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Comment by oprah2018 | Hacker News Reader

oprah2018

There is another way to look at this. In the current economy, anyone who wants to can get IT and programming skills and get a pretty good job. In fact, IT in general is a pathway to wealth, which is open to anyone, and leads to more wealth than many other career paths. You can be a 17 year old Javascript expert a get a $200k job without going to college. All the training materials you need to do this are online, for free. You need a $200 Chromebook, a Wifi connection, and some kind of ambition or drive.

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A 17 year old JavaScript "expert" with a $200k job is such an outlier that it, quite frankly, is not worth mentioning.

Those "experts" are generally (statistically) not born, they are created. From strong education systems and strong social safety nets. If those are public and available to everyone, those "experts" obviously become more prevalent than if they are only available privately to a few.

>You can be a 17 year old Javascript expert a get a $200k job without going to college.

Please elaborate on what companies hire 17 year "javascript experts with no degree" starting at 200k

Yeah, not any more. Maybe in 1999 you could come in as a high school dropout and make an easy six figures since you truly were better at this "internet stuff" than the vast majority of the older IT folks.

I doubt we're in for another massive technology shift like that though in our lifetimes where toys turn into business tools exceedingly rapidly. AI is about the only one I could think of, and the barrier of entry there is far higher than the $150k/yr 17 year old webdev job of olde.

They were outliers, but they certainly existed within my friends group. Those that built independent websites/marketing/etc. did even better, and built rather good careers out of them over time. Many are now retired or semi-retired in their 30's.

Those doors have since been firmly slammed shut though by those who came afterwards, now you are gated by the HR dragons from most jobs.

It was a unique point in tech history I doubt will be re-created, but it's easy for those who lived it to think things are still like that. I got lucky to experience that and "come up" at the right time being interested in the right things. Today I'd have zero chances being unable to afford college. The competition is much more fierce as well.

I have CS degree, I interviewed recently in Chicago burbs. Junior income is around $60k to $80k......where do I sign up for these $200k Javascripts jobs?

Mountain View, CA

Menlo Park, CA

And live in your car.

Precisely, my friend got hired by apple as dev. Straight outta school $120k. His rent is $5k lol.

Mortgage on my house, which is one of the nicest suburbs in Chicago with great schools is $2k.

You're not getting hired if you don't have a minimum acceptable grasp of writing and communication skills, which are sorely lacking in most of the US unless you were raised by parents who taught that to you.

It's not really open to anyone. You have to be pretty smart to do well in IT. Not a genius by any means, but definitely in the top half of the IQ distribution.

And it applies to other fields in the so called 'knowledge economy' as well. How many people in a given developed country really can actively participate because they have the required aptitude, geographical luck and resources for education? 30- 40%?

The Atlantic addressed this in an article a while ago. Just waving away the disenfranchisement of large parts of the population because they're unable to work mentally tasking jobs erodes human worth.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-war...

au contrair -- people who control financial contracts get paid to pay others less.. people who monitor and exert management on others, get paid to monitor them more.. and, there is always someone in this Big Big World that is willing to work for less money.. people get paid to find those people

And an IQ/aptitude at least a std deviation from the mean.

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