too small) to automate much of anything.
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I am retired now but when I was working in software research (my field is machine learning), I always had to keep an eye on what was coming next. I usually spent all weekend studying papers and code to keep up with new developments.
After a while though, this catches up with you and was feeling a little burnt out by the time I got to my fifties. Fortunately, financially I was in a very good situation so I was able to retire early. I still, spend a few hours a day reading technical stuff but now its fun since its no longer for work 
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That’s interesting as my S loves reading papers. Sometimes as we’re driving somewhere he’ll start reading one on his iPhone.
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The “elite or bust” phenomenon isn’t just limited to the choice of a career path. Along the same path, the likelihood of a bifurcation also is, or is going to be, real, and growing. Take software development, for example. When quantum computing becomes a reality, most software engineers today won’t know what to do with it (and they can’t even be retrained in most cases). Obsolescence is real, even in some of today’s hottest disciplines/careers. We only have limited abilities to predict what’s going to happen in 5 years, let alone 10 or 20 years from now.
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And not just software engineers. As a PhD computer scientist, I’m not sure what to think of it. I believe that the applications are pretty specialized, but it really throws a wrench into my idea of algorithmic complexity. I have to admit that part of me hopes there will turn out to be a limit of the number of qubits that are feasibly attainable so I can comfortably think of it as a limited acceleration rather than a total game changer.
It is on my list of things to study, but I am far more comfortable considering computation in terms of symbolic operations, sometimes with random access, sometimes in parallel. In fact, this will still probably be an accurate description of many algorithms of interest (sorting and searching, graph theory).
From a software engineering perspective, the problem may not change all that much. Anything that can be done by a quantum computer will be abstracted as another library call. How many developers know or care how the B-trees work in their database calls, how the UI rendering is accomplished, how the floating point arithmetic happens? There’s a big gap between knowing how to use a Python regular expression and knowing the algorithm Python is using to find the pattern. So I think as with everything else, the vast majority of developers will just be learning when and how to use quantum computing, not how it actually works.
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I think you’re probably right that eventually there will be more user-friendly quantum computing libraries that are more accessible to an average software engineer. However, there could be a significant lag because of hardware limitation, not dissimilar to what happened in the early days when we have more limited (regular) computing hardware. In those days, we had to resort to using assembly languages (and even counting clock cycles of each machine instruction) to optimize programs so they could run more efficiently. With likely limited number of qubits in early quantum computers, we may have to optimize programs again in some way.
Another (probably better) example of this is probably in cryptography (rather than general software engineering). There’re a lot of students (and their families) think computer security is a great field to be in. It is, but they have to be careful. Many elements of traditional cryptography are going to be obsolete once quantum computing becomes a reality. Many, if not most, colleges don’t teach quantum cyptography (other than some simple vague short description).
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Quantum has a ways to go before it becomes disruptive in any real way.
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I guess it’s possible that the “elite or bust” mentality about careers (and life) are driving all the angst about getting into top colleges. Overall, it seems destructive.
To the extent that this concept drives our culture, it can be toxic, I think, and reflects the divide so often cited between the 1% and the 99%, with those at the bottom making minimum wage or worse, and those at the top making huge amounts.
We need less" elite or bust" and more “good enough.”
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Former journalist here and I disagree. Most digital publishers pay next to nothing (and often literally nothing). Your example of someone plucked from obscurity for a job at the NYT is a rare exception, not the norm.
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