[alephnerd]

As I mentioned elsewhere on HN [0], younger generations are much more competitive now.

Visit and talk with undergrads at a top CS program like Stanford, Cal, UIUC, MIT, etc. The culture is different because this is a much more competitive generation. When the acceptance rate into a top CS program is in the 1-5% range and laurels like being a Valedictorian, NHS member, JV or Varsity sports team member in HS, getting a 2100/1500+ on the SAT, and taking 6-7 APs are now table stakes, you get a degree of viciousness, competitiveness, and steel-eyed execution that a lot of older Americans just aren't used to.

This mindset is the norm across Asia though - from the Gaokao to the JEE to SKY-or-bust. Honestly, I'm glad that younger generations are much more competitive now - pressure makes diamonds.

And honestly, the top 40-50 STEM programs nationally graduate around 30-40k new grads a year. Add to that respected regional programs and Veteran-to-Employment pipelines and you have a self-sustaining talent pipeline.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506001

[annzabelle]

I disagree with the increase in competitiveness being a good thing. Excessive filtering at all levels has meant that eccentrics or absent minded professor types are not making it into research roles, and creatives or mad geniuses are filtered out before they have the chance to make an impact. There are a lot of people who are extremely bright and creative, but just don't have it all together the whole time from ages 14-25, and these days they have no chance of making it into research positions.

The system is rewarding conscientiousness and consistency over creativity.

[alephnerd]

> The system is rewarding conscientiousness and consistency over creativity

This assumes that you can get to the top via rote skills alone. Rote learning only gets you so far and most of those kinds flame out.

It's hard to describe, but once you meet actually talented people what you end up seeing is that they're just extremely diligent and deeply passionate about a topic and will continuously execute.

For example, when I was in HS I wrestled. Yes there were physical differences that could impact a sparring round, but technique and preparation was almost always able to outcompete base innate talent. Later, I ended up learning ballet the Russian style and it was the same - the truly creative types who were at Vaganova or Paris had already built strong fundamental and technical skills which allowed them to mix and match and create.

You cannot be creative without also being diligent and understanding fundamentals.

The "eccentrics" and "mad geniuses" are few and far between, and to find people with talent, you do need to use exclusionary tactics like scores and interview performance.

[porridgeraisin]

Not really. Outliers of that sort get dealt with as an exceptional case and it works. I've seen amazingly bright batchmates get into all sorts of programs without most of the qualifications, because they were a genuine math wizard (the kind that submitted errata to a standard textbook on some weird number theory stuff at age 15), but they didn't always score the best on many exams, especially when aggregated across subjects. IIRC he's a researcher now. All trends point to him being an eccentric old hag at age 50 ;)

The filtering system is meant for the majority case and there it works. The outliers get dealt with as outliers, which also works. In this case, he later asked the author of that textbook who he emailed with the errata, to connect him with the group he wanted to work in. Needless to say it was a very strong referral.

[cyberax]

The US education has always been competitive. In sports.

Its school system has always been a state-sponsored daycare.

SAT/ACT tests reflect this. I can get a perfect score in SAT math easily. And I likely could do that as a kid (I never took standardized tests at school). I wouldn't have been able to get the perfect scores in the Chinese gaokao or Korean/Japanese tests.

> There are a lot of people who are extremely bright and creative, but just don't have it all together the whole time from ages 14-25, and these days they have no chance of making it into research positions.

This is just nonsense. Are you saying that we should kick out smart kids with high test scores to let in absent-minded students who care about only getting drunk so that they _might_ become great researchers in their 30-s?

To the topic at hand: it's way too easy to fluff your resume with nonsense like "Coordinated a responsible team for an implementation of cross-cutting concerns improving customer retention change by 12.23% across the organization". Test scores provide at least some objective measurement.

[annzabelle]

I'm not opposed to the use of test scores, it's more the requirement that kids have the whole package of grades+activities+honors societies+test scores consistently through a phase of life that is widely understood as tumultuous for many. We're selecting for robots.

There's a reason the west was so productive in terms of new scientific and technological discoveries in the twentieth century, and it's not that our scientists were the most consistent conscientious students who prepared extensively for exams and padded their resumes in just the right way.

[cyberax]

> We're selecting for robots.

And to add to this, learning itself is a _skill_. Working on a complex problem, looking at it from different angles, spending time memorizing facts, working on learning to paint fine lines - these are all skills that you need to master.

By not motivating children to do that during their formative years, you set them up for failure later in life.

Yes, there will always be exceptions, humans are extremely variable. But for the general case just letting children float along without any goals or competition is not a great general strategy.

[cyberax]

> the whole package of grades+activities+honors societies+test scores

This is _also_ a very US thing. Without true competition, students have to fluff their "resumes" with nonsense to get admitted into good colleges.

Other countries have tougher tests that can provide a better signal.

> We're selecting for robots.

I disagree. We're selecting for people who can set a goal and follow it.

Apply the same arguments to sports. Should we not stop all the competitions until the age of 25?

[annzabelle]

I didn't really state my whole view, but hard exams like Oxford and Cambridge use make sense for elite colleges to use (rather than unrelated extracurriculars), but reforming the whole education system to be oriented around a single high stakes test like in China or Korea has its own severe costs. I do not want high schoolers to spend 20 hours a week at hagwons, and the current resume filler system is also terrible. I do not think declining admissions rates at elite universities reflect that the students are any smarter or more prepared than they were 20 years ago, but rather they are much more cutthroat about many things that are orthogonal to being successful adults.

Ideally we'd follow a more exam focused system more like the UK, though I wouldn't want to require all students to only study 3-4 subjects towards the end of high school. But something in the european model of IB/Abitur/A Levels, where there are serious exams in various subjects at the end of high school for all uni bound students, plus some special higher level exams for the most elite unis (in the vein of Cambridge's Sixth Term Examination Paper). We could probably repurpose AP exams to fill a similar admissions role to A Levels, and possibly use the AMC/AIME/USAMO more explicitly for admission.

Edit: this doesn't let me reply again, I think the chain got too deep. But the point is that we're not just using AP exams and USAMO scores, we're also using a pile of other metrics around extracurriculars, GPA, and honors societies, and the end result is stressed out children and not actually having better outcomes than we did two decades ago. Declining admissions rates at elite colleges do not reflect smarter and more productive incoming students.

[cyberax]

Yeah, Chinese-style gaokao would be impossible in the US. And I think it goes _too_ far into the "competitive high pressure" direction.

There are many ways to make a more competitive and objective system. I honestly don't have a lot of professional experience with any particular one, so I don't have strong opinions on a particular form it should take. A European model is good, some kind of mix of Chinese+European would also be great. And ultimately, these systems would be more fair for applicants.

And the current topic just highlights the ridiculousness of the status quo. For most people in the US, SAT is the _only_ objective test score that they have.

[alephnerd]

> We could probably repurpose AP exams to fill a similar admissions role to A Levels

They are already being used like that in college admissions today.

> possibly use the AMC/AIME/USAMO more explicitly for admission

Already in use explicitly at most of the top CS programs today

> I do not think declining admissions rates at elite universities reflect that the students are any smarter or more prepared than they were 20 years ago, but rather they are much more cutthroat about many things that are orthogonal to being successful adults

The cutthroatness is what we should be optimizing for long term. Competition is what begets innovation.

Also, even at solid middle tier universities like UC Riverside, the calibre of student has increased dramatically over the past decade [0]

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39369724

[alephnerd]

> There's a reason the west was so productive in terms of new scientific and technological discoveries in the twentieth century

> it's not that our scientists were the most consistent conscientious students who prepared extensively for exams and padded their resumes in just the right way.

Instead, a large portion were immigrants or the children of immigrants who arrived in the US as part of trans-national brain drain from countries with strict education systems (eg. Hungarian Jewish Americans in WW2, Eastern Europeans in the 1980s to present, Asian Americans today).

There's a reason Asian Americans, Eastern European Americans, and immigrant African Americans are overrepresented in leadership and white collar industries despite the very real handicap of having extended periods time without US citizenship or a greencard.

Instead of optimizing for feel-happy edge cases, we should be optimizing for building the best talent where possible, and that requires being competitive.

> We're selecting for robots.

Frankly, this is insulting as well. Yes there are some late bloomers, but they are outliers. If they can truly succeed they would stil find a non-beaten path to succeed in a competitive ecosystem.

> consistently through a phase of life that is widely understood as tumultuous for many

Only to y'all "heritage" Americans. For those of us who are kids of immigrants, we learnt that life is a race, either you compete or you fall to the wayside.

[jleyank]

Of late, US folks coming out of university optimize for money and head for things like finance - people who hire STEM people. Those more interested in the field than the bucks go for advanced STEM degrees. And if the Yanks don't go for the bucks, they go for the MD.

[alephnerd]

> US folks coming out of university optimize for money and head for things like finance...

Not really, and I say this as someone who works in VC with peers in PE, Growth Equity, and other segments of high finance.

If you have the resume to get hired as an IB Analyst you will also get hired as a new grad SWE or APM at OpenAI, Google, or Roblox where they would earn the same or more than as an IB analyst with chiller work hours.

People overestimate finance salaries - it's the same as big tech with worse hours.

> And if the Yanks...

I don't think you live here in the States or Canada and as such haven't experienced our job market.

Please butt out of the convo.

---

Edit: can't reply

> Have you experienced the US job market outside of the Valley and NYC

Yes.

Before I switched to VC, I've managed teams and hiring for teams or product lines that reported to me in North Carolina, Georgia, Virgina, Texas, Washington, Massachusetts, and Colorado, and helped open my previous employer's Prague and Warsaw offices.

I also started my career outside of Bay Area or NYC tech before my stint as a staffer.

Additionally, the majority of tech hiring in the US remains consolidated in a handful of geographical locales [0].

[0] - https://www.bls.gov/oes/2022/may/oes151252.htm

[neilv]

> [...] you get a degree of viciousness, competitiveness, and steel-eyed execution

I think there's a lot of truth to that. (Aside: Many manage without the viciousness part. It's not their fault their parents lined them up with an internship and a research paper co-author in high school, and they're not jerks about it.)

Though the current generation of students didn't invent hyper-competitive. Before software engineering jobs (and startups) were high-income and high-status, you'd see that mentality among many people on track for Wall Street, for example.

Another example: Before CS was a go-to for the hyper-competitive, a mentor of mine actually switched from pre-med to CS, at an Ivy, because a percentage of pre-med students were outright sabotaging other students, and it turned him off of the field.

> that a lot of older Americans just aren't used to.

Though, there have been -- and hopefully will remain to be -- people doing it for the love of the field, who are not impressed.

Other than the genuine people being crowded out of admissions slots and fratbro interviews by Wall Street types...

If a Palo Alto helicopter-parented overachiever McDojo black belt tries to pick a fight... with a humble rope-belted person in Asia, who's studied martial arts for the love of it... the latter will chuckle good-naturedly, and help the Californian up off the ground.

[LPisGood]

> a Valedictorian, NHS member, JV or Varsity sports team member in HS, getting a 2100/1500+ on the SAT, and taking 6-7 APs are now table stakes

This is very true in my experience, except I subbed out Valedictorian with multiple varsity sports/student government and the SAT with ACT and I didn’t even get waitlisted at top schools.

[cute_boi]

Extreme competition isn't good. It will just lead to race to bottom.

[tmule]

“ getting a 2100/1500+ on the SAT” Typo? 2100/2400 << 1500/1600 in terms of rarity.