Even people with degrees are locked out of those high paying or leadership roles. Meanwhile, others can make it just fine by learning a trade. As a junior engineer, I was making the same amount as my degree less counterparts working in the oil industry were.
There's this unfortunately prevailing attitude that you aren't successful in America if you aren't living in New York or San Francisco. It's absolutely bonkers. There are many other great places in this country besides those two cities.
If you can make NYC/SF money and save/invest a portion of your income, you can retire and do significantly better elsewhere. You can't do the opposite.
If you can have a decent lifestyle in Ohio on 40k (big if, when you factor in retirement planning) you can still fundamentally never leave Ohio.
God forbid. Think of all the experiences you and your family will miss out on!
Lately all I want is to get as far away from people as possible. The internet has negated every advantage of these regions and of money broadly. You cannot buy a nuclear family.
The internet has not negated every advantage of regions, unfortunately (Employers are still making folks come to the office) and it still costs money to move elsewhere.
Folks in Ohio still have trouble leaving Ohio.
And you can, to an extent, buy a nuclear family. Mail order brides still exist (and the arrangement can be beneficial for both parties). You can do this with the expectation of children, which you will pay for in the US. Alternatively, you can check adoption as plenty of agencies will make you feel like you are buying a child. (20k upwards, plus travel).
The risk of being tied to a small corner of the country is real and something any Ohioan ought to be sensitive to. Most of Ohio has suffered 50 years of economic back sliding. A lot of people thought that they had realized their modest and reasonable middle class dreams of a good quiet life doing honest work. Major structural changes compromised all of that and a lot of people were stuck holding the bag in places like Toledo, Akron, Youngstown. (Not trying to pick on Ohio, just making a point about risk (though Toledo is the least nice corner of the state and they would have been better of foisting it off on Michigan back when they had the chance))
>God forbid. Think of all the experiences you and your family will miss out on!
This is a snide remark, but it is absolutely a factor. I grew up in Michigan, and the number of people who never venture beyond their almost-entirely-white small town to see what other communities and cultures are like is a huge contributing factor to the amount of prejudice and judgmental nature that makes me never want to move back.
Seeing people different from you and different places is broadening and gives you a much better perspective to be able to understand the world. This is important in life as well as in your career.
also, and this is personal taste of course, it can get to be pretty soul-crushing working with and being around mostly people that don't value a nuclear family, when you yourself do. this was a major reason for moving away from the video game industry and greater Seattle area and returning home to South Dakota a few years ago. it took a lot of mental and emotional effort to kill the lifelong dream I worked toward since elementary school (I turned 30 this year) and "settle for" a local government programmer job... but so far it's been 10000% worth it, I'm much happier than I've ever been, I'm going to start a family very soon, and I'm surrounded by people who have the same core values as I do. nobody in the greater Seattle area wanted to hire a white male with no degree but a frankly ridiculous amount of self-driven personal project experience (plus some team project experience from a few contract positions and an unfinished (stopped halfway when the college fund ran out—best decision of my life) degree) in the fields of game and web development, but my hometown was overjoyed to get someone exactly like myself to write SQL and learn all the ins and outs of the public education system and how it interfaces with state and federal requirements. it's not my first choice of work by a longshot but without having money to either finish a degree (like all my friends did) or make my own gamedev startup (in an increasingly flooded market to the point of ridiculousness), I've finally found happiness, and, more importantly, a very direct path to achieving the actual lifelong goal I kind of always had but never knew it: starting a family. like you said, you can't put a price on something like that.
my best friend had a complicated career trajectory that began with a music education degree, until he found out he hated teaching music to middle schoolers, then he decided to get a two-year online CS degree. this put him in a fair bit of debt as he comes from a very poor upbringing. he got married and moved to the D.C. area a couple years ago to work for a CRM shop there and while he loves the work, he hates the crime and bullshit of the Big City Life, and while he and his wife have gone from enjoying it to tolerating it, they're moving back here to South Dakota at the end of this year before they have children.
I wonder if, going forward, with the advent of remote work and the like, we're going to see less and less people who come from rural/suburban/otherwise sub-100k-population cities choosing to either move back to areas like those they grew up in (if not where they grew up specifically) instead of migrating to The Big City to Make It Big, for these exact reasons. there just doesn't seem to be much to gain from moving to The Big City anymore, if starting a family is your ultimate goal in life.
> don't value a nuclear family, when you yourself do
When you say you value a 'nuclear family', instead of just 'family', the distinction means things like 'I do not want my parents to have more than a minimal role in their grandchildren's lives' and 'my siblings and their children are to be kept separate from my children'. That's what the 'nuclear' part means!
Mom died and now Dad's dropping hints about moving into your furnished basement? Sorry, we're a nuclear family. Going halves with your sister on a duplex with her and her family living next to you and yours so all the cousins can grow up together? Absolutely not nuclear.
On the contrary - I'm not sure of the exact definition, but the meaning of a nuclear family, at least to me, has morphed into a traditional family structure with an at home mother and working father.
If anything, a structure like this would facilitate and encourage visits from and to relatives. Seems like a much nicer life than a situation where both parents work.
Assuming the rest of the world doesn't exist, though. Can't honestly say I'm targeting having more retirement money than needed to get by in some combination of Ukraine, Thailand, and Colombia.
Major life regret? Thinking other countries didn't exist when I was at the age to enter college and taking on massive loans to pay exorbitant US tuition for a school that wasn't anything special when I could have found overseas options at a fraction of the cost.
Until the city grows to encapsulate your neighbourhood, and you find yourself a 'boomer' who was so lucky to be able buy a house for 40k, whose children 'never will'?
Those aren't even that great of places so I think it's pretty regional on thinking that. But definitely there's an attitude of needing to be in a major city to be successful and it's not entirely false. The big difference is major urban area vs not.
Sure, NYC/SF are super expensive, but almost every urban area is when compared to other smaller cities or rural areas.
The issue is that for a lot of people they can only find an ok job in the major urban area, but it's not enough to live there so they get stuck in the suburban wastelands with 45+ minute drives just to go work 8 hours.
They make enough to get by, but not enough to save and move out to a more desirable living situation in a smaller city or rural area without a secure job lined up.
Like $20 an hour is good in Toledo, but it's probably not what most people are making. That's probably a job you have to work up to for years. At $20 an hour in Toledo you very likely can have a higher quality of life then people making far more in the much larger metro areas. But at $10 an hour ($8.80/$7.25) in Toledo area you're probably worse off due to a lack of public support and opportunities for advancement.
Before I left Toledo (grew up there), I made about $18 driving busses with a lot of of overtime. Its not a terribly difficult place to make a living right up to the state median but almost everyone with potential leaves or works out of the city, simply because professional industry is incredibly lackluster.
This is beside your point but HN is such a coastal bubble that I always feel the need to chime in with perspective when someone mentions my hometown.
I know people in the Bay Area who spent two or three hours a day commuting before moving back out to the mid-west again for remote work. This is a typical commute from SF to Mountain View, for example.
The great reshuffling that is happening in front on our eyes might very well push those not in the cognitive elite away from all those great places as well. I am seeing it happen around my area, where housing costs have shot up by 20% in one year, mostly driven by out of state arrivals. I see it in our own family's economic status which has improved several fold, thanks to the remote opportunities brought about by the pandemic. Maybe this is good, maybe it is bad, but there is a profound change coming.
These days, it's not enough to live in a world-class city, you need to have your own kitchen, living room, and bathroom that barely get used. The people I know who complain about high cost of living refuse to live with other people.
That works great until you get married and start a family.
I mean, in theory there could be acceptable ways to let a couple with babies have roommates. But the design problems alone seem too complicated to attempt, let alone the cultural problems.
Also, keep in mind that a young couple with kids might have only one income earner. And that couple is in the same apartment hunt with singles willing to share multi-tenant residences. Sometimes three or four of them!
Point being, "get roommates" doesn't scale over time or over the entire population.
I think the issue is more when people are still having roommates when they're in their 30s and older. it's hard to have families when you still can only a afford a bedroom, driven mostly by debt and low wages if I had to guess
Everyone has to make trade offs. You want to live in the cultural capital of the world or place where the average income is over six figures, but everyone else does as well. There's limited space in these cities, so you need to bid top dollar if you want to keep a place for yourself.
Sorry man, I just don't buy it. Expensive housing is a solveable problem. Six figures isn't that much when you're still spending half your paycheck on rent.
As for the cultural capital of the world? New York used to have a thriving art scene when it was cheap to live in. Now it just has an expensive art scene.
I agree that housing policy is broken and has a lot of room for improvement. There's no way around supply and demand though. At best you'll have a situation like Singapore where housing is expensive, but still attainable.
This is a contrarian take that may get me downvoted and unfairly labeled, but I encourage critical thinking instead:
I've struggled with people telling me that these FAANG companies have "diversity problems," as a person of color myself. A majority of software engineers are female and male immigrants from East Asia and South Asia. These population centers are some of the most diverse regions of the world. The engineers who have been hired by preparing for and passing these companies' selective merit based coding tests had to overcome adverse conditions in their home countries as well, including extreme poverty, starvation, and totalitarian regimes.
Why do they not count toward diversity, to some white and white-adjacent critics? What message are we sending to people who are ethnic minorities from certain groups who earned their spots through merit and have also been targeted in recent newsworthy attacks, just as others have, when we make these kinds of accusations? What does a non problematic ethnic composition look like? What are these companies doing right toward some minority groups and wrong towards others?
There is literally no right answer, the very nature of modern diversity is that it will always be a moving target. That is until we get over the entire concept of diversity which is racist / discriminatory at it's core.
That's incorrect. The main use of diversity is in an antiracist fashion. I'd suggest you read one of Kendi's books. Stamped from the Beginning has clear and readable descriptions of the difference, but it's a relatively long work, so you might start with one of his shorter books.
Instead of dismissing the argument with a tawdry negated statement and a book suggestion, do you have some thoughts of your own with this matter, or at least some kind of summary?
Long ago I learned that it was rarely worth my time to try to argue online people out of their ignorance. A rando with a throwaway account, a strident tone, and a fair bit of ignorance on the topic is almost a guarantee that that's no point.
If you're interested in knowing something about the topic, you'll do some work. If you aren't, no amount of me spoon-feeding you summaries of serious scholarly works will change that.
If you do end up learning something and have questions, feel free to email me. I'm glad to discuss the topics with people who are serious about it.
What distinction does a throwaway account make on an otherwise-anonymous online forum? No need to take discussion offline. Within the next decade, I am in confident the pendulum will swing the other way, and the people who are able to vocalize their opinions now in public will be the ones needing throwaway accounts.
That's another very ignorant question. You can look up the literature on it. (Heck, you could have just followed a link in my bio to get a start.) But again, I'm not spoon-feeding you.
Why not? My point is that it should! What percentage of the US population is from South / East Asia? How does it compare to the representation of others? If it's similar or less, and it still somehow doesn't "count," then we have a diversity problem.
Nobody is saying they don't count toward diversity. What people are saying is that the conspicuous exclusion of less favored racial groups does not get erased because they have some people from other groups.
Put more frankly, the success of recent immigrants does not erase America's long history of brutality and exploitation toward blacks and Latin Americans. The latter is a problem that we have to solve regardless.
> Put more frankly, the success of recent immigrants does not erase America's long history of brutality and exploitation toward blacks and Latin Americans.
But given that America was far more brutal and exploitative towards Chinese immigrants than towards Latin Americans, why are Latinos so prioritized by these initiatives to favor certain racial groups?
Ironic that in a discussion about diversity, you believe in a prejudiced stereotype about a major ethnic group in Silicon Valley. Casteism is pretty much a nonissue in Silicon Valley, if only for the simple reason that most Indian-Americans tend to be ignorant about the castes of most other Indian-Americans.
Sure, and we are discussing the existence of racial discrimination in engineering hiring at top tech companies, not American history or South Asian culture. Asian immigrants on H1-B conducting coding tests as interviewers at FAANG did not involve themselves in the American Jim Crowe south, for example. It's saddening to see America's own past being used to justify discrimination in the present, even to people who aren't originally from the US.
You might not share the beliefs of others that are gainfully rallying behind diversity as a cause to justify penalizing some minority groups for "doing too well" and bolstering others (the literal definition of discrimination), but it IS happening -- and certainly more people than "nobody" are backing it, provoking my original statements. Someone had to put Prop 16 on the ballot, for example (which was thankfully voted against by a large margin of fellow CA Democrats).
The notion that American tech companies are somehow entirely separate from and unrelated to American history is quite a belief to hold. It's not one that stands up to any understanding of the topic, alas. But since that's a hill you've chosen to die on, I'll leave you to it.
The short answer is that tech companies run diversity programs for three reasons: they believe in righting wrongs, they don't want to be sued for biased hiring practices, and they don't want bad PR. All three require under-represented minorities.
Turning it back on you, what should the point of a diversity program be? What's meant to be achieved outside those three goals?
While I certainly understand bad PR (a surprising number of people lack critical thinking skills), what is wrong or biased about hiring for coding positions based on merit-based performance on an objective coding test? Anybody regardless of background or group membership that passes will be hired, meaning it is fair and unbiased, by definition -- that is the diversity program, and if there is some lack of objectivity, that is what needs to be addressed. If that is not the case, then yes, I agree with you, the hiring process would be biased.
You really need to interrogate "merit" and "objective". Nominally objective standards have long been used to advance racial discrimination in the US. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test
You should also look up the extensive critiques of meritocracy as a concept. There's a lot of literature there.
Further, I know of no major tech company who uses a nominally "objective coding test" as the only criterion for hiring. And they shouldn't, because being good at taking coding tests is not the job and not what we should be hiring for.
No, coding tests are not the "literacy tests" you have described, and if they were, why would some minorities be performing even better than Caucasians on them?
Coding tests examine the type of work actually required to be done on the job (as coders), and they have been correlated with post-hire performance successfully. Someone who is not familiar with efficient data structures will not write scalable code and will end up creating a burden on their teammates during on-call, for example. Asking someone to solve an engineering problem with a provably correct answer is an objective test for hiring engineers, and I will have a difficult time continuing to engage with anyone who counteracts this basis of reality and truth.
When I was hired there were three coding test rounds and one interpersonal round. You might argue that the latter is where racial discrimination seeps in, as well as the recruiter outreach step itself, but somehow I am optimistic that a bunch of tolerant Californians have moved past applying a Literacy Test here already by hiring a majority immigrant / minority workforce. In my situation, my recruiter was also an Asian-American minority.
I didn't say coding tests were literacy tests. You also seem a lot like somebody who has not hired people, which would explain your poor understanding of how hiring actually works.
Since my comments here don't seem to be making any sense to you, I'm not seeing the point in trying again.
Why are you assuming that I haven't hired anyone before? And any reasonable observer would agree that you are falsely equivocating the literacy tests of yester century with the modern day objective hiring practices of FAANG companies.
Actually listening to minorities instead of summoning some kind of sick quota for different ethnicities. Racists are in stark decline and it didn't even take a diversity program or a change in language rules.
The companies are then righting the wrongs on the shoulders of innocents, that most likely never were racists to begin with. In short, just committing to another mistake.
> South Asia and SE Asia, maybe. But East Asia (NE China, Korea, Japan) has actually one of the most ethnically "pure" populations in the world.
Northeast China–usually defined as the provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang–does not belong on your list. According to the 2000 Chinese census, about 10% of the population of Northeast China comes from ethnic minorities – the majority of whom are Manchus, but also including significant numbers of Mongols and Koreans. That is far from being 'one of the most ethnically "pure" populations in the world'-especially when compared to Japan or Korea.
Indeed, even though Northeast China was (in 2000) approximately 90% Han, prior to the 19th century Han were a minority in the region, and Manchus were the numerically (and politically) dominant ethnic group.
According to the 2000 Census, the most ethnically homogenous part of China is not the North or Northeast, but rather Eastern China, which is over 99% Han (and, as well as being over 99% Han overall, 4 of its 7 provinces are over 99% Han too.) By contrast, North China is about 94% Han and Northeast China is only around 90% Han.
(There have been two Chinese censuses since, in 2010 and 2020, but I can't find ethnicity figures for them.)
