Comment by jaimebuelta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaimebuelta | Hacker News Reader

What I see in this brief (I haven't seen the actual talk) is an understandable fear to get out of the education system.

Let's face it, from kindergarden to the end of college, what we have is a set of "levels", a fixed path with very very few points where you can actually decide something. The natural step is to reach the next level and keep doing roughly the same. More tests, more lessons... etc

BUT, when that system ends, there is a void. The adult world is not "a fixed system" or "the next level in the game", but a whole chaos, full of options, opportunities, uncertainties. And that freedom can intimidate, specially if someone has been focusing in excelling in the educational system and has the perception (not necessarily that's a real thing) that none of that is useful, that other people already have links (which a lot of people will form) with this new and weird "life outside academia"

I mean, it's a great thing, but I can totally understand that it's scary at first.

This is true. I think society has gotten better at stretching out the shelter over time. It used to be undergrad + law school, then figure it out. Now it's undergrad + banking/consulting/TFA + MBA + McKinsey, then figure it out.

Or for the lucky who were REALLY into programming, we knew early on that grades didn't matter as much so long as we learned enough to be valuable, since it's a field that's a relative meritocracy.

My experience, though, was the folks not handing in homework assignments were doing it out of laziness, not alternative studies.

> since it's a field that's a relative meritocracy

I couldn't know this, I could just sincerely hope it's true, for all the years I played with programming, neglecting my duties as part of an educational system. I believed that I can become good at this thing called programming and I believed that it will be enough.

Almost twenty years later I'm still astonished that my childish, naive belief was indeed true. That in this field it is much more important what we can do than who we are.

Or maybe it was just luck and I'm deluding myself...

There are politics in technology like every field, but... It's a field where things work, or things don't. And very hard problems get solved, or they don't.

In Marketing, there's always a way to spin a result. In HR, the results can be too long in the future to hold someone accountable.

Sales is perhaps the only other that comes close in being a meritocracy. There too the pedigree doesn't matter as much.

That's a very insightful post. Thank you.

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