Are normal adults not "working" in a similar way to your kid for 15+ hours per weekday?
Comparable adult parent things would be up at 6am, prep kids for school day, in the office by 8am, 8 hours of work plus a lunch, departing the office around 5pm, transporting kids to/from some activities, dinner, helping kids with homework, somehow fit in regular shopping needs (food, essentials, etc), maybe some volunteering or hobby things, if lucky in bed by 10pm, and we're easily at 15 hours of "work" on a weekday.
Very challenging at times, but for example I sleep with my kid hugging me, or I chat with them while in the car, or we do chores while watching tv or something like that.
And not every day is packed like that, you can tell your kids "no more than 3 times per week of activties, the other 2 days are for playdates", and that should be acceptable.
There are horrible days of the week, but it's not daily 15 hours of work. That's training for slavery.
Homework for break and homework for weekend should be STRONGLY ILLEGAL.
> Homework for break and homework for weekend should be STRONGLY ILLEGAL.
Get a grip dude. The standards for school have never been lower. In the US there's a graduation rate of 87% while a math/English proficiency rate of 22/35% respectively.
Something doesn't add up, and it's not too much homework
As you point out, a HS diploma is largely meaningless these days.
This discussion is about students trying to get into top colleges, which is a completely different population with completely different problems from those doing the bare minimum.
And my experience is based on Italy, where the children are loaded with homeworks since grade 2.
Clear memories of spending half the weekend doing homeworks instead of playing outside
That is a weird (modern?) delusion. Without children, our species disappears in <100 years. And the last of those years would be painful for those still alive.
Those who are having and raising children are the ones doing the most for the next generation.
No, I am not saying that in a negative way. I have kids and I love them deeply.
I am saying that the people who have kids now are aware of how much effort it involves, so they consider it "part of hobbies" (as in, interesting things), not as part of "chores".
Modern society requires that, otherwise people just have no kids.
And yes absolutely, the government overlooks entirely all the work that goes into parenting now. The standards have raised enormously.
Naw. Adult life is so much easier with regards to competitive pressure compared to getting into a good college. The real world is Pass/Fail, much to the chagrin of plenty of HNers.
> Adult life is so much easier with regards to competitive pressure compared to getting into a good college
You’re competing apples and oranges. Getting into a top college is similar to grinding to get into Big Tech jobs and then climb the ladder there.
Good colleges are easy. The top few colleges are very hard.
> The real world is Pass/Fail, much to the chagrin of plenty of HNers.
If by “fail” you mean lose your job in the next round of layoffs and have your career derailed, possibly.
You’re still comparing apples and oranges. The people who compete for top college spots usually continue competing for promotions and better paying jobs. The people who coast through high school look for jobs where they can coast and then get comfortable with whatever salary that provides them.
> Good colleges are easy. The top few colleges are very hard
Define "good" and "top".
Ivies, Ivy Tier privates (Stanford, MIT, Duke, Northwestern, Chicago, NYU, Caltech, Georgetown, CMU), and Ivy Tier public schools (Cal, UCLA, UCSD, Mich, UIUC, UW, UT, GT, Purdue, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA) all recruit from the same student body. Thanks to the Common App, UC App, Coalition App, and ApplyTexas it's marginal effort to apply to all the colleges above in addition to the "good" tier.
The Good tier of publics (the rest of the UCs, the rest of the Big 10, UTD, SJSU, CalPoly, NCSU, William&Mary, VT, Rutgers) and privates (Claremont Colleges, Seven Sisters, Vandy, etc) end up with plenty of kids who couldn't mkae it to the top which also makes them more competitive.
Outcomes at Good and Top are the same for most cases, but both are similarly competitive. The kind of profile that gets you into CS@UCR today would have gotten you into EECS@Berkeley a decade ago.
I have several hobbies that are popular with kids (mountain biking, rock climbing, and some others).
I can assure you that there are plenty of kids with more time than I have to dedicate to these hobbies at every popular spot I go to. Many of them are ambitious, smart, and working toward top universities, too. It’s actually fun energy to be around.
The parent comment about students getting up at 6:30AM and working 15 hour days is highly unusual.
Your comment specifically compared it to the normal adult, my point is the normal adult who is a parent is very likely doing even more than your example of your kid. Even for adults who aren't in the elite high earner category, heck people who make less money are likely working even more hours per day just to make ends meet.
As adult with job and kids, I honestly don't work as much as a kid described in that comment. It is in fact way less competitive. I get a good pay, my job is reasonably interesting (ai can make it sux and probably will, but we are not there yet). There are parts that sux or where I am under pressure, but overall, it is better to be an adult then to be teenager trying to get to competitive school.
And for the record, I had to work less to get to good school back then.
How, exactly, are they working more? How many low-paying jobs offer overtime, if they are full time at all? Any clue how many jobs won't let you work a part-time job or won't work around another job? Can't exactly work for Uber if you can't afford a decent enough car. And this is assuming you have older children that don't need childcare.
The fact is that they aren't working extra, not for a job anyway. The extra work comes in the time making dried beans instead of buying canned, in repairing stuff poorly, in shopping around for a doctor that takes the state health insurance or an affordable option if you have none at all, in taking busses (if they are available), and other unpaid things. Your child will be lucky to afford the activities that gets them a 'good' education, especially if they have to work.
That is exactly OP's point: for OP, if a child's "working hours" includes university prep and resume-padding sports activities, then an adult's "working hours" includes housework, grocery shopping, dealing with insurance and taxes, and commute/family chauffeur time.
Why should we change the practice of putting people to work to build civilization when they’re at their physical and energetic peak? In his early 20s my dad helped overthrow the Pakistani government, and by his late 20s and early 30s he was helping tackle the astronomical infant and maternal mortality in the country. Why shouldn’t our young people in America work?
"It takes a ton of pressure to make a diamond". I read that in a game when I was a kid and took it as a guiding principle in my life.
Overcoming hard times absolutely made me a better person, but as I've grown I've seen many examples of the fallout you're referring to. Sometimes people just break.
Only if you make it so. Good college/university means little in many jobs. The best devs for example (and most paid correspondingly since they knew their value very well) I've ever met were either coming out of subpar schools or skipped university altogether.
I myself went through mediocre noname university in eastern Europe with OK grades and it didn't matter at all, now I get perm salary thats better than 99% of devs in whole Europe while doing just that and nothing more, while sporting 10 weeks of paid vacation yearly. Quality of life further down the line, success and happiness are extremely non-correlated with all this academic stuff.
Its just control freak helicopter parents, which, albeit with good underlying intentions, fuck up everything they touch, including mental health of their kids. So kids compete just to endlessly compete while winning less than nothing. This is how deep regrets later in life are made.
Sometimes I wonder where all these HNers work. The majority of "slightly below top companies" seem to consist of mediocre workers, which is fine. Employees are just doing their job and if they fuck up, even badly, it's not too difficult for them to get a new job. Meanwhile a student getting a few subpar grades, often for reasons beyond their control, should somehow be punished forever.
I don't get all this existential talk about college acceptance. Yes, elite schools should expect elite applicants.
Meanwhile, the state school down the road is a fraction the cost, teaches a lot of the same content, and will accept anyone with a pulse. In my state, at least. State universities are somewhat competitive to get into, but state colleges... wide open.
All of which is very real-world. Certain top firms recruit only top candidates. Everyone else works somewhere further along the spectrum.
> I don't get all this existential talk about college acceptance. Yes, elite schools should expect elite applicants.
As a non-US person who's worked for a bunch of US companies, my belief is that the Ivy League et al act as a class system, rather than a symbol of educational attainment.
I strongly disagree. I knew a number of people who were accepted into those elite schools (two at MIT, two at Harvard, one at Brown). All but one of them were lower-to-lower middle class and only able to attend due to the grants given by the school itself. The thing they all had in common was they were incredibly intelligent and hard working. The elitism definitely exists, but it's not the way you describe in my experience
I’ve known a lot of Ivy League graduates and they were all very smart. Most of them were very good people, too. A lot of them came from backgrounds that didn’t include wealth or social connections.
This goes against the stereotypes you read online, but many of them are motivated by a desire to sneer and cut down others’ achievements. Look up “tall poppy syndrome” for one phrase describing this phenomenon.
> I’ve known a lot of Ivy League graduates and they were all very smart. Most of them were very good people, too. A lot of them came from backgrounds that didn’t include wealth or social connections.
Again, the fact that entry to the class system can be meritocratic is entirely disconnected from the fact of it operating as a class system.
When I worked at Big tech I remember recruiters (US-based) talking about hiring from approved schools, which were mostly Ivy League.
Additionally, when we were hiring a candidate in Europe, our director wanted to know what school she had gone to. Fortunately, she was an Oxbridge graduate so all was well.
Again, even if all Ivy League graduates were in the top 1% of objective merit, the use of this credential in hiring/firing/other decisions is what makes it a class system.
I have worked with many Ivy League graduates and they were all super smart and mostly effective, but that doesn't change my point.
Your original argument appeared to imply that it was a system designed to separate people by class, not by merit or educational attainment.
In my experience the people who are that selective about university pedigree are either doing it out of laziness (outsourcing selection process to the university filtering mechanism) or they have a degree from that system and believe that hiring people from it will automatically grant them more allies, thereby improving their own power.
> Your original argument appeared to imply that it was a system designed to separate people by class, not by merit or educational attainment.
I guess my core point is that those people you note (and I've met loads of them too) would have been equally smart and educated if they'd gone to a less prestigious university, but conditional on their ability, they'll do better at getting higher status jobs because they went to an Ivy League.
> In my experience the people who are that selective about university pedigree are either doing it out of laziness (outsourcing selection process to the university filtering mechanism)
This was a HR level policy at a really fast growing tech company (Facebook, back in 2013). I remember it because I was so shocked that this was a thing (not being an Ivy League graduate myself).
HN is centered around venture capital, which in college terms is the subtopic of branch Finance under Business Administration. SJSU, a top business school half an hour south of YC Palo Alto, has an intensely competitive Investment program that admits very few applicants for which students directly manage an investment fund; meanwhile, their Accounting under B.A. program is admitting anyone with a GPA of 2.2 or higher. That duality can be deeply confusing to people on the glamorous side of the fence: why would SJSU cheapen itself by admitting literally everyone it possibly can into Accounting by, when being highly selective results in such a high quality Investment program? That confusion fades rapidly when considered from the other direction: Investment is where the glory is, for those who seek that, and for the rest of us, there’s Accounting and Finance.
While HN, VCs, SJSU, and Tech are obviously not composed of the same population or applying the same restrictions, it’s certainly reasonable to highlight one similarity: the potential glory of one’s role at work directly impacts how competitive it is. That we’re currently in a nightmarish layoff cycle due to the ZIRP bubble popping and due to businesses replacing costly (and glorious) creative roles with more economical PREs (prompt reliability engineers) is amplifying this effect more strongly in Tech than in other industries, because Tech — just like the Investing industry that’s underpinned it for so long — has been saturated with glory and competitiveness.
I spent my career in tech working in the roles that do not offer glory — IT, rather than Product; Cost Centers, rather than Profit Centers — but even within IT, there were a couple of roles that had more glory and were much more competitive in their selection and evaluation criteria than others. At my final IT job, we were less strict about credentials and competitiveness with directors and vice presidents than we were about the high-glory role of enterprise architect. So while I do empathize with HN’s bias, having myself once pursued glory in tech, such competitiveness is abnormal in most jobs in most fields.
All of the AI companies are what I would consider top companies and all of them have had consistent outages because of bugs. OpenAI resets Codex limits almost weekly because of a major outage. Top companies have plenty of average employees.
we wake up at 7, prep the kids to school, they walk there alone then, we have coffee together, then I drive to the office by usually 9:30. have a proper lunch break with colleagues, then in the office until 6pm or so, then drive home, have dinner, put the kids in bed by 8, then we can watch a movie/do hobbies/etc.
while I work, my wife can do the shopping and take care of other household chores if needed.
Most of the stay at home spouses I know come from lower middle class households and they’ve made their lifestyle, living location, and other spending decisions fit their desired work arrangement. Even many of the construction contractors I’ve talked to recently (which is a decent number due to some remodel work) have stay at home wives.
What most people can’t afford is to maintain their desired lifestyle and only have one parent working. It’s similar to how people earning 3-4X the median wages for an area will think they’re barely getting by, while someone earning 1/4 of what they do is raising a family with two kids.
> What most people can’t afford is to maintain their desired lifestyle
True, goes without saying. I see most of the time when lifestyle is not even considered making a choice but simply as "everyone does it".
I might turn into most odd person in some sense among friends, colleagues, family/ relatives because I just happen to say things explicitly which makes for weird conversation.
Everyone around me expects these between the lines.
I've known many families around that age (+/- 5 years) with a stay at home spouse taking care of multiple kids. It really shapes their lifestyle in a lot of ways (smaller/older house, rarely eat out, rarely big family vacations, clothes/toys often from secondhand consignment stores, fewer/cheaper vehicles, etc.), but that's what's important to them so that's how they've set their priorities. Most didn't come from extremely wealthy backgrounds so its not necessarily like other wealthy people are propping them up, although a few are like that.
It may very well be impossible in certain markets but I wouldn't say its true across every family with the parents being around 30 years old.
This discussion gets me every single time. All three of my younger sisters are stay at home moms and their husbands make less than I do, and they have kids, whereas I don't. Until you're at least a deca-millionaire, no amount of money will ever feel like enough and you'll be stressed, or at least I will be, and I'm sure my sisters are, but the material differences in our day to day lives are nil. Their houses are smaller and they live in the middle of nowhere, whereas I live downtown in a major metro, but I also barely leave the house, so what difference does it make?
Everybody who thinks they absolutely cannot do it needs to take a long hard look in the mirror and ask how it is that 7 billion or so other people manage it with even less. It's nice not ever worrying about bills or paying much attention to what anything costs, but it's not that nice. I'm not actually any happier now than when I was living with four guys in a two bed apartment in the slums of Long Beach.
In my anecdotal experience the trend seems to be the less well-off families have stay-at-home moms, while the well-off professionals both work. It largely seems that the "no one can afford kids" idea is an excuse to not give up the DINK life style or at least dual income.
Its an "easier" thing to do (not claiming its an easy thing) when you're not living in a very wealthy area. Far easier to own a home when home prices are $200k not $2M. Groceries are often cheaper in less expensive areas. The few times you do decide to eat out the restaurants are also usually cheaper in the cheaper parts of town. There's more demand for good second-hand stores so they tend to thrive more in those areas. Very rich people often vote against public transit and bike lanes, at least in many parts of the country.
If you're trying to do it on a normal-ish kind of salary in an expensive place to live, its no wonder it seems impossible.
> personal anecdote
Anecdotes can refute an absolute claim like "no one my age can afford a stay at home wife". If you claim all screwdrivers are blue and I point to a red screwdriver in my tool drawer you can't just wave it away and say that's an anecdote. In reality, more millennials are opting for a single working parent lifestyle than Gen X did, largely due to extreme childcare costs.
When the cost for childcare is essentially eating a whole normal person's salary, there's a strong question of why have that parent go to wage-earning job.
this is mostly the norm in Switzerland in my social circle for families with children - husband works in tech, mom stays home until all the kids are old that they don't need mom around so much and/or you don't need to spend a fortune on them.
school launch + supervision for the 11:30 - 13:30 period is ~42 USD per day per kid, kita (pre-kindergarten) is easily ~3100 USD/month or more per kid. (I've put the numbers here in USD as most of the audience is outside of Switzerland for easier comparability), so for a lot of families, if mom works, mom's salary is spent on these costs.
Comparable adult parent things would be up at 6am, prep kids for school day, in the office by 8am, 8 hours of work plus a lunch, departing the office around 5pm, transporting kids to/from some activities, dinner, helping kids with homework, somehow fit in regular shopping needs (food, essentials, etc), maybe some volunteering or hobby things, if lucky in bed by 10pm, and we're easily at 15 hours of "work" on a weekday.
Yes, it's a lot.