The author's thesis is that the rise in home-schooling is driven by a desire to "opt out of being around average people," and he implies that he is not home-schooling his own children in part because he himself was home-schooled and believes that may have contributed to his own struggles with social stress.
However, given his self-description, it seems there is a decent chance he would have struggled with social stressors regardless of what education setting he was in, possibly even more so if he had been exposed to bullying or excessive social stressors in a more traditional public education setting.
Exposing oneself to just the right dose of poison in order to develop immunity is a delicate science.
When I was younger, I was also taught to believe that nurture always triumphs over nature, but as I got older and eventually had my own kids, I found out that nature was winning way more of those battles than I first realized.
We live in a social climate where we can't even assert ourselves of someone's gender based on their name out of fear from a very local special interest group that has far reaches into public education system and this is another big reason why parents who can't afford private school opt for home schooling.
The fact that parent had to edit their comment and could not call a man a he answers the article's question very well.
It means the user, a relatively recent account, is trawling for bites. The KKK in the username and the slant of many of their comments might hint at a touch of bad faith edge lording.
I find this somewhat hypocritical given that you've recently made suggestive statements about users comments being posted and mocked on other forums, along with vague threats of their real identities being uncovered e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pkkkzip
I didn't say you threatened to do it, just that you suggested vague threats of it occurring.
> i dont think the ppl expressing ... here realize the screenshot of their content is being ... shared on other platforms ... coupled with ... the discoverability of usernames connected to their other real world profiles
Agreed. Titles and credentials do not mean what they used to, in education and a lot of other fields.
Sufficient erosion in the meaning and value of 3rd party teaching credentials then diminishes the relative value of outsourcing the process vs. doing it in-house: literally.
Digital surveillance is often marketed as a form of harm reduction, with a focus on some metric that is easy to measure.
What is more often ignored is the potential for harm creation imposed by the measurement process itself: after all, such externalities are subtle and hard to quantify, even if they may ultimately sum in total to a larger quantity, potentially yielding a net positive harm overall.
Some would likely argue that we should prioritize the known over the unknown, but I'd rather not sign up my kids to be your guinea pig, especially if you have already demonstrated yourself to be a rotten scientist.
On an international level, there is a grand plan to ditch old Freudian categories like narcisissm, borderline, etc. in the upcoming ICD11.
There was never much evidence for such diagnostic categories, and I was told that if you look at notes from old proceedings of the DSM-III committee that their inclusion was an artifact of the political need to get buy-in from the then-powerful psychoanalytic groups at the time.
The ICD11 plan to have a single personality disorder bucket makes more sense to me. At its core, a personality disorder consists of a heavily reinforced and entrenched cluster of behavior that is significantly self-defeating and that actively resists common intervention strategies. From that perspective, you could either have endless personality disorder categories or a single category that summarizes the phenomenon.
The restructuring is not complete, though: a concession was granted to allow borderline personality disorder to remain for the time being due to industry concerns related to reimbursement, but the plan remains to ditch it eventually.
Caution: you might get paid 50% more to work at a company that is 500% worse managed, and therefore is hemorrhaging employees so fast that the only way they can maintain staffing levels is to offer a hefty premium above normal market wages to get new suckers to take a chance on them.
If you're nihilistic and believe all employers are rotten, then jumping ship every 2 years might be a decent game strategy, but I tend to believe that good employers do exist and are just somewhat rare. So if you find a unicorn, I would recommend holding onto it.
Perhaps this is just personal experience, but the worst jobs I've ever had also paid the worst. The places that are badly managed either don't know or can't afford market rates, so they try and hire cheap labor. Think body shops, game dev, government positions, etc.
By contrast, a place that has expensive employees is going to see their time as more valuable, so there's a direct monetary incentive not to waste it and the cash flow exists to do things. Doesn't always work, but it dramatically improves the odds.
I agree on all your points, but find it funny that you mention game-dev as a bad example. I know the industry has a bad reputation but some of my best gigs were at gaming companies(and, as per your suggestion, those were the best paid ones too!)
probably relevant detail is that I did contractor work for backend/server stuff for those gaming companies. And the two studios in question have each published the biggest games in their respective categories in the world(which basically means they both have infinite money)
> and, as per your suggestion, those were the best paid ones too!
I've never worked in game dev, but at least in NYC I was being interviewed by Rockstar Games for a pretty senior-level position a couple years ago, just to find out that it maxed out at considerably less than my previous job. I didn't continue the process and I just assumed that it was standard in the games industry.
It's probably more that non-game-dev-Swedes actually make significantly closer to what game-dev-Swedes make in general. Regular software engineering jobs have pretty inflated salaries in the States - Swedish take home salary for software engineers (and indeed, much of the rest of the Western world) is about 1/3 of the equivalent USA salary. Obviously there are other factors at play here, like the functioning healthcare system and social safety net, but all other factors aside the take home pay for non game dev engineers is significantly inflated in the States compared to the rest of the world.
I'm pretty sure that at least in the states, game dev jobs pay somewhat mediocre. Looking at Rockstar and Activision's job posting, even for senior level stuff they're paying considerably less than some of the more unsexy senior engineering jobs.
As I said, I've never worked game dev, but people who have here told me that they are pretty brutal, expecting you to work a lot of extra unpaid hours. It would not surprise me if Sweden has better labor protections in this regard.
The worse pay is what adds on to the feeling of the job being terrible. As much as many want to claim, its not very satisfying to slog away and ship an elegant product for peanuts. When the pay is lower than what is the standard, it's always going to make the job feel terrible.
I'll add to this that low-paying companies tend to drastically overestimate the impact that other positive aspects of management can have on your life. I have friends. I don't need my employer to be my friend, I need my employer to pay me.
In recent years, I've worked for clients that didn't give me the information I needed to do my job and then were mad when the work was delayed. Every pay cycle I got paid and every night I went home and slept like a baby.
Contrast this with early in my career when I was at times struggling to make rent. My managers at that time weren't bad so much as unmemorable: what I remember is being unable to sleep because I was worried about how I was going to make ends meet.
The things employers do besides pay their employees usually just don't have the impact on workers' lives they sometimes think they do. Outside of egregious outliers like verbal, sexual, or physical abuse, there really isn't much a manager can do that's going to impact their workers as much as stable pay and benefits.
You're not wrong, but that's not the full story here tho, at least not in my experience.
Worst job I ever had paid about 60% of what I usually earn, and I was told of by the manager for pointing out that there were compilation errors in our master branch (at this place, anything pushed to master was automatically deployed into production, with zero testing. The only reason prod didn't burn that day was because the pipeline crashed when it couldn't produce the jar file)
(Well, prod did burn that day, it burned every day at this place, but none of those fires were because of the non-compiling commit in question)
There were a lot of other problems at this place, but that was the day I handed in my resignation.
Would you have tolerated that if you getting paid 1.5 or 2x instead of 0.6x? Maybe you wouldn't, but on average many would be ok with that environment for higher pay.
One interesting data point is that places that pay higher than the market on average have much higher rate of retention as well. Barring some egregious conditions, many will tolerate an non-ideal environment for better than market pay.
I'm not sure if I would've tolerated it or not, I was in a tight spot financially when I took the job so I might have tolerated it for a bit longer at least if the pay was 2x my normal rate.
But I still would've hated every second of it. At 10x I definitely would've tolerated it for longer, but only by steeling myself with the thought that if I work 12 more months, I can basically retire afterwards.
> Worst job I ever had paid about 60% of what I usually earn, and I was told of by the manager for pointing out that there were compilation errors in our master branch (at this place, anything pushed to master was automatically deployed into production, with zero testing.
Out of curiosity, how long did it take from hiring day to resignation for this to become apparent?
I first started considering resigning after about 3 months, but I was in tight spot financially at the time so I stuck around for 6 months in the end. It was soul crushing and terrible.
The primary reason for having an employer in your life at all is for them to pay you, so the primary measure of a good employer is good pay. Yes, there are other factors, but many of those factors (read: benefits) have known monetary values which are effectively equivalent to pay.
There is no such thing as a good employer who doesn't pay their workers competitively.
While this may not be your intent, your post sounds a lot like a manager narrative that "sure, our pay and benefits leave bit to be desired, but we have a great culture and we're well managed". That's not a thing. A great culture is one where everyone is paid enough to live comfortably, and when the company does well financially, workers do well financially. The primary measure of managing well is paying your workers well.
The things management does besides paying their workers simply do not have enough impact on workers' lives that they can "manage" well enough to make more difference in an employee's life than a 20% increase in pay, let alone a 50% increase in pay as you describe. Beyond behaving at all in an appropriate manner, i.e. not verbally, sexually, or physically abusing your employees, your actions as a manager simply don't impact workers' lives as much as that much money does.
And in fact, other attributes of management are correlated with pay in my experience. The company you describe, that pays well but is otherwise terribly managed, is not one I have experienced. In most cases, a company that pays well is great to work for in other ways, and a company that pays worse is terrible to work for in other ways. The management mindset that is stingy toward workers doesn't stop at pay.
I never suggested that there are good employers who don't pay their workers competitively.
I instead suggested that there are bad employers who pay above market rates as a way to compensate for problems with employee retention. Sure, they'll run out of money doing that eventually, but you'd be surprised how long a business can cover up their mistakes with such a strategy, especially with the right funding partners behind them.
If you have not had the misfortune of working for such a business, that's great, but I believe there are plenty of comments here on HN to support the notion that such businesses not only exist but are fairly common in any industry touched by Venture Capital or Private Equity, and I have seen many even suggest that their higher financial compensation ends up not being worth it in light of the added psychological and physiological toll.
> I never suggested that there are good employers who don't pay their workers competitively.
Agreed. I don't think I accused you of saying that--I just think that what you did say is easily twisted to support that narrative.
> I instead suggested that there are bad employers who pay above market rates as a way to compensate for problems with employee retention. Sure, they'll run out of money doing that eventually, but you'd be surprised how long a business can cover up their mistakes with such a strategy, especially with the right funding partners behind them.
> If you have not had the misfortune of working for such a business, that's great, but I believe there are plenty of comments here on HN to support the notion that such businesses not only exist but are fairly common in any industry touched by Venture Capital or Private Equity, and I have seen many even suggest that their higher financial compensation ends up not being worth it in light of the added psychological and physiological toll.
I'm not saying this situation doesn't exist. I'm saying it's far less common than the situation where you find a job that pays better because your current job is underpaying you.
A friend of mine did work for such a company. He stayed there for 9 months, and then quit without a job lined up, and it took him 4 months to find a job (partly because he was being much more selective about jobs). He a) still made more money in 9 months than in the previous year, and b) leveraged the higher pay history to obtain higher pay at all companies he worked for in the rest of his career. Having talked to him extensively about it at the time (and advising him to quit) I think he'd maybe work there a shorter period, but it doesn't seem like he regrets doing it.
So sure, these companies exist, but working for one is not necessarily a critical mistake as long as you keep your option to quit open (which I think is critical in any job, no matter how good--the ability of either party to walk away from the table is a key component of any free transaction in a free market).
Having worked in a position where it was part of the job description to periodically report parents to CPS, my experience was that it was actually quite challenging to get CPS to take up a case, even when there was lots of evidence suggesting abuse was taking place. In general, CPS seemed to work very hard to prevent false positives, and concerned itself far less with false negatives.
At the time, I remember finding that frustrating, but in retrospect I think it was the right approach. Why? Because invalid reports are always going to vastly outnumber valid ones, in part because it is easy to be judgmental about someone else's parenting for a variety of prejudicial reasons, so "innocent until proven guilty" should be the default stance of any agency tasked with investigating such reports.
That is why stories about shaken baby syndrome are so galling, because the faux-science sets up a "guilty until proven innocent" scenario, which is definitely the wrong approach.
This is not always stated explicitly, but will turn up in board minutes if you have access to them. Many professional boards have added a DEI committee or incorporated language into their mission statement in recent years as well (Oregon bar statement: https://www.osbar.org/diversity/programs.html).
I'm never clear whether the hypothesis is "more DEI = more efficacy && competency," or whether the hypothesis is "benefits of (DEI) > benefits of (efficacy && competency)." The former hypothesis at least seems more testable, but I'm not sure whether anyone is trying very hard (meta-analysis: https://academic.oup.com/tbm/advance-article/doi/10.1093/tbm...).
Oregon's move is exactly backwards. If anything, they should cancel the law school requirement and allow the public to sit for the bar exam. Schools are notorious for graduating incompetent students who's only ability was to take out loans to pay the tuition. Allowing the public to sit for the bar exam without going to law school would be a much better DEI initiative because it would directly address disparities in the ability to finance a law school education.
Also law school is ridiculous. My sister is studying to be a lawyer but may not be able to attend despite passing the initial test (the name I forget.) basically she needs a couple of existing lawyers recommendation, but we’re from a small town and she only knows one. Also the work requirements are ridiculous, she’s not allowed to work for a law office at all while attending a law school which seems so backwards compared to most schools where they actively encourage getting a job working in the field. So she’ll have to quit her current law secretary job if she wants to go to law school.
Are you in the US? Created an account to address this misconception in case it’ll help your sister out:
Assuming she hasn’t attended yet (and therefore just took the LSAT, not the bar exam), most schools will accept letters of recommendation from anybody that can speak to your sister’s ability to succeed in law school. That can be her current employer, past employers, colleagues, past professors, community members she’s volunteered with, etc. If she can’t find literally anybody, she might be able to network with local attorneys to get a basic letter to help her meet requirements.
And law students complete internships whilst they’re in school, not sure who told her she couldn’t work for a firm during her studies. However, many schools do have a rule against allowing 1L (first-year) students to work as it could interfere with their studies. I agree that it sucks when you’re not already wealthy, though. She could see if the firm she currently works at would allow her to go on leave, coming back as an intern after her first year. Alternatively, she could do a part-time program.
Disclaimer: I’m also applying to law school this cycle, so actual lawyers may have better info.
You can work, but you can't get paid for said work unless it's during a school break. At least that was ABA rules around ten years ago, and followed assiduously by everyone from private practitioners to the federal government. Nobody will hire you when you study for the bar (although if you apply outside of the legal field, you can. I worked in a kitchen when I studied for the bar). Although you'll have to have a body of work in order to get someone to pay you anyway, so if you're not the type who'd go from law review to big law or teaching, you can rack up a lot more hours if you're willing to do the unpaid busywork that comes with, say, the Public Defender's office, or the Prosecutor's Office. Internship + externship + paid work added together with a summer's head start I managed to cram in almost 3000 hours before I took the bar and had a job waiting for me right away, but please don't do that, because you'll get burned out really quickly and possibly become very jaded about the work. I spent one spring doing only juvenile cases and it totally fucked me up. And this was after I had worked on two capital cases (neither got the death penalty, thankfully), and in the early days of Facebook I scraped the personal details of residents of two counties for peremptory challenges during voir dire (hung jury, both murder cases). I don't think anyone in my class came even close to how much work I put in. I practiced for 6 years and then quit.
I believe all four of the states that don't require law school instead require a substantially equivalent period of supervised apprenticeship with a licensed attorney to qualify for the bar if you choose not to go the law school route (California does), so its inaccurate to point to them as examples of the “allow the public to sit for the bar” recommendation upthread.
The reason for DEI does not matter. The practical outcome is perhaps perverse.
A potential client will see a "diverse" lawyer and think "this person was hired because of DEI rather than competence."
Prudent clients will insist on white male lawyers because they must be competent to have jobs in a DEI environment. So actually competent lawyers from minorities suffer because of DEI policies and laws.
The ordinary client does not know how to properly evaluate the competency of an attorney anyway, DEI or not DEI. And no, the jingle is not correlated to performance either in motion or trial practice. Hell, Cellino and Barnes literally had a new Barnes and kept the jingle and nobody even seemed to notice.
Not sure if the ditch the exam here is related to that, since there’s a lot of pre-existing discourse around exam practices anyways, but
> I'm never clear whether the hypothesis is … or …
It’s possibly both. I’ve seen a lot of arguments (poorly cited usually) to the affect of
* diverse organizations tend to perform better. The general claim is that providing psychological safety enables people to work better. And diverse groups of people have more different experiences, and can contribute increasingly different ideas and perspectives.
* DEI initiatives are beneficial people and society at large. This claim is obvious.
So it can be true that the benefits of these initiatives are important AND they lead to better performing organizations.
People who are granted access to opportunities based on DEI and not on merit will be forever indebted to the DEI power structure and will aid them in their long march through the institutions by loyally doing whatever it takes to increase and ensure their political power. They claim that their is a conspiracy against DEI and they are just rebalancing the scale and this is why there are different scores on standardized tests, etc. They say the only way for you to get justice is to give political power to the DEI hierarchy and ignore their crimes and corruption and prosecute to the maximum extent those who want to do things based on merit.
And conversely, anyone who has been granted opportunity due to suppressing the opportunities of others despite merit will do whatever it takes to maintain their political power.
Source: the entire civil rights movement going all the way back to slavery
It's just a means of assembling a very large clique of underqualified people, who everyone knows are underqualified and who know they are underqualified who will, in the name of job security and gratitude and whatever fake intellectual "justice" sophistry the PHDs in whatever studies come up with, will willingly participate in and ignore political corruption and call it "justice" and persecute anyone trying to clean it up. This model has been replicated among many big cities in America that demand "diversity." Over time in the name of "social justice", a whole cadre of underqualified civil servants lining their pockets and waving whatever flag of the month protects them from any scrutiny at all milk to death the historical wealth of cities and slowly turn them into Detroit. All the productive people give up on and move out of the cities. The tax revenue falls, cities services decline, lots of buildings become derelict and burn down, and everyone cheers about how "diverse" they are.
In cities that just won't die like San Francisco, they spend $300 million dollars on a homeless problem that would put thousands of diversity hires out of a job if it was ever solved. They do a subway expansion that costs more than $1 billion dollars for a mile, and they demand more taxes to fix problems that could be solved by simply enforcing the existing laws.
If only that was the bar exam. Now it's all UBE so what you end up with is 2/3 multiple choice questions that bear little relationship to actual law you'll be practicing, and 1/3 are answers to absurd hypotheticals that you'd answer in a formulaic fashion, situations that you will pretty much never see IRL and certainly will never be in a position where you can't look up the law, except this one time.
Oh, and the software that's used to conduct the test is practically malware in the way it operates. At the NY State Bar exam I took there were about 100 people who didn't finish because the crappy software crashed and you had to handwrite the whole thing from the first question on. If it crashes your computer, you might as well leave since you won't have time to finish.
Really, the bar exam has virtually nothing in common with the actual practice of law. It's a separate skill, like taking the SATs. Although, there are so many legal niches that it's unlikely that testing real law would really resemble how legal practicecs work today anyway. It's pretty much an arbitrary test that might fry your computer. Hopefully they at least they should have released a newer version of the software in the intervening years.
There is an interesting hypothesis by Oded Galor that states that there should be a balance between not enough and too much diversity when it comes to innovation and progress - with the first you'll get stagnation and with the second you'll get chaos.
However, most professional boards are created with an explicit mandate to promote efficacy and competency, which makes a hypothesis like "benefits of (DEI) > benefits of (efficacy && competency)" rather troublesome for a professional board to rally around. Even if true, it seems out of scope.
The "more DEI = more efficiency && competency" hypothesis seem like it should be where a professional board should focus its efforts and messaging instead.
In a service business, sweat equity is an awesome tool, not just for paying yourself, but also for paying your early employees.
One of the biggest obstacles you face when bootstrapping is that you need employees to grow your revenue, but you need revenue in order to pay your employees. It's a chicken-and-the-egg problem, which sweat equity can help to solve, at least to a limited degree: grant some sweat equity that vests over 5 to 10 years as a form of deferred compensation, then hope that your new employee / business partner boosts the value of your remaining equity in that time-frame by some multiple that is much larger than than the value of the equity you are giving up today. Then everybody wins.
I have found this approach very successful in my own business. It also increases the likelihood that when you want to retire some day that your own employees might be able and interested in buying you out, which means that you won't have to shop your medium sized businesses to private equity groups or search funds in 20 or 30 years when you want to get out of the game.
Part of building a middle class is not pulling up the ladder after you, which means you need to aim to enrich others -- specifically others who are not already wealthy -- alongside yourself.
I would argue that all businesses are lifestyle businesses. Dreaming of a lifestyle that involves 10 houses and a yacht? Become a VC, or join a company backed by one and hope it becomes a unicorn. Astronomical wealth and power are a LIFESTYLE, the same way that dreaming of a modest home, work that you love, and time to spend on meaningful relationships is a lifestyle.
Just try to avoid judging the lifestyles of others.
On the other hand, if someone has a child who is aggressively attacking anything and everything in site, no matter how they might have heard about PANDAS, I would argue that antibiotics might still be the lowest risk intervention and most prudent option to try if they fit the profile.
Yes, antibiotic resistance is a concern if you start handing out antibiotics like candy, but if PANDAS is truly as rare as everyone would have you believe, then prescribing antibiotics to every kid that comes in with a PANDAS profile is not going to move the needle much with regard to global antibiotic resistance.
Alternatives:
Prescribe them anti-psychotics or some other medication to sedate them?
Likely much higher side-effects and risk profiles than antibiotics.
Send them to a therapist in hopes that the therapist can behaviorally condition that aggression away?
Bad news: talk-therapy for aggressive behavior in children has terrible outcomes. Most likely scenario in the mental health system is that they end up in an intensive group treatment setting somewhere with other aggressive children, learn more sophisticated aggressive behaviors, and gradually get worse.
On the other hand, antibiotics have a fairly low risk profile. Some pediatricians do literally hand them out like candy when kids come in with an ear infection or sore throat. Maybe stop prescribing antibiotics for those kids, tell them to try some tea tree oil or some other natural remedy, and save the antibiotics for the kids who fit a PANDAS profile instead?
However, given his self-description, it seems there is a decent chance he would have struggled with social stressors regardless of what education setting he was in, possibly even more so if he had been exposed to bullying or excessive social stressors in a more traditional public education setting.
Exposing oneself to just the right dose of poison in order to develop immunity is a delicate science.
When I was younger, I was also taught to believe that nurture always triumphs over nature, but as I got older and eventually had my own kids, I found out that nature was winning way more of those battles than I first realized.
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