The STEM Degree SCAM: Why I Quit Coding.

look I'm sorry you guys but the stem degree is a scam as an ex Google tech lead and somebody who's actually climbed that whole entire stem degree ladder to the very top I mean I went through the AP biology classes AP Chemistry AP Computer Science went through UC Berkeley studying computer science linear algebra calculus useless fouryear transforms and matrices how often do I use any of this in daily life how often have I had to implement a binary search tree or quick sort never it's an over saturated field at this point and if you're in stem you're are going to be in for the rat race of a lifetime competing against the hardest working hungriest immigrants in the world for their visas and they need this more than you they're willing to work harder for than you at lower pay cheaper in worse conditions because they need this and so quite frankly I think students are being lied to when we tell them to go and do stem do stem because your parents wanted to do stem stem may have worked in your parents generation but today the Landscapes just changed other people seem to be no theing this too with a backlash against stem someone notes here there's a ton of indoctrination that typically goes into stem degrees which no one seems willing to admit arguably most scientific research data and papers can be fudged or simply made up there's even a reproducibility crisis where most research papers can't be reproduced and so a lot of it was simply made up or the experiments set up in a certain way to bias for a certain desired result which was paid for by the sponsors of the experiment right paid for by grant money I mean just take a look at Dr foui the vaccinations and covid masks they can get science to back up whatever data they wanted to back up and so what happened to coding it used to be cool didn't it well if you think about it coding is fundamentally about the selling of advertisements on premium apps and websites that's the business model for Google for Facebook but this broke a while back these days people go on social media like Tik Tok Instagram YouTube influencers sell the ads and then the free apps and websites which are broke try to pay for these ads so that they can get a few users and so unlike in the past nowadays your app or website actually has to be good good enough to charge money like a subscription fee and it's not good enough to simply just make something free and throw it up on the App Store because nobody goes through the App Store anymore it's got no distribution no visibility and so even a pretty decent app like say threads from Facebook or even Facebook itself is just not going to get much usage these days it's just not good enough it's not compelling enough there's just much better stuff out there better content and that content is really part of the problem because we are in an attention economy it is vital to remember this one fact so your code is competing with viral content for limited user time because users spend most of their time on social media content and the problem is this social media content is going viral every single day can your app can your code go viral daily is your app that addictive and fun the fact is code can't really compete with viral content we saw VR fail we saw chat GPT even fail it had this 50 15 minutes of fame but a lot of these very Innovative tech services just aren't interesting enough compared to just that daily viral news grind and so what really happened is media came in and beat code and in a way media has always been number one Hollywood is number one coding and Engineering were never glamorous jobs historically similar to say construction worker electrician or plumber today they're simply the digital equivalents of such if you look at the longer history of human civilization Engineers were I mean they were the slaves building the pyramids of Egypt they were the ones building the Great Wall of China building the dams the infrastructure Engineers building toilets and Roads and stem was mostly this hard path of long hours low pay and no status and it's going to go back to that and really the people who had the good lives were the rulers maybe the philosophers like Socrates the people who could talk and had some influence or maybe it was folks like Cleopatra and so in a way Hollywood has always been number one and nothing else really comes close this was the way in the 1950s where everybody idolized the Stars the actors and actresses but somehow everyone today seems to have been brainwashed into the stem degree as the path to success hey you got to learn robotics you got to get into coding you got to learn biology get into Matrix math you got to learn your igen values coding coding you got to learn your JavaScript and Java public static void mainstream arcs return zero so stupid stop that already so here's what happened social media basically democratized the top 1% of Hollywood celebrities into really the top 10% of society which is the top layer now sure we all like to hate on these influencers but nowadays with social media you've got peers people from high school who you may know living that lifestyle and these are the people that you need to now compete with as a stem degree now actually below that level you also now have the no code Solutions and all the entrepreneurs that come with them because coding has advanced to a degree where we've got no code Solutions and coders are just obsoleting themselves by building all these solutions that anybody can can use nowadays and then in the lowest rungs of society the bottom say 50% least desirable portion maybe you've got the engineers and the rest of the 9 to5 working class who nobody's really interested in it's essentially a life of slavery competing with the immigrants for their visas and if you already have a Visa then why are you even in this competition it just it doesn't even make sense anymore at that point it's just a lot of hard work for nothing and that's that's you you know when I was conducting interviews for Fang at Google and Facebook I would occasionally interview these immigrants who were just so smart I mean they knew every lead code question they could Ace them just one after the other perfect answers and they would smoke any American I mean they were brilliant candidates America needs that kind of talent we should bring them in but it's just personally I would not want to compete at that level I mean I've got better things to do than that and maybe you should find something better to do as well and even in the coding competitions like the ACM competitions I've competed in that before Americans just don't stand the chance because we just don't want enough you would be a fool to compete on stem alone and then of course to make matters worse you've got Ai and chat GPT moving in as well on your job now a lot of people are going to say it's some bogus claim that AI can actually replace a human programmer's job it's not at that level yet and sure not now at least but maybe in 2 to 4 years at the pace of its advancement it may start coming after real jobs now some people are going to say well I love coding still sure I love coding too we all love coding someone tweeted to me me my 8-year-old son genuinely likes to code what should I do tell him we all like to code who doesn't like the code it's so much fun with the auto completion the fancy editors you've got oneclick deployment buttons to just deploy an entire website launch an entire blog with a single click Autos scaling databases and fully managed AWS scaling Solutions it's so fun so easy but to be honest this isn't even real coding at least not the way it was back in the day these days if you're talking about using autoc completion fancy Ed to launch a whsy wig Autos scaling blogs that's not even coding at this point it's just a hobby I mean have fun at it but that's just like playing sudoku maybe you should try doing something hard like building a 10 million subscriber YouTube channel that's hard all right so what should you do I have a few suggestions actually number one is you might make more studying Bitcoin than any stem degree and the reason is simple it is very difficult to go 100% into Bitcoin right now nobody does that it's too scary the only way to do that realistically is to have conviction in Bitcoin and the only way to gain conviction is to study it you got to put in the time there's no other way you can study math science or physics or you can study Bitcoin which one has the highest Alpha return should be obvious and in fact all about One have negative returns and I think it's possible when the Bitcoin ETFs finally come out it may be the only thing going up because it could suck the air out of the room for every other asset class as people try to sell off their other assets in order to have enough liquidity to acquire Bitcoin right you got to sell something to get the money to buy Bitcoin even if you're Diversified you could be losing money the only winning hand here may be going 100% into Bitcoin of course you have to study it to get to this point the other option is build a media company a lot of people seem to mistakingly assume that I'm suggesting everyone go out and be some social media influencer no not really in fact that's a pretty difficult job rather if you take a look at how many people are behind CNN NBC News Fox News how many people are behind tuer Carlson that one influencer he's got a whole team of people behind him and I think it's quite possible by the year 2030 every student is going to be getting media degrees in college everywhere you go on campus people say oh yeah I'm doing media yeah I'm getting the media degree what are you doing you're doing media too yeah let's get media degrees oh what about what are you doing oh you're doing stem you're learning coding oh okay sure yeah fine that was last year's thing well I guess some people like to do that kind of like how some people want to do some medical degree right you go through like 30 years of school just to get your degree some hey I guess everybody's different now of course building a media company at this point isn't really easy you could also apply to work at some media companies there's more coming up by the day but it wouldn't surprise me if there's more jobs these days for media than for say engineering like if you're to go ask Mr Beast hey you need a job you're looking for work what type of skills is he looking for he's probably going to say he wants a media guy not some C++ coding candidate who can reverse a binary search tree it's like useless skills that he would be overpaying for here now on the other hand if you are in stem already or you're already halfway through your coding program then I suppose you might as well finish it take a look at this email hey Tech lead I've got some questions for you should I take one more programming online course on you to me or should I only be taking one course I mean this kid only wants to take one course in programming HTML CSS JavaScript this kid is not going to make it I mean this kid can't even finish one you the me course here and then you've got other people complete the Entire Computer Science curriculum degrees at top universities going through like 20 complete computer science courses learning how database systems work back and forth how to build the operating system from scratch how to design an entire compiler and these people can't even get a job and now this kid I mean he's not going to make it look kid breaking into software engineering is not something to be underestimated it's not like trying to get a job at Target or Starbucks you really need all the help you can get if you're going to get into this game at all I would suggest checking out techinterviewpro decom X Google X Facebook interview coaching mentorship and training where you will learn everything it takes to pass those interviews with flying colors you'll learn exactly what they're looking for in the coding data structures and algorithms systems design and behavioral portions of the interview broken down step by step for you so look kid either go home now or get with the program techinterviewpro docomo now if you are a program or the other things you can start pivoting here I mean look you have a technical mindset you understand how systems are put together coding is not everything actually we can see here people say well maybe need business customers product design all these other things when we take a look at AI tools and infrastructure for example generative video pipelines there's actually not that much coding but it is still highly technical not every person can do it and so one example you could put together a stable diffusion pipeline trained in a certain art style to create certain types of images or videos and then wrap that together in a package and turn it into a Twitter bot that comments and it's just a service for people now why do I say twitterbot because nobody visits apps or websites anymore as I mentioned before your app or website needs to go viral basically daily in order for it to even compete in an intention economy which is why you need something that's heavily integrated with social media ideally and in my personal opinion the world is about to get a lot more entrepreneurial if it hasn't already these days every teenager and their Grandma seems to be an entrepreneur or a CEO and sure we like to laugh at them but some of these people actually are legit CEOs and entrepreneurs and in a way the 9 to5 employee just can't compete with that type of world anymore eventually the 9 to5 employee slave will truly become the world of the wage slaves a Bottom Rung of society kind of like blue color worker you could do it if you like I guess if you think it's fun and finally it's worth mentioning that opportunity es and flows sometimes there's massive opportunity like with the baby boomer generation if your were alive you basically made money and then other times there's just no opportunity left at all it just gets wiped with oversaturation kind of like how we may be in an era now where there's just massive Tech layoffs everywhere you see and the opportunity may have just shifted into other areas like say Media or Bitcoin as soon as you spot that opportunity like say with the Bitcoin ETFs which is truly a once in a-lifetime birth of a new asset class just have to remember that opportunity rarely knocks twice when it knocks you have to answer it but that'll do for me let me know your thoughts though is there still opportunity in the stem degree would you get one yourself these days and go compete in the rat race of a lifetime see you in the comments below see you in the next one thanks bye

Channel: TechLead

Views: 198,930

Keywords:

Id: syqmc4rEvr8

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 29 2023