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No joke. I lived in the US for a while, but I am from Eastern Europe, and so are my parents. Back in high school about a decade ago, I decided that I want to do either an engineering degree or a CS degree. I got a reaction from my parents that was the opposite of what most of my US peers would have expected to get. For context, we have already been living in the US for quite a bit at that point. Even my parents, who are neither doctors or lawyers themselves, considered engineering/CS to be a grunt and pretty much blue-collar work (not that there is anything wrong with blue collar work at all, but I was not going to pick that fight with my parents at the time when I lived with them). And even now, once they know how much software devs can actually get paid in the US, the only thing that's changed is that they stopped pestering me about it. But I definitely took a note of how when the conversations with their friends or other relatives go, my parents still try to avoid mentioning what I studied or what I do as my career (aside from namedropping the company names, because apparently big US corps carry some weight with those people). All while also letting me know every single time how awesome their friends' son or daughter is, because they are a doctor or a lawyer. /rantover I cannot understate how good it feels to me in the US in this aspect, because it feels like most people here on average absolutely don't care which path you took and don't even question it. Sure, some are still judgemental, and some of them still assign weight to the outcomes you got. But I would rather get some weight assigned to the outcomes I got, as opposed to the same weight being assigned to some stupid bs like "oh, your degree isn't of the right class of respect, so no matter what you do, you ain't going to be as much of a respected person as a doctor/lawyer". Just the entire concept of "respectable" degrees makes me feel a certain kind of way that I absolutely hate. If you want to talk about degrees based on any measurable metric, you are welcome to. But "respectability" of a degree is not measurable, and is the most snotty bs that is way too commonplace outside of the US. I had some friends from SK (so not even the same continent as EU), and they echoed fairly similar sentiments in regards to the cultural sentiment about engineers/tech workers in their country. And the thing is, I cannot even really blame my parents, because it isn't just them, it is pretty much what the majority there believes. |