It’s better to self-actualize than work in a dead-end job . With all the free resources available online to acquire high-paying skills, why waste time with low paying, low-skill work – unless I guess you really need money.
Well-intentioned adults are giving bad advice to young people by encouraging them work dead-end jobs instead of learning valuable, high-paying skills like coding, econ and math. As we wrote before, according to studies, these low paying jobs offer no benefit. Look at the recent oil implosion. that’s a lot of blue collar jobs that will be going away, but STEM is doing better than ever. Then in 2006 you had the housing construction collapse, which again hit blue collar workers. Now since 2008 you have all this accelerating trend of outsourcing and automation, which will hurt low-income service sector workers the most. Not everyone is cognitively suitable for STEM, but it provides the best shot at good-paying, stable employment. Silicon Valley isn’t going away. Web 2.0 valuations aren’t going lower. Stocks will keep going up and interest rates will never rise. We live in a society that equates intelligence (like IQ, STEM), wealth an self-actualization with self-worth. Why put yourself or your children at a disadvantage by gaining useless ‘work experience’ when they should be gaining cognitive experience?
Now more than ever, it’s a great time to be rich and smart in America. Everyone else has to worry about losing their jobs and health insurance. And those who aren’t smart are typically faced with crummy job prospects, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
Are coding bootcamps a waste of money?
You can learn coding for much less by reading books and various online guides. A 12-week bootcamp is not going to make a novice competent at the major programming languages – there’s simply too much to learn, and then you also have to learn how to apply to code to varying situations that may arise, as well as how to integrate serverside code with clientside (ajax + php for example). Same for those sites like treehouse and code academy that seem to make the grandiose promise of being able to find a career after taking their courses. Then there is the whole IQ issue: if you cannot score at least 120, don’t bother.