[mattm]

I think there is much more pressure on young people today (me being one of them) that you must be doing what your love or working on your passion.

While good advice, some young people don't realise that this is good long-term advice. It's something you should work towards over a number of years. It is a very big mistake to close doors that may not offer the perfect path. I have some friends like this who seem to want the perfect job right away so they pass up other opportunities even though they could lead to it in the future.

[commandar]

There is also a lot more pressure on young people today to go amass piles of debt acquiring a college degree that they do not need.

The stigma against trade and vocational educations in this country needs to die, otherwise we're going to just keep starting people off at a bigger disadvantage than they need be for very little good reason.

[aliston]

I agree -- and going one step further, WITHIN higher education, there seems to be somewhat of a stigma against training for real-world, hands-on, applications. I was pretty lucky to attend a college that encouraged students to work on projects that could become viable products... but from what I hear from friends, it was the exception.

[commandar]

Just to provide another data point from my own college experience, I actually ended up dropping out from my school because I got fed up with the fact that their program focused too much on application.

This is a school whose computer science curriculum circa 2004 still included COBOL because one of the major employers in my area is the banking industry. (Coincidentally, the CS building carries the name of one of the big names in that field here).

CS is a field where the theory end of things are often the most important thing you could take away long term, so having that kind of focus on tools in general (let alone ones that are hopeless obsolete for most purposes) is just insane.

Like everything else in life, it's all about balance. That said, I can't blame academia too much for erring on the side of theory.

[aliston]

I agree with what you're saying -- I thoroughly enjoyed the pure theory classes as part of the CS curriculum. I also agree that it is more important to teach concepts than specific technologies. That said, I think there are schools that fail to teach concepts as well... things like working as part of a team, using source control and designing a product modularly and writing code which would be considered "production quality." There's a tendency to put those things off because it is "just for a school project."

[bbwharris]

Exactly, long-term is the key. The majority of us are not going to be instantly wealthy (in the sense of money or passion).

[zephyrfalcon]

"I think there is much more pressure on young people today (me being one of them) that you must be doing what your love or working on your passion."

That does work, but the key is that you just start doing what you love, possibly in your free time (chances are that when you start out, you're not good enough yet to get paid for it :-). If you keep that up long enough, and you keep enjoying it, chances are that at some point you will be good enough to get a job doing it. Case in point...

What does NOT work is sitting around waiting for a job to come by that you might like (like the guy in the article seems to be doing). Nor is it a good idea to live off of someone else while you wait.