this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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Showerthoughts
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My kid's a millennial and graduated college in 2018... Here's the dirty little secret... Your life depends on what you put into it. Nobody just just going to hand you anything, you have to put in the work.
I tried to make it easy for him, I paid his way through college so he got a CS degree with no debt, but he worked for that degree, and the connections he made led to his first job at Intel, his second job at Oracle, and now, at the age of 28, he's out there doing the super spooky AI stuff, and presenting papers at conferences.
Not to belittle you kid's efforts, it's a great feat they've achieved, but it sounds like survivorship bias. You can do everything right and still fail. Being in the right place at the right time and having the right connections matter.
As a millennial who wasn't interested in computers these types of stories will haunt me my entire life
I'm a millennial who was interested, I do IT for dirt money. You may put a lot in, but you also have to be surrounded by the right people to succeed.
That last statement is absolutely true. My first 5-6 years in IT I kind of languished, because there were very few people around me that made an effort or pushed me to get better or just explained stuff to me. Then I got a call from a recruiter for a system engineer position. While I didn't get that job, it did lead me to quit my job to go find something better. I then did find an IT system engineer job where I had a great mentor, support and incentives to get IT certificates. I wasn't there for long due to personal circumstances, but that really launched my career and I've been getting better and higher paid jobs since.
I'm in my 4th year of your six years. My.manager says certs aren't worth it. Won't pay for them
Your manager can go suck a dick. They are absolutely worth it and worth the out of pocket expense for the exam. The long term benefits (it looks very good on a cv) are absolutely beneficial to your career, not to mention you will learn relevant stuff in the process.
Yeah mixture of both, wouldn't you agree?
Sometimes you can get far by just being lucky.
Sometimes you can get far by just working hard.
You're most likely to get far by working hard and being lucky.
You can still not get anywhere even when you work hard.
Strong economies create more opportunities which means your luck factor doesn't have to be as high.
Definitely a mixture of both, but the one thing I guarantee is if you sit around doing nothing, that's exactly all you'll ever attain.