Through grade and high school the kids are taught everyone is a winner.
In the real world it is winner take all for the most part.
My kid is at school and he gets a steady diet of the comming reality
It is this…
“In the past two years, we haven’t made an engineering hire that didn’t have multiple other offers. Not one,” said Mader-Clark, head of human resources for Lookout, a San Francisco mobile security firm. “The supply-and-demand equation is totally imbalanced and the talent crunch is expected to get even worse.”
It’s already as bad as San Francisco has ever seen. With both established and startup firms in the city displaying an insatiable appetite for talent, there has never been a tougher time to be a tech employer seeking workers — or a better time to be a job candidate with technical chops.
Compensation packages for software engineers straight out of college have shot past $100,000 without braking and now can approach $200,000 once bonuses and benefits are thrown in. Those with jobs get calls daily dangling even sweeter offers down the street.
People with kids in IT shouldn’t be too blase about their child’s employability down the road. It’s a notoriously agist field, and lots of people nearing/over 40 are far from secure in their positions.
I’m kind of thinking that being well-rounded is the way to go. Love CS? Awesome, there are a lot of opportunities out there now. But don’t forget to learn a little Shakespeare, study music or art, and learn how to look outside of your own culture a bit. Hate CS? It’s still probably worth learning a little basic programming, but don’t feel you have to spend your life doing something you hate.
Not to mention, the absolute explosion in the last 2-3 years of coding camps/ programs/ clubs for elementary school-aged kids. It almost has the feel of a bubble that could burst once everyone jumps on the same bandwagon.
“People with kids in IT shouldn’t be too blase about their child’s employability down the road. It’s a notoriously agist field, and lots of people nearing/over 40 are far from secure in their positions.”
Agree.
As to the agism, my family is intimately acquainted with this when the bloodbath occurred in the SV which put out to pasture virtually anyone over 40. It’s one of the many reasons I do NOT idolize the field, even though far too many worship at the Temple of Technology. My reliable, skilled, non-outdated brother was one of the thousands of casualties at that time. He had brought much to the field but they had zero loyalty or consideration for him and those like him.
Outside of agism, the field is virtually impossible to keep even with, let alone stay ahead of. So exactly what does the industry plan on doing with human beings? Dispose of employees every 5 years? As fashionable as apparently Youth and robots are to the modern world, robots are limited in their quality and reliability of decision-making. Human beings are not only better decision-makers, they are more efficient on a variety of measures.
If these dystopian predictions are true, then life is going to be terrible for the vast majority. If no one has any money to buy the product that you are engineering, then how does that help you? Even Henry Ford understood that.
This same “advice” was bandied about 30 years ago when I was in college. Although my engineering major friends made as much as twice what I, with my liberal arts major, made in our first jobs out of college, I have greatly outearned them for the past 20 years of my career. Winner!
The winners will be the hands-on jobs. You can get a doctor’s diagnosis from india via video-conference, but a plumber’s got to duck under your sink to open a drain.
My kid study Computer Science because she didn’t want medical school, too long of schooling for her. So far she is already has an internship line up for the summer. But I’ve been warning her not to expect to work until the age of 50, she must save aggressively because it could end early.
My kids are helping to make the new world order in their fields of interest. Neither is in tech. Their success has been built on their ability to define or redefine old and long established professions of journalism and design. It’s not just a matter of having the core skills for a particular profession but being creative, taking some risk, and taking initiative.
Radiology scans are already being read in real-time by doctors in India. http://www.photonics.com/m/Article.aspx?AID=42010
And the low-end, simple interpretations don’t even require a doctor. They can be done by a machine.
