> You'll be viewed as a neanderthal that probably can't or didn't pass Calculus.

Funny you say this 1.5 months after I find out that the university where I got my master's dropped calculus classes (from the bachelor subjects, there never was much non-applied math in the master years). Logic (mathematical logic), discrete math, combinatorics and theoretical statistics have been dropped years past (more than a decade for logic). Applied statistics and "Math I + II" (essentially revision of high school calculus, practical only, no theory, e.g. no more treatment of the difference between Riemann and Newtonian integration) are all the math that's left.

Master degree holders starting 4 years from now will all be "neanderthals that probably can't or didn't pass Calculus". Or at least know little of the theoretical underpinnings of calculus.

I think that you’re missing out on the fact that you’re an outlier. Most people in tech do not get there by hacking away at their computer as a teenager on up, or as a hobby (or work related self education). That’s why companies use a college degree as a filter, especially in jobs that are heavily theoretical and not “we’ll just grind on it with man hours until it’s finished”. It suck that you are an outlier but that doesn’t mean companies have to take a chance on you. Life isn’t fair very often, that’s why it’s extremely important to network, go to conventions or trade shows, or volunteer if a company wants someone on site at a 3rd party. I’m in your boat as well. All I have is an undergrad, but I work with PhD’s because I have niche knowledge and experience that a lot of them do not, and after being in the industry for a while I can hold my own, even though this job tends to require PhD as a degree filter.

> It's a hard requirement a lot of the time in tech as well

I've always seen "or equivalent experience". I'd assumed that including that alternative was mandatory-ish for the same reason that explicit intelligence tests are reportedly lawsuit magnets.

It's a bit apples to oranges to compare mean to median? Or at least Honeycrisp to Gala...

Union plumbers, electricians, pipefitters, and sheet metal workers all make more than $50/hr on the check and $100/hr with fringes in my metro area with a population of 3 million.

You can see what union trades make in a specific area by searching for “prevailing wage [city name]” and looking at the wage tables.

Employee tradeworkers make good average money, self-employed trades people make a ton more money.

I think the silver-lining here is: be competent at your job and all aspects related to it, but do that while being your own boss.

Not much different from other areas but in this case, trades are in high demand and the initial investment in terms of capital is very little compared to "start a company and hope to break even in an year or two".

I don't know what its like it the states, but many household Plumbers and Electricians are actually running their own small company and work very hard to minimize their take home salary.

But regardless of career path, the real trick is to raise your children to aim higher than median. :)

You don't want to be a plumber, you want to run a plumbing empire!

In the Bay Area and other places where tech workers congregate, trades people make far above these numbers. These numbers are kept low by the south, which might as well not count for the purposes of the average demographics of this website.

you should provide a source(s) for claims like this…

We're just in a really bad "liquid" economy right now, so it's easy to feel that narrative of "college degrees are useless".

They aren't useless, but as tuition rises it is inevitably going to be a worse investment. Not to the point where trades are worth its equally annoying but different kind of annoyance, though. Pay depends on unions, and get into trade unions is anything but a meritocracy.

Source?

As a non US citizen, can you tell me how much a computer science degree costs? I've heard students are left with hundreds of thousands in debt when they graduate.

Also, can you pay student loans with pre tax income?

I've worked with many talented engineers over the years who didn't have degrees and have had no trouble finding jobs and moving around. I imagine a degree might help you get a foot in the door, but once you can demonstrate you can do the job, seems to be easy to pick up more work.

I really wonder how damaging that debt would be for a young person who is also trying to save for a house and start a family.

>So why aren’t we applying the same logic to this?

because you're going up a whole waterfall to convince anyone we live in a matriarchy. Teachers are majority female because sexism as well, on both sides (nothing gets more of a sideeye from judgy peers than being a male and saying you work with kids). and loads of DEI programs have focused on helping female student succeed. So I'm not surprised that can tilt the scales in an environment that already benefitted feminine disposition (a quiet, orderly environment that you need to sit calmly at and listen for an hour or 2).

>But if men invented all of it, why are women outperforming men? That’s the nuance that needs to be answered here. It’s not solely just intelligence. Wokeism prevents you from reasoning from the dark side, to be able to see the fundamental fact that men are the creators of tech, science and civilization.

Well if you want an inconvenient truth: men in general care a lot less about men than women about women. That's part of why that whole "sigma male grindset" and divisions within men of "alphas and betas" was able to work so easily. Men see men as competition, and there's no easier way to get blind acceptance than to pick a target and tell them that they are the reason you are miserable.

All that happens and we suddenly wonder why men are undergoing a loneliness epidemic and why its not uncommon to not hear from friends for weeks, months on end and treat that as normalcy.

> It’s not that boys are making a decision in high school not to go to college and therefore letting their grades slip.

I may be taking the surface level for grantes, but: based on the article, men were a lot more likely to in fact make my decision:

> A 2021 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans without a bachelor’s degree why they chose not to seek one – and found some gender differences in the responses. For example, men without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than women to say they just didn’t want to get one.

And women in another study suggest that they more or less need a degree due to less non-degree options:

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2022/mar/why-women...

>What these numbers reveal is that, indeed, getting more education is an important way to close the gender pay gap. College entry—whether it is to get an AS or a BS—helps women gain access to careers where they have a comparative advantage (e.g., office work). Men on the other hand have better access to lucrative careers that don’t require a college degree (e.g., construction work). This appears to be the most reasonable explanation for why women outnumber men in college.

Encouragement goes a long way, but of course kids aren't dumb either. I'm sure some boys simply seek to work these blue collar jobs and realize you don't need to go to more school (which yes, they do worse in) to star doing this stuff.

>To illustrate my point, we can compare earnings of men with no college to women with a bachelor’s degree. Men make $45k, women make $65k. To believe that men are choosing trades you have to believe that men would voluntarily choose to make 30% less.

Using the men's average is not the right metric. We're looking at a choice here, so the proper thing is to look at the percentage of men without a college degree who earn comparably to men with one, vs the same with women. I think you'll find a greater percentage of high earning men without degrees than you will find with women.

State universities outside tier 1 cities don't care about grades except that they are passing (D or higher).

I understand what you're saying, but in a broader sense there aren't as many opportunities for a woman without a college degree to earn a comparable living as a college graduate, given their prevailing preferences for types of work. And of course we don't know how much the fact that there are so few women plumbers influences a young woman's decision.

The skilled trades in the BLS stats are[1]:

45-0000 Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations 432,200

47-0000 Construction and Extraction Occupations 6,225,630

49-0000 Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations 5,989,460

51-0000 Production Occupations 8,770,170

53-0000 Transportation and Material Moving Occupations 13,752,760

That adds up to 35 million total employed.

[1] https://blog.dol.gov/2023/03/21/data-spotlight-employment-of...

The IWPR link from above (with data from the US BLS) suggests that the 320K women in construction trades represent 4% of the total field, implying that there are about 8 million total construction trade jobs in the US. I'm not sure how many construction workers hold 4 year degrees, but it seems plausible this would explain a large portion of the gap.

What do you mean incredibly small? Don’t you numbers show trade jobs are on par with nurses and teachers?

So I admit some mistakes on this post

- these aren't the only trades. Sorry i got confused by chatgpt - I only meant to point out, this seems like a very small amount of people compared to what I thought - Not a mistake, but I was kindof joking with the post and it wasn't obvious. For this alone I deserved the massive downvote I got. I do think these numbers don't reflect the true number of people working in the field as say registered nurses or professional teachers because... how do i say this in a nice way.... many of them may be sharing a ssn and that's much more dangerous from a regulatory perspective than doing that as a REGISTERED nurse or PROFESSIONAL teacher. However there's a lot of peop[le nursing and teaching who aren't in those stats as well

</rant

If I could do college over, I would have learned to code earlier, networked, and got a job at Facebook or Google my sophomore year.

Not really. I was studying something I loved but was really impractical. I had the money to major in basket weaving, so I did.

But if I needed cash, it would be coding and Google.

The problem is that so much of maleness is stuff like the male libido, which is a bad, no good, horrible, terrible thing which one must be ashamed of and stigmatized for having. They call it “the male gaze” and try to root it out of the media.

Masculinity is porn, soldiers, guns, cars, savior fantasies, and suffering.

We will get a positive representation and celebration of masculinity at around the same time when a term like “toxic femininity” gets used as much as toxic masculinity does today.

I wasn't just talking about the GOP. Some of these people actually are ignorant, feel bad about it, and try to keep everyone else ignorant so that they feel less bad about themselves

I don't know. Why are we told that representation is important and we must have diversity along every axis throughout media?

Well, if you think about it for five seconds, it's because people in general (but especially children) identify with and look up to people who look like them and share their culture. That's just human nature.

It's not impossible, but boys with only female role models do not develop their masculinity, which is important for self-control considering males can be physically dangerous. I believe there is a link between criminal behavior (which is mostly men) and single mothers. It's really more than a correlation, and perhaps one of the leading causes of criminality.

You can, but ultimately there are male issues that are much easier to confide with males on. Especially about women. It's no different from why women need some female role models.

Good question... I did. But maybe I'm just lucky

It's only around 6000 students, but Missouri S&T (a mostly engineering and mining school) is still like 75% male.

There are a few. Harvard 51/49 F/M, UC Berkeley 52/48, Cornell 51/49, Princeton 47/53, Chicago 47/53.

Highly selective STEM schools are both coed and close to 50/50 for undergrads!

* MIT is 49/51 female/male

* Harvey Mudd is 50/50

* Caltech is 43/57 (the exception, I guess)

* Olin is 52/48

Of course, these schools are not feasible options for most people but it is still a relevant counterexample.

This is not the way it has always been. Males dominated colleges and universities until anti-male DEI programs were put in place. And now we see 60-75% female colleges/universities.

This includes men. Men don't care about men. Especially the men who say they do, care the least. What they actually care about is just themselves, not "men".

trump cares about this as much as I care about synchronized swimming

That’d need a lot more substance to generate a productive debate, starting with how to reconcile “no one cares” with decades of people being endlessly very concerned about it. I’d also expect some comparison of their policies if you’re saying that’s a big reason why he won.

It's merely noting that the majority of homeless are men and the majority of college students are women.

It doesn't imply any causality or relationship.

> How is this any different than something like "it's kinda shocking to see so many single moms, then silicon valley filled with tech bro programmers"?

Realism, to be frank. Even a single mom has better odds statistically to find a partner than 90% of males. That's why there's not anywhere near as many homeless males than females.

Women still have a cultural option to retreat to the role of a housepartner. Very few men have that option.

>There’s nothing wrong with single income families

Except the economies. When dual income becomes more common, housing starts to charge under that assumption.

Most people literally cannot afford to be single income. There are divorcees who stay together simply because either cannot afford to move out and go it alone for a while.

There's definitely nothing wrong with them. But we a matter of risk mitigation, it's obvious why people wish to put themselves in a situation where they don't wind up in the situation or being dependent on a single income (that is another person) when they have preplanned all that out already and chosen it

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No bank anywhere in the western world will lend you money for a house on a single income. Double income is the norm, so it's reflected in the price.

Yes.

It would not be surprising if they perform on-par with men at least, given that they dominated the field of computing until the advent of automated machines (and then system operation after that until approximately the era of the personal computer).

“Veterinary medicine has been predominantly female in the US since 2009. That trend is continuing, with 87.3% of current veterinary school applicants identifying as female, as well as 88% of veterinary technicians.”

(Source: aaha.org)

Given that the gender imbalance in physics/engineering/CS is always blamed on men pressuring women against participating, one wonders, what kind of monstrous women are gatekeeping the veterinary field, and what kind of harassment are they inflicting on men who try to participate?

That kind of gets to what I was trying to say, though. The 'just-so' story I hear often is that men in STEM fields are incredibly sexist and this is just how it is and certain policies are the only way to fix it. I'm willing to accept that might be true but I would like to know why.

I don't really buy the "computers were marketed towards men" argument that was mentioned a few child comments down. I also don't really buy into the idea that men are just inherently sexist and women aren't, especially since I've heard both mysogynist and mysandrist comments from women in my workplace...

Why are fields like law, medicine, and mathematics more receptive to women?

40 years ago, the personal computer was marketed at boys. That's just a type of marketing we are still trying to correct over 2 generations later.

And that's how we should treat it. It's too later to get people interested in engineering in college. you need to start 5 years earlier minimum. Ideally 10 years earlier.

> moreover, 40 years ago you could be making the same sorts of just-so stories up about law or medicine.

No you couldn't as women were barred from those fields pretty recently then. No women working today has been barred from physics or engineering, the situation is not the same.

Partially: that’s the perfectly rational position but … how many teenagers did you know who carefully planned the game-theoretical optimum for their life? The guy who got a scholarship to MIT is doing that but public policy has to think more about how the 50th percentile person is doing and I think that’s where what you see around you matters more: someone academically driven or who grew up comfortably with professional class parents has the cultural preparation to stick with it but someone who has non-stellar grades, needs to juggle work and school, is thinking regularly about how many years of their parents’ annual income their student debt translates into – that’s who’s likely to give up.

I guess it varies by K-12 rigor, but college was mostly easier for me... until the 4th year. that 80 hour workload was my high school, and I had no choice but to balance 5 classes + an elective every year. And ofc I pushed myself more by having an acedemic club and volunteer work. I was always so tired. My mom felt bad for being out of the house a lot, but truthfully I wasn't much different anyway and barely noticed.

College, I dropped a lot of that, and my class workload dropped to 3-4 classes a quarter. It was like a huge weight was off my shoulders. less time in classes, more time to myself to choose. classes were harder but I had more time to focus down on my majors instead of being distracted by 3 GE equivalents in high school. It just fit my way of working better.

----

But I think that is part of the point: the standard line of K-12 has been falling while the line for college wants to keep trying to go up. Those determined A/B students will meet that line, but not the people doing the bare minimum to pass. A "C" is not what used to be a "C". I don't know the solution to it, but the current "solution" of grade inflation is not a direction I agree with.

the celebration will last until morale improves

>"Content creator" is not a real job. That's something you do for fun.

This is dismissive. Some do it as a hobby or simply to expand their reach (even Tim Walz had a few gaming streams this year), but the people making real money easily put 40+ hours into analyzing trends, understanding their audience, preparing content, editing media, and overall being a business person. Those CCs very easily be the hardest workers in any sort of communications company, but that's not how the market works these days.

I suppose by that metric, most of HN just working on some website frontend or server backend are just typing away for easy money

>considering that the entire rest of the society spends all their time ranting on social media and not doing actual work.

well, no one wanted to give me a full time job this year. Gotta do something between the Workday applications draining my soul and the boring Leetcode practice.

> but I think "psychological castration" is maybe being a bit hyperbolic w.r.t the long term effects of amphetamines at typically prescribed dosages.

You see long term brain changes in kids who get prescribed Adderall, you don't see this for adults. Proponents tend to tout this as why we absolutely need to give this to kids, because they say this will permanently heal them, could just as well be permanently damaging them.

you would certainly have thought somehow differently if your thinking apparatus was consistently influenced by unnatural neurotransmitter concentration during its formation

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There's ton of good male role models. But you don't get to the public sphere these days by being a good wholesome person with zero drama. How many of anyone do we really have like that? Maybe leBron James? Keaneu Reeves (for now?).

The public sphere gets its attention by appealing to base desires (rage, sadness, humor) and slowly slipping in the pitch for snake oil. If you're giving inconvinent truths, you're being "preachy", and "don't understand my struggle" and "are part of the problem".

Or they simply become famous in various means and in that power make skeletons to be revealed years later. It's hard to have a spotlight on you 24/7 and have your entire life be squeaky clean. That used to be the facade of politicians and even they don't care anymore.

Can't make the horse drink, even if they are dying of thirst because they keep being fed alcohol.

You don't think Trump and Andrew Tate are good role models??? /s

>I doubt that this is the actual reality you guys live in.

There's nuggets of truth, but the overall effect is nowhere near as dramatic, no. Kids (both genders) are subscibed to a lot more medicine than the previous generation. There are a lot more initiatives to promote women in education than men. But it's not like men are failing out in droves nor are being abused in school to not succeed.

There are a lot more holisitic issues with education to fix, like the decreeasing budget and teachers being paid less that starbucks baristas, before we need to worry about nuanced factors like the different ways boys learn vs. girls. But yes, girls tend to do better in K-12 becaue the environment is more suited for them compared to the energy of boys who run around and rough house and other "disorderly" conduct.

The whole "go to trades" argument people are making is already a big reason men are pulled away from college compared to women. They already are doing that, and very few women are.

That's a pretty accurate description of what's happening. DEI did this to men, because men were blamed by the media and by the feminists for everything. Sexist anti-male programs were created, and now we see the results.

What, you thought that in one generation men magically became dumb?

Maybe I'm just already brain damaged in an irreparable way or am potentially a superhuman badass capable of doing all the drugs without consequences...

I think it's bad to give amphetamines to kids...full stop. But it isn't similar to castration or a lobotomy or even in the same order of magnitude in terms of long term irreparable effects.

Stimulant drugs of that nature tend to be more tolerable than opiates or benzos or a lot of other drugs often prescribed for common mental illnesses (and often to kids).

My issue with the whole discussion is not that we shouldn't take a hard look at our amphetamine prescribing tendency and try to resolve the underlying issues instead of putting on a drug band-aid...my issue is that it is implying some sort of long term catastrophic damage for kids or adults that may have undergone that sort of treatment in the past. And it's asking them to start adopting a blame mentality and potentially start using this great potential (imagined) future that was robbed of them as a coping mechanism.

They aren't mentally handicapped, and they shouldn't think of themselves as being the equivalent of somebody that's been castrated or lobotomized and therefore permanently mentally disabled in some way.

Yes, giving amphetamines on a regular basis to kids is mind blowing. It's also not the end of their lives.

Force-feeding adderall to developing brains will eventually be viewed the same way we view lobotomies - a crude and cruel method of control. These children absolutely are victims of a sick system.

can you stop tone-moderating people who are trying to share how they feel about something?

You can swear on HN you know, it's ok to say "shit," we can handle it :)

The current model of "equity" as in Title IX is currently defined based on difference in outcome implying structural/systemic discrimination. There is now a difference in outcome going the other way. Thus, one must conclude systemic discrimination the other direction by the same rules.

This difference in outcome was the only hard evidence that justified creation of programs that give women an advantage, such as women-only mentorship programs, scholarships, and career counseling.

why would a man’s wife get an abortion? maybe a side piece? :)

If the couple is smart, they'll just move to such a state, or to another country even.

Though changing the system during the French revolution led Napoleon to take over Europe. Nepo is sclerotic, it might not look very bad now but give it a few generations and you end up really way down there. A more efficient governance will then take you over.

> before the diversity hires, there were nepo hires

There still are nepo hires, you just added to the problem with diversity hires it didn't fix the nepo hire issue.

> didn't suddenly throw "merit" out the window to make way for diversity, it was already a lie to begin with

Deviations from an ideal (hire whoever will be most effective at doing whatever it is you're hiring them to do), whether intentional (nepotism, e.a., trading favors, etc) or accidental (for example trusting formal credentials a little to much), do not make that ideal a "lie".

You're not wrong, you're just failing to appreciate the difference in scale.

What does white supremacy have to do with this?

>since Trump seems serious about breaking up administrative and bureaucratic load.

He sold that bridge, or rather: wall, 8 years ago. Do you know what the definition of insanity is?

Even ignoring everything else: "making jobs" is a bipartisan good move. No one is ever going to carry on the promise of "I will make less jobs" and survive long in office. And the last thing you want when you're pretending the economy is good when it isn't is to further raise the unemployment rate.

This is a false promise.

Agree that a college degree sends a strong signal that you can conform to the expectations and requirements of an institution. You can show up when required and follow instructions to achieve an outcome over a period spanning years. This is a valuable signal to employers that you meet some bare minimum of employability.