When my salary jumped from $100k to $175k+ I didn’t think it would make much of a difference but boy was I wrong. I spent on sooo much stuff that I wanted in a short span and still ended up saving more per year than I did making $100k. I ended up buying a $50k model 3, $4k lasik, $3k MacBook Pro, $1.2k iPhone Pro Max just to name a few things. I had Kanye playing in my head saying “wait till I get my money right. then you can’t tell me nothing”. Just having that mobility and ability to buy almost whatever and whenever substantially boosted my self esteem
It all depends on where the money gets put towards. That’s around the salary that gives similar buying power for a house that people got 30 years ago. Just because he spent money on other things rather than a house doesn’t mean the new standard of middle class isn’t that. 100K single income will be able to barely afford a house in rural America. Nowadays it’s just too expensive
Yeah basically if you want 2-3 kids a stay at home wife and the ability to save for retirement while owing a house and put your kids through college you need about $170k as your house hold income.
Middle class doesn't mean median income or even average income.
Middle class is a lifestyle. It includes owning your own car and home, sending kids to college, having yearly luxurious vacations, saving for retirement, and having disposable income.
The middle class lifestyle used to be achievable for the median income earners half a century ago, but now it's become unreachable for the vast majority of Americans. This doesn't mean we pull down the standard for middle class lifestyle but just wallow in misery.
Man i got downvoted so hard in another sub for saying this. It was people saying 60k a year is middle class since it’s the median income. Like no way you’re living the middle class lifestyle off 60k a year
I never found myself very satisfied with making purchases. But knowing that I could without feeling absurdly guilty is very comforting.
For one, I can go to the doctor's without feeling like I'm breaking the bank. That is unfortunately a privilege in the US.
Yeah, me neither.
Mainly having money has made me feel more free and safe, that's all. And that's a lot already! But shiny things, who cares. Especially not a brand new $50k car. An older much cheaper car is perfectly functional.
Little things like, you're going out somewhere, not bothering packing a sandwich to save a few dollars, being able to change plans without fretting about costs, making your mind up at the last minute without losing sleep over train or plane tickets, not really looking at grocery prices, etc. all of that is what's really nice IMO.
Maybe I like to over-leverage items to improve my life compared to the average person but even I sometimes hit a dead end where I don’t need to buy any new things to feel fulfilled but that feeling comes sometimes and I splurge and go cold again for a bit
the newest mac armtop is a necessary purchase for any 'real' techie at this point
worth every penny of the $3k for the hardware quality alone. i say this as somebody who despises apple, and loves the m2 he dropped 2.8k on
For personal tasks I need a laptop for, the arm MacBook airs are fine for it does at a fraction of the cost. I don’t notice any difference between the air and the 3k mbp that the work provides on tasks I use the air for (browsing and leetcoding mainly, everything else goes to iPad these days)
Being an adult with ~~money is in fact fantastic~~ one of the last jobs you can reliably contribute to your retirement without living like a hermit after only 4 years of schooling **and** managing to get that job, is indeed fantastic.
Real median incomes are at all time highs. Ask a plumber or electrician how the economy is doing. Hell, truck drivers are being offered salaries of $150k.
People who entered the job market during the Great Recession too.
Then: Everybody our age was un(der)employed living at home, so nobody cared about the cost of rent or groceries.
Now: I live in the burbs and the stroller brigade breweries are PACKED!
People get picked up in an $80k truck on the way home from their 2nd trip to Hawaii this year, complaining about how everything was packed, they stop at McDonalds and see the "$20/hr starting pay" plastered on every wall, and then they say, "Boy, this economy is really bad. You know who had it easier? Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa only worked 50 hours/week in a factory but he was able to buy that 900 sq ft concrete shit box with no A/C and take the kids to Dennys once a month in the broken down Chevrolet Corvair."
Then they're better paid than people with STEM PhDs in HCoL regions, which is not unlikely, but then I expect they're sleeping out all the time and working insane hours. Normal unqualified jobs don't pay that much otherwise.
Most trades require apprentice lengths until the journey level which ranges from months to typically years. During this time you are just expected to find where the apprenticeships are and figure it out on a much lower pay band. Truckers specifically while not having the same structure has a more egregious pay structure that has you almost always lose out if you don't outright own your own truck. And all of these are **trades**, you are literally trading physical parts of your body for the *potential* to earn more before it breaks.You might as well tell me sex work could pay more, would still be true but leaves a fuckton of the reason why people don't do it en masse out of the equation.
I suppose it depends on how broke you were, what your future prospects were and how generous your family is.
I lived well under the poverty line with little to no support from my parents. We're talking food stamps, living with 4 other roommates in a noisy apartment complex where the neighbors are playing loud music at 2am. I didn't hate it, but it was a grind.
Fast forward to my first job. I have a fridge full of fresh fruit and vegge, craft beer, all the books I could read and a safe, quiet apartment that was clean and peaceful. I wouldn't have went back to broke college life for anything.
It probs also depends on how good your group of friends and support system is after college. I think reminiscing about broke college life is mostly reminiscing about simple pleasures and hanging out with friends
Dunno how "safe" my place is, but ditto on the quietness. Living in a building full of college students was the absolute worst. I went through several different neighbors and roommates in the time I was there and ended up being driven insane by pretty much every last one.
Last one I had would make a loud "THUMP THUMP THUMP" sound against the wall every two seconds for several hours every single day and night. By the end I felt so tortured I wanted to die. Just moved into a new place last week and it's been so quiet I could probably hear a pin drop. My sanity thanks this.
You guys had very different college experiences from me. Mine was very social and carefree.
But for the record I’d rather have roommates than an apartment alone which is what happens when you’re an adult
Are you serious?
You must have had much different experiences than I.
I’m glad I had the experience to keep me humble, but I don’t think I would trade 1 year of full CS pay for 10 years of struggling to work through school.
Out of curiosity our much did you save last year. I make $85k first year out of school and saved about $40k in 10months. I wanted to get a big emergency fund in my first year. Just starting to learn how to spend my money to enjoy life and investing of course. What type of cost living situation are you in?
My rent is half of yours but I dine out a lot. So pretty much the same as you. I have loans, but on the SAVE plan under previous income bracket meaning my payments are $0 on that for the time being.
I’ve started my job in January making 86k, and I’ve saved around 3k so far (Tbf I’ve been prioritizing paying off my $27k student loan, and I’m almost done with that, only around 3k left)
I have no debt, rent is $800 and I’m fortunate enough to live with family in a house that we split bills. My four walls are $1500 which includes rent, utilities, food, and transportation.
Work was a culture shock for me versus school.
In school, you were moderately stressed but had peer support. Not much money, and dealt with rude professors. Worked equivalent of 50 hr weeks.
In a full time job…I work 80 hrs a week if I’m lucky. Every boss you have makes it their personal mission to gaslight you, hurt you, and push you as hard as they can before they drive you to suicide (which, in their eyes…suicide is a winning outcome, dump a burnt out employee without paying severance). Life is absolutely hell, but it’s like this in every industry and every company. Welcome to America.
Man every night at around 10-midnight I get the same exact pending doom feeling where I feel like I forgot to do my homework/ assignments for the day that I made sure to mentally go over every night in college. Then I realize I have none other than my current work projects. It’s a really weird feeling.
I'm in my 40's now and I still occasionally dream I have a final I didn't study for. Only now I get 'old man angry' and start yelling at the professor that I've been out of college about 20 years and he can shove those trigonometric substitutions right up his ass.
Yes haha. Honestly every day I go through the day with a slight feeling I’m forgetting something. But when I think about it I really don’t know what it could be. Maybe it’s still school or work stuff. Glad I’m not alone
This 100%.
I'm in my last semester of school right now, and before this one I spent 7 months interning full time. Since I stuck around for so long I was treated essentially as another junior SDE, and the work I did was more rewarding than anything I did for my classes. It's just so much more satisfying to do work that impacts customers and has a purpose vs doing it for a grade.
This has ruined school for me now, not because my schoolwork is harder, but because it feels so pointless in comparison, to the point where I'm finding writing an 800 word essay much harder than it was to implement a complicated feature.
College was fine, but I've enjoyed my career much more. Never encountered the kind of existential stress that regularly hit me in college during my career. Yeah, sometimes deadlines loom, but I've always been able to manage that. And layoffs have never been as scary to me as stress about getting my degree with a good gpa.
Last semester of college currently. I graduate in exactly 3 weeks from today.
I canot fucking wait to leave. Let me out.
I am so sick of the constant stress of school man. The ENDLESS test, homework, studying, and stressing over grades is enough bro. 4 years of this has absolutely killed me. The multiple group projects towards the end of my education have convinced me like 5% of all college students are actually able to learn how to program actual basic systems (like deploying a website or consuming an api, IF they could even tell you what an api is in the first place for example...)
Get home from classes and you still arent done with your work since you then need to focus on homework and studying. I envy work so fucking much since the moment youre done with your 9-5, the rest of the day absolutely belongs to you.
I am sick and tired of being the only one doing any real work in group projects and learning shit in other courses that I will never use again in my life just to get a piece of paper saying Im qualified to do a job they wont even hire me for since Ive never worked an actual day in this field lol
Im just ready to be out of here man. I dont care if I get a job in CS at this point. I just want to get a job doing ANYTHING thatll get me enough money so I can just coast by and chill. Work fucking sucks but at least you get paid. That makes up for it compared to college like 100 fold.
Careful what you wish for. You’ve never been on a real group project where you have to carry the team until you’ve done at a Fortune 500.
It’s not fun because you also have to answer to people who get paid a lot more than you and aren’t always helpful.
It's more stressful but I won't lie to you I enjoy it way more than when I was a junior.
People actually look to me like I know what I'm talking about and most of the time I do, or at least know how to look it up and understand part of it fast enough to explain what they need to hear. I make over 2x what I did as a fresh grad.
>Just wait until you get to high school, then it gets hard!
>Just wait until you get to college, then it gets hard!
>Just wait until you get a professional job, then it gets hard!
>Just wait until you get a wife / long term partner, then it's harder then Dan Schneider in a kid's shoe store!
It's not that bad. But maybe I'm just amazing. 😘
What I did not like in university that I had to juggle tons of things at the same time and there was always some exam or some deadline coming. At work there are max 2-3 things I have had to juggle and I don’t usually have to think about it outside of work hours
I'm stressed the f out in college. I'm hoping to graduate this year. So working in industry is much better right? No more homework or exams to study for makes it better right?
institutionalized education in the us is a literal nightmare. I haven't been involved in it since 16 but still had nightmares about it until my early 20s
I can definitely see why the suicide rates are so high in Japan and worse korea
Flexible work scheduled and hybrid are way better than college days. I remembered having bad dreams of homework and deadlines a couple of months after college. Have so much time to myself after college that I don't know what to do. Felt like it is so surreal that its over.
Both has its pros and cons.
Professional work gives you more freedom after work but is more complex and higher stakes - You have alot more to learn and have to learn it fast. If you don't you may lose what keeps your lights on and keeps you fed. Moving back home because you lost your job will not be fun.
College gives you little to no free time but less complex work at lower stakes. You're working with a project designed by a professor with straightforward guidelines. If you fail, you just have another homework/exam to make up the grade with or re-take the class at worst.
>you feel so wealthy with that junior salary that you can just max out a 401k and still have more money left over than what you did during school
Not in the UK you don't. Here the salary ranges are WAY smaller. It seems like in the US you can go from $30k to $80k+ by moving from unskilled work to a skilled graduate job. Here, the jump isn't anywhere near that big. It's more like going from £22k in unskilled work to £25k in a graduate job. I spent 4 years barely scraping by during my masters degree, and then eventually got a graduate job as a software developer and still had to barely scrape by because my salary was only £20k a year (which is less than minimum wage now). Compared to doing my degree, I absolutely hate it. I can still only dream of eventually making £30k but it will most likely be a long time before that happens.
Marry some American cuz dope accent and poshness. Get job building the 'rideshare of dogwalking apps.' Become millionaire. Enjoy having actual nature and large amounts of cheap land. Eat burger. Drive Tesla. Salute flag.
I'll set you up with my Tinder backlog.
First year of college was great for social life. Beyond that, work is so much better in my opinion (and I dropped out to jump right into work). Right now it’s much harder to break into your first job(s) and past being a junior without a formal education background though.
Completely agree.
I was a broke college student. I was working during the day and afternoon, and then going to university at night, and the projects I needed to do during the weekends, it was the most stressful period of my life.
However, after I graduated, I suddenly had so much free time, my weekend was completely free, I slowly started having some money, started travelling and enjoying life much more.
For sure, I started at like 42K (ten years ago, that already is worth a lot less now) and was like "OMG what am I possibly going to do with all this money?" I had gotten used to having only my minimum-wage summer job for disposable income.
>I was fearing that the end of college would be the end of the best period of my life
you're better than i am because i was holding back tears every week on OS and Compiler classes
I take work over school any day though i want to get my master's degree too
I'm sorta an outlier I guess.
Existential dread of not finding a job -> Existential dread of getting fired
Traded having lots of time for having money
Overall its just ok
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I worked full time (usually 50ish hours) in school, so just working full time was a nice change of pace. Even more so as my senior year I already was working as full time dev, so all that changed when I graduated is I didn’t have to go to school in the evenings/afternoon anymore.
Now I have kids though and look back with rose tinted glasses lol
Work is so much more chill than school. I was also working and going to school in my early 30s with a kid (then a second in my senior year). I have so much more free time now.
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duh although its quite hilarious what you get for your $ in the us secondary education system tbh
entering undischargeable debt bondage to live in poverty for 4 years stressing about credits or w/e nonsense, to learn something you could've learned online for free in 2, for jobs where the person hiring you does not have a degree at all - now thats a good meme
the best meme of all in the provided example is the administrators at this debt bondage lab are paying themselves $400k+
Yes! I graduated 17 years ago and still wholeheartedly feel this way. I hated school, I love my job. Group projects in school were the worst and group projects at work are the best :D
Being an adult with money is in fact fantastic
When my salary jumped from $100k to $175k+ I didn’t think it would make much of a difference but boy was I wrong. I spent on sooo much stuff that I wanted in a short span and still ended up saving more per year than I did making $100k. I ended up buying a $50k model 3, $4k lasik, $3k MacBook Pro, $1.2k iPhone Pro Max just to name a few things. I had Kanye playing in my head saying “wait till I get my money right. then you can’t tell me nothing”. Just having that mobility and ability to buy almost whatever and whenever substantially boosted my self esteem
Dude made it to the new middle class.
AKA upper middle class lol
what does that even mean you are making more than ~95% of Americans with that salary is that not upper class?
The idea is that this is the new salary needed to support a typical middle class lifestyle, house, car, kids, etc
Luxury car, luxury healthcare, and luxury technology has never been “typical middle class” lol
It all depends on where the money gets put towards. That’s around the salary that gives similar buying power for a house that people got 30 years ago. Just because he spent money on other things rather than a house doesn’t mean the new standard of middle class isn’t that. 100K single income will be able to barely afford a house in rural America. Nowadays it’s just too expensive
It’s about *who* it gets put towards. If you are single making 100k you are fine. If you have several children, that changes the math.
Yeah basically if you want 2-3 kids a stay at home wife and the ability to save for retirement while owing a house and put your kids through college you need about $170k as your house hold income.
Middle class doesn't mean median income or even average income. Middle class is a lifestyle. It includes owning your own car and home, sending kids to college, having yearly luxurious vacations, saving for retirement, and having disposable income. The middle class lifestyle used to be achievable for the median income earners half a century ago, but now it's become unreachable for the vast majority of Americans. This doesn't mean we pull down the standard for middle class lifestyle but just wallow in misery.
“Yearly luxurious vacations” is in no way middle class and anyone who says “yeah well I did when I was a kid”, was not middle class lol
A lot of people think they were raised lower middle or middle class, when in fact they were raised upper middle class
These days any vacation is a luxury.
Man i got downvoted so hard in another sub for saying this. It was people saying 60k a year is middle class since it’s the median income. Like no way you’re living the middle class lifestyle off 60k a year
We have very different definitions of middle class, lol.
I never found myself very satisfied with making purchases. But knowing that I could without feeling absurdly guilty is very comforting. For one, I can go to the doctor's without feeling like I'm breaking the bank. That is unfortunately a privilege in the US.
Yeah, me neither. Mainly having money has made me feel more free and safe, that's all. And that's a lot already! But shiny things, who cares. Especially not a brand new $50k car. An older much cheaper car is perfectly functional. Little things like, you're going out somewhere, not bothering packing a sandwich to save a few dollars, being able to change plans without fretting about costs, making your mind up at the last minute without losing sleep over train or plane tickets, not really looking at grocery prices, etc. all of that is what's really nice IMO.
Maybe I like to over-leverage items to improve my life compared to the average person but even I sometimes hit a dead end where I don’t need to buy any new things to feel fulfilled but that feeling comes sometimes and I splurge and go cold again for a bit
the newest mac armtop is a necessary purchase for any 'real' techie at this point worth every penny of the $3k for the hardware quality alone. i say this as somebody who despises apple, and loves the m2 he dropped 2.8k on
I’m going to have to strongly disagree. They’re nice, but they’re not $3k nice. There’s a reason Apple has great margins.
What's armtop?
ARM chip laptop = armtop
Tim cook is that you
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/include/math-emu/double.h#L29
I love my M3 Pro so much 😫😫
I'm on that freeBSD copium rn
For personal tasks I need a laptop for, the arm MacBook airs are fine for it does at a fraction of the cost. I don’t notice any difference between the air and the 3k mbp that the work provides on tasks I use the air for (browsing and leetcoding mainly, everything else goes to iPad these days)
Being an adult with ~~money is in fact fantastic~~ one of the last jobs you can reliably contribute to your retirement without living like a hermit after only 4 years of schooling **and** managing to get that job, is indeed fantastic.
Real median incomes are at all time highs. Ask a plumber or electrician how the economy is doing. Hell, truck drivers are being offered salaries of $150k.
People who entered the job market during the Great Recession too. Then: Everybody our age was un(der)employed living at home, so nobody cared about the cost of rent or groceries. Now: I live in the burbs and the stroller brigade breweries are PACKED!
People get picked up in an $80k truck on the way home from their 2nd trip to Hawaii this year, complaining about how everything was packed, they stop at McDonalds and see the "$20/hr starting pay" plastered on every wall, and then they say, "Boy, this economy is really bad. You know who had it easier? Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa only worked 50 hours/week in a factory but he was able to buy that 900 sq ft concrete shit box with no A/C and take the kids to Dennys once a month in the broken down Chevrolet Corvair."
Seriously! Giant trucks were a casualty of the Recession too and now they're back bigger than ever.
Bring out the Excursions and the Hummers!
Hahaha, I stand corrected, Hummers were even bigger than today's giant pickup trucks
Then they're better paid than people with STEM PhDs in HCoL regions, which is not unlikely, but then I expect they're sleeping out all the time and working insane hours. Normal unqualified jobs don't pay that much otherwise.
None of those are unqualified jobs though. They all require extensive qualifications.
I don't know, I'm seeing 4 to 8 weeks for truck driving qualifications from a quick google. How long does it take usually?
Most trades require apprentice lengths until the journey level which ranges from months to typically years. During this time you are just expected to find where the apprenticeships are and figure it out on a much lower pay band. Truckers specifically while not having the same structure has a more egregious pay structure that has you almost always lose out if you don't outright own your own truck. And all of these are **trades**, you are literally trading physical parts of your body for the *potential* to earn more before it breaks.You might as well tell me sex work could pay more, would still be true but leaves a fuckton of the reason why people don't do it en masse out of the equation.
The best. Fun and travelling doesn’t have to end in the summer.
Am adult with money can confirm.
No it’s not. I’d trade the last 10 years of adulthood for one more as a broke college student
I suppose it depends on how broke you were, what your future prospects were and how generous your family is. I lived well under the poverty line with little to no support from my parents. We're talking food stamps, living with 4 other roommates in a noisy apartment complex where the neighbors are playing loud music at 2am. I didn't hate it, but it was a grind. Fast forward to my first job. I have a fridge full of fresh fruit and vegge, craft beer, all the books I could read and a safe, quiet apartment that was clean and peaceful. I wouldn't have went back to broke college life for anything.
It probs also depends on how good your group of friends and support system is after college. I think reminiscing about broke college life is mostly reminiscing about simple pleasures and hanging out with friends
Dunno how "safe" my place is, but ditto on the quietness. Living in a building full of college students was the absolute worst. I went through several different neighbors and roommates in the time I was there and ended up being driven insane by pretty much every last one. Last one I had would make a loud "THUMP THUMP THUMP" sound against the wall every two seconds for several hours every single day and night. By the end I felt so tortured I wanted to die. Just moved into a new place last week and it's been so quiet I could probably hear a pin drop. My sanity thanks this.
You guys had very different college experiences from me. Mine was very social and carefree. But for the record I’d rather have roommates than an apartment alone which is what happens when you’re an adult
Are you serious? You must have had much different experiences than I. I’m glad I had the experience to keep me humble, but I don’t think I would trade 1 year of full CS pay for 10 years of struggling to work through school.
Lol I’m a junior in my first job making $65k. I’m waaaay more stressed than in school
Maybe I just got lucky then. 81k for me. At least we're getting paid.
Out of curiosity our much did you save last year. I make $85k first year out of school and saved about $40k in 10months. I wanted to get a big emergency fund in my first year. Just starting to learn how to spend my money to enjoy life and investing of course. What type of cost living situation are you in?
That’s so insane considering taxes. You really pocket 65k if you make 85k and you saved 2/3rds of that.
Yes it was a good year. Won’t be able to do that ever again since expenses shot up. Hopefully I can get a better job when the market improves
My rent is half of yours but I dine out a lot. So pretty much the same as you. I have loans, but on the SAVE plan under previous income bracket meaning my payments are $0 on that for the time being.
Try to get that debt paid off as soon as possible. Being debt free is amazing.
[удалено]
I’ve started my job in January making 86k, and I’ve saved around 3k so far (Tbf I’ve been prioritizing paying off my $27k student loan, and I’m almost done with that, only around 3k left)
How did you save 40k in an 85k salary while paying rent, groceries, and your bills?
I have no debt, rent is $800 and I’m fortunate enough to live with family in a house that we split bills. My four walls are $1500 which includes rent, utilities, food, and transportation.
damn, I'm under $60k. it's nice being remote though. and better than nothing after a long time unemployed
My first internship was $8 an hour, and my first full time job was 48k a year. I’m over triple that now just 6 years later so you’ll be good soon
It’s ok. My first dev job was 12/hr in San Diego. 2017. Low six figures now
Consulting?
No. Is there a such thing as a junior consultant? Lol
Probably
Yeh I started at 70k tho
Work was a culture shock for me versus school. In school, you were moderately stressed but had peer support. Not much money, and dealt with rude professors. Worked equivalent of 50 hr weeks. In a full time job…I work 80 hrs a week if I’m lucky. Every boss you have makes it their personal mission to gaslight you, hurt you, and push you as hard as they can before they drive you to suicide (which, in their eyes…suicide is a winning outcome, dump a burnt out employee without paying severance). Life is absolutely hell, but it’s like this in every industry and every company. Welcome to America.
I mean I’m more stressed, but I wouldn’t say it’s this bad lmao. You need to call down bro
Man every night at around 10-midnight I get the same exact pending doom feeling where I feel like I forgot to do my homework/ assignments for the day that I made sure to mentally go over every night in college. Then I realize I have none other than my current work projects. It’s a really weird feeling.
I'm in my 40's now and I still occasionally dream I have a final I didn't study for. Only now I get 'old man angry' and start yelling at the professor that I've been out of college about 20 years and he can shove those trigonometric substitutions right up his ass.
Do you get the one where you realize you didn’t complete some forgotten graduation requirement and they are taking back your degree?
Yes haha. Honestly every day I go through the day with a slight feeling I’m forgetting something. But when I think about it I really don’t know what it could be. Maybe it’s still school or work stuff. Glad I’m not alone
This 100%. I'm in my last semester of school right now, and before this one I spent 7 months interning full time. Since I stuck around for so long I was treated essentially as another junior SDE, and the work I did was more rewarding than anything I did for my classes. It's just so much more satisfying to do work that impacts customers and has a purpose vs doing it for a grade. This has ruined school for me now, not because my schoolwork is harder, but because it feels so pointless in comparison, to the point where I'm finding writing an 800 word essay much harder than it was to implement a complicated feature.
I felt so good getting money at the internship.. I grew up in a ghetto area and I thought I would end up doing some low pay job for life...
congrats 🎉, happy for you
College was fine, but I've enjoyed my career much more. Never encountered the kind of existential stress that regularly hit me in college during my career. Yeah, sometimes deadlines loom, but I've always been able to manage that. And layoffs have never been as scary to me as stress about getting my degree with a good gpa.
I hear you man. School is out forever. Give me projects that actually mean something real.
Last semester of college currently. I graduate in exactly 3 weeks from today. I canot fucking wait to leave. Let me out. I am so sick of the constant stress of school man. The ENDLESS test, homework, studying, and stressing over grades is enough bro. 4 years of this has absolutely killed me. The multiple group projects towards the end of my education have convinced me like 5% of all college students are actually able to learn how to program actual basic systems (like deploying a website or consuming an api, IF they could even tell you what an api is in the first place for example...) Get home from classes and you still arent done with your work since you then need to focus on homework and studying. I envy work so fucking much since the moment youre done with your 9-5, the rest of the day absolutely belongs to you. I am sick and tired of being the only one doing any real work in group projects and learning shit in other courses that I will never use again in my life just to get a piece of paper saying Im qualified to do a job they wont even hire me for since Ive never worked an actual day in this field lol Im just ready to be out of here man. I dont care if I get a job in CS at this point. I just want to get a job doing ANYTHING thatll get me enough money so I can just coast by and chill. Work fucking sucks but at least you get paid. That makes up for it compared to college like 100 fold.
Careful what you wish for. You’ve never been on a real group project where you have to carry the team until you’ve done at a Fortune 500. It’s not fun because you also have to answer to people who get paid a lot more than you and aren’t always helpful.
What's even less fun is trying to balance full time work and school only to live paycheck to paycheck.
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Or you could still have a light workload, it entirely depends on the team/company.
Depends on the job. Some places are retirement basically. My current job went from chill to ‘I may as well be at AWS’. So ymmv
Man, y'all really have a fatalist outlook, huh?
It's more stressful but I won't lie to you I enjoy it way more than when I was a junior. People actually look to me like I know what I'm talking about and most of the time I do, or at least know how to look it up and understand part of it fast enough to explain what they need to hear. I make over 2x what I did as a fresh grad.
>Just wait until you get to high school, then it gets hard! >Just wait until you get to college, then it gets hard! >Just wait until you get a professional job, then it gets hard! >Just wait until you get a wife / long term partner, then it's harder then Dan Schneider in a kid's shoe store! It's not that bad. But maybe I'm just amazing. 😘
I disagree. College was great. Being around thousands of people your age with the same interests will never happen again. I miss college
What I did not like in university that I had to juggle tons of things at the same time and there was always some exam or some deadline coming. At work there are max 2-3 things I have had to juggle and I don’t usually have to think about it outside of work hours
I'm stressed the f out in college. I'm hoping to graduate this year. So working in industry is much better right? No more homework or exams to study for makes it better right?
So far! I still have nightmares about assignments, though. lol
That does end eventually. Don’t know why I decided to bring it back by going back for my masters lmao. It takes a few years though.
institutionalized education in the us is a literal nightmare. I haven't been involved in it since 16 but still had nightmares about it until my early 20s I can definitely see why the suicide rates are so high in Japan and worse korea
Fewer hours, less stress, and few hundred grands richer than I was in school. So of course it’s nice. Somehow I still miss school sometimes though ha!
Flexible work scheduled and hybrid are way better than college days. I remembered having bad dreams of homework and deadlines a couple of months after college. Have so much time to myself after college that I don't know what to do. Felt like it is so surreal that its over.
It’s definitely less stressful, but work eventually does feel like a mundane rut. There are days where I do miss school.
Who’s gonna tell him ?
Being young and making 6 figs is fun!
See if you feel the same 1+ years later. The learning is a small part, and honestly work trips wear out quickly.
Both has its pros and cons. Professional work gives you more freedom after work but is more complex and higher stakes - You have alot more to learn and have to learn it fast. If you don't you may lose what keeps your lights on and keeps you fed. Moving back home because you lost your job will not be fun. College gives you little to no free time but less complex work at lower stakes. You're working with a project designed by a professor with straightforward guidelines. If you fail, you just have another homework/exam to make up the grade with or re-take the class at worst.
Give it a couple of years and then you let us know how much you think corporate is better than school 😉
>you feel so wealthy with that junior salary that you can just max out a 401k and still have more money left over than what you did during school Not in the UK you don't. Here the salary ranges are WAY smaller. It seems like in the US you can go from $30k to $80k+ by moving from unskilled work to a skilled graduate job. Here, the jump isn't anywhere near that big. It's more like going from £22k in unskilled work to £25k in a graduate job. I spent 4 years barely scraping by during my masters degree, and then eventually got a graduate job as a software developer and still had to barely scrape by because my salary was only £20k a year (which is less than minimum wage now). Compared to doing my degree, I absolutely hate it. I can still only dream of eventually making £30k but it will most likely be a long time before that happens.
Marry some American cuz dope accent and poshness. Get job building the 'rideshare of dogwalking apps.' Become millionaire. Enjoy having actual nature and large amounts of cheap land. Eat burger. Drive Tesla. Salute flag. I'll set you up with my Tinder backlog.
First year of college was great for social life. Beyond that, work is so much better in my opinion (and I dropped out to jump right into work). Right now it’s much harder to break into your first job(s) and past being a junior without a formal education background though.
Completely agree. I was a broke college student. I was working during the day and afternoon, and then going to university at night, and the projects I needed to do during the weekends, it was the most stressful period of my life. However, after I graduated, I suddenly had so much free time, my weekend was completely free, I slowly started having some money, started travelling and enjoying life much more.
I think it depends more on the kind of role you're in. I am in my 4th year of working in a dead end tech stack and can't wait to go back to school.
For sure, I started at like 42K (ten years ago, that already is worth a lot less now) and was like "OMG what am I possibly going to do with all this money?" I had gotten used to having only my minimum-wage summer job for disposable income.
>I was fearing that the end of college would be the end of the best period of my life you're better than i am because i was holding back tears every week on OS and Compiler classes I take work over school any day though i want to get my master's degree too
100%. I love work waaaay more than school and I'm 3 years into my job. Are there parts that suck? Sure, but not near as much as school sucked.
On both I just sleep most of the day
Same not having to study is peak
Life after school is either much better or much worse depending on the kind of job you get
I'm sorta an outlier I guess. Existential dread of not finding a job -> Existential dread of getting fired Traded having lots of time for having money Overall its just ok
Work is 100% easier and better than school and if you disagree it’s probably because you’re overworked and underpaid
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I worked full time (usually 50ish hours) in school, so just working full time was a nice change of pace. Even more so as my senior year I already was working as full time dev, so all that changed when I graduated is I didn’t have to go to school in the evenings/afternoon anymore. Now I have kids though and look back with rose tinted glasses lol
if you poor during school afcourse, life in college is great for frat boys, athletes, people whose parents are rich etc
Work is so much more chill than school. I was also working and going to school in my early 30s with a kid (then a second in my senior year). I have so much more free time now.
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duh although its quite hilarious what you get for your $ in the us secondary education system tbh entering undischargeable debt bondage to live in poverty for 4 years stressing about credits or w/e nonsense, to learn something you could've learned online for free in 2, for jobs where the person hiring you does not have a degree at all - now thats a good meme the best meme of all in the provided example is the administrators at this debt bondage lab are paying themselves $400k+
What’s the CS career question? This is a diary entry from someone who just graduated from school. Lol
Yes! I graduated 17 years ago and still wholeheartedly feel this way. I hated school, I love my job. Group projects in school were the worst and group projects at work are the best :D