Comment by b0rsuk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by b0rsuk | Hacker News Reader

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I can't be sure about the first quote - 120 could be called the high end of average - but holy crap, the second quote describes me almost perfectly, word for word!

The reason I didn't became a scientist is that it SUCKS being a scientist in Poland. Last time I checked the best Polish university is outside the top 400 universities of the world. It's the last foothold of feudalism in my country. The academic environment is dominated by middle aged and senior men who are only concerned about keeping what they have. In many other ways, Poland has an innovation problem.

That, and childhood traumas I don't want to bother you with. When you get a bachelor's degree in CS, but you only have so-so grades and it took you 5 years instead of 3, it's hard to impress anyone in academia.

So I became a programmer. It was hard getting used to doing stuff initially, but I learned to enjoy it. However, I'm quickly bored by repetitive tasks and programming languages worse than Python. I seem to love learning new programming paradigms, libraries, programming languages even if they're difficult (I wrote a Rust program).

I like programming, but I'm not super excited by it. I wonder if you could suggest me some other career I can pursue if I don't have success as a programmer? I thought about an investigative journalist, but few people value good journalism around here.

Replace Poland with Ukraine and you’ve described my situation as well, with uncanny precision.

I’m thinking about continuing my education in US after a 6 years break from academia. I’m a bit anxious no one will want me, a 28 y/o guy with a degree from an unknown university. I also find myself leaning towards journalism and social studies, which doesn’t play nice with my CS degree.

Anyway, I wish you luck in any direction you end up taking.

I think you are both gravely mistaken or may even externalize as the parent poster said, some trauma.

Academia is hierarchical ("feudal"), is so everywhere, and this is by design. And it works.

There are wholly different factors such as complacency of local academics in dishonest practices of some of their subset. There does exist a genius loci, the whole social, administrative contexts matter.

Also the Wallerstein centre/periphery theory applies, developing countries are at a disadvantage and that is not for the lack of smart among their people or even in the pockets of their academia (remember, Oxford also has a lot of dead wood, the difference lies they have at least 50% of it while you might approach 90%).

I would not place the selection process among those factors. It may be romantic to think the US grant system as meritocratic. However historically it was first introduced by Vannevar Bush who in the war time has lead the State's scientific efforts. He saw public subsidy as the modus operandi of a successful effort and also saw the Soviets realizing the same while the US government was barred by the Constitution from direct subsidy. So the NSF was set up not for selection, that's a byproduct, but as a workaround enabling government to pour streams of money to the usual suspects. Wallerstein's dynamics also applies to the inter-US provincial relations with the centres.

I find your fears about age premature. I know of many academics who started late or took enormous time. The whole system in Sweden is set up around taking enormous time for everything. If you are able to show good research you might have a honest chance. If all you want to show is pedigree, you set yourself up a rat race with all the Asians for example.

There are fields combining CS and media, such as for example the so-called digital storytelling lately combining grammars of graphical visualization, and probabilistic programming in spreadsheets, NLP and what not.

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