My father was very strongly against my decision to get into web development (2012) and he echoed this sentiment heavily. I distinctly remember him yelling at me as a teenager; "you'll be living under a bridge in 5 years if you do this! India has this market!". He eventually kicked me out for not listening, forcing me to to borrow money from a friend to pay tuition in my final semester.
Needless to say he was completely wrong. I was out-earning him within 2 years of entering the market and I have probably the greatest job security in my immediate friendship circle.
Despite my efforts, he refuses to talk to me to this day. The man does not like being wrong nor disobeyed. A shame really.
If there’s anything I’ve learned it is that you should always make your own mistakes. Your parent’s mistakes don’t even make sense any more 30-40 years down the line.
My father pushed me into EE. I burned 5 years in industry being paid crap and then discovered it was actually a fairly low paying profession in the UK. Ended up supporting a bunch of Sun machines for other EEs which was more fun. So i learned Perl one weekend, bailed out and lied my way into a sysadmin job for 2x the money. 20 odd years down the line I’m glad I made that choice.
When offering PhD studentship positions, I have had several cases of people from developing countries who wanted to come work in my group, but didn't, and the reason (from their own accounts) was that their parents wouldn't let them go get their PhD anywhere not in the US.
They ended up at groups in the US with much worse scientific output than mine (it's true that well-known US universities wipe the floor with mine in every metric, but that's not true when you go down to the level of individual groups, labs or fields of research), while working unpaid while I was paying a decent salary.
They were bright people so I think and hope they'll have fruitful careers, but their parents (with their best intentions, I'm sure) surely put a roadblock in front of them due to the prejudice that there are no good opportunities outside the US.
This. I also had a M.Sc. student work at my company, a brilliant guy from China, he deserved the best Ph.D. Which in my opinion is with a Professor that made his mark, has a secure position (so he is not still in his publish or perish period), enjoys what he does and cares about his Ph.D. students' development. His parents didn't agree, they wanted him to go to the most prestigious lab he could get into. Probably to be worked like a measurement slave for 4 years + the inevitable extension.
I told him to beware, talk to other students and try to gauge the atmosphere in the lab. If you're smart and motivated you'll make it. But will you have fun and be happy? What do you want out of life?
I have friend that made "Associate Professor" at an impressive age. He does make 80 hour weeks and travels 50% of his time. It can be fun and it is an adventure, but is it what you want? This life is pretty incompatible with having a family for example.
Beware of the fact that your parents may define success very differently from you.
Why is EE so bad? On the surface it looks like a degree with a strong grounding in mathematics, exposure to programming, the discipline of engineering, and a diverse range of applications across industry. It kind of seems like the ideal degree if you want to hire someone. I'm always baffled when I hear stories like this.
I have some hypotheses. Note my degree is in physics, perhaps a similar situation though not as widespread. There are a number of things happening.
Most engineers in all disciplines lose their math ability after graduating. The workplace itself allows this to happen: They get so busy with regular design work that they forget their math and theory. A lot of the analysis work is handled by their CAD tools. The work that does need math or deep domain knowledge is handled by one or two experts within the department.
There are some practical limits to the size and complexity of hardware, that limit the amount of hardware work. An electronic board might be designed and tested once, and then a million copies made. The software for supporting that board is maintained constantly. This is partly due to a conscious choice to move functionality from hardware to software. When hardware is obsolete, it's abandoned. When software is obsolete, it's augmented with new software on top of the old software.
There's a strong message from above that software is more important than hardware. Sparkly software is what management sees when they are shown the product. The people who find that they can program well enough to do it for money, have moved into software development.
It's harder for an individual hardware person to capitalize on their own innovation, because they need the infrastructure to test and manufacture new hardware. So we can only move at the pace of the businesses that employ us.
Programming can inflate its own demand through technical debt, and can organize itself to a level just short of full blown collective bargaining.
Note that I'm not talking about pure software businesses, but those businesses don't need hardware engineers at all. ;-)
Though I don't agree with negative take on software like "sparkly software for management", "inflate its own demand by technical debt" or "organize itself for collective bargaining".
Sparkly software gets you just as far as it is useful usually, less sparkly sells worse but you still need it on hardware to get job done, hardware alone is not enough.
Inflate demand - well people just suck at organizing big projects there is no need to artificially inflate demand it just happens as business needs more and more features.
Software developers are bad at organizing and bargaining - because they all think they are better than others and code of other people always sucks :)
What is my hypothesis:
Hardware has physical limitations as is obvious - even if you build millions of boards - well it takes storage space, you need copper, aluminum, you cannot make transistors smaller into infinity. You can only sell so many phones as there are buyers.
Software on the other hand is limited now mostly by amount of the developers in the world. There is infinite amount of programs that you can run on finite amount of hardware. There is infinite amount of software to be built let alone maintained that is why software developer salaries are going through the roof.
While I can sell 1 phone only once now I can build SaaS solution that I will get cashflow and monthly payments it is not even that individual can capitalize on his own innovation. Basically infinite revenue stream from SaaS model is just so attractive for any business man.
Brilliant comment.
It applies to most engineering, or scientific fields. Develop, discover, once. Maintain or improve forever.
Explains the massive difference in demand for truly imaginative innovative thinkers, and the maintainers.
Come to think of it, other fields too.
Well for me the degree was of mediocre usefulness. The job I had to sit in an office on a factory floor with no windows, fully airgapped on my own 7 hours a day doing test automation and designing test fixtures mostly. That was the entry position for us back then really. I had to wear full static gear head to toe which was hot and uncomfortable and smelled weird. This was broken up twice a day by some shitty machine coffee and to sit in the canteen and stare out the two small windows at people outside at the company over the road all smoking. All while being paid just about enough to eat for the month and keep up with my games habit. There were also 9 layers of bureaucratic nightmare everywhere and as the company was large everyone knew or was related to everyone else as they all lived in the same area so it was politics galore.
A lot of negative responses here but my own experiences having graduated with an EE degree from an average university (in the UK) 3 years ago has been pretty good so far. I was able to get 3 internships at 3 different semiconductor companies throughout the course of my degree and got a job at another semiconductor company immediately after graduating doing digital chip design so I don't think the job market, at least in my niche, can be quite that bad. The pay is pretty good, well above average for a recent graduate in the low cost of living city I'm based in and a bit higher than my software engineering friends in the same city. Still considering maybe doing a masters in computer science to expand my career options though
An EE degree IS awesome. It gives a generalizable mathematical foundation which applies in just about any other field of work. It gives a huge competitive edge. For example:
* Circuits are physical implementations of differential equations, and EE gives a unique way to intuitively think about dynamics, which applies to finance, epidemiology, and just a really diverse range of domains.
* With a rigorous EE background, you can rapidly pick up most domains of engineering (think Elon Musk), since you've got all the mathematical foundations. The reverse isn't true. The way math is taught in EE is broader than e.g. mechanical, civil, or other engineering disciplines, where it tends to be more domain-specific. EE gives you a lot of depth in probability, error analysis, signal processing, controls, calculus, linear algebra, etc. I think the only things missing are statistics and discrete math, and I picked those up elsewhere.
High-performance board-level EE is insanely fun. Incredibly creative. You get to build stuff, design stuff, do math, and it's just a huge diversity of intellectually-fulfilling stuff.
IC design is a bit less fun, due to the many-month turn cycles (develop, wait months and hundreds of thousands dollars, and test/debug), but not bad.
However, the EE industry sucks:
- Pay is not bad, but much worse than other jobs you can get with an EE degree.
- Work culture has all the worst excesses of the eighties -- think of Office Space style cubicle farms, dress codes, conservative management, ISO processes, and paperwork.
- Yet it's somehow adopted some of the worst excesses of the 2010s; it no longer feels like work is a family or a community
- And it's hard to get into. There are virtually no jobs for junior-level EEs (which isn't just BSes -- in the Great Recession, I knew bright newly-minted Stanford/MIT/Caltech/etc. Ph.Ds who couldn't find jobs).
- Even at the senior-level, there's a bit too much of a boom-and-bust cycle, without the booms ever getting that boomy, but the busts being pretty busty.
I spent maybe five years doing EE work after my EE degree, and I think that was enough. I've been out for a long time now. I still do EE as a hobby, and I enjoy it, but the industry culture isn't one I remember with fondness.
I suspect a lot of this stuff will continue to disappear from the US into Asia; that transition is rapidly in progress. US firms maintain specialized knowledge in some areas (e.g. particular types of MEMS devices), but there are plenty of places we've fallen behind. I don't see us on the path to regain leadership. I think some of this is cyclical. Declining industries don't make for good employers, and poor employers don't make for growth industries.
EE is one of those "engineering is really applied physics" disciplines. There's a slant towards standardised EE-specific solutions for PDEs, but it's still much more abstract and mathematical than any field of CS, apart from maybe cryptography and data science.
But career-wise, it's a mediocre choice in most Western countries. (Possible exception is Germany, where engineers have a similar status to doctors and lawyers.)
Most people have no clue what EE even is, or just how much math and engineering goes into building everyday devices and services.
(A friend of the family said "Great! You'll be able to get a job repairing TVs!" when I got my course offer.)
> There's a slant towards standardised EE-specific solutions for PDEs, but it's still much more abstract and mathematical than any field of CS, apart from maybe cryptography and data science.
Here's the thing, though: PDEs are NP-hard. There isn't a generalizable way to model dynamics. On the other hand, dynamics come up everywhere:
- How is the pandemic going to evolve?
- How will incentive structures skew cultures?
- How do I build a suspension for my car?
- How does heat leak from my house?
- How does my understanding evolve with learning?
... and so on.
What EE does -- and I think uniquely -- is given intuitive, graphical tools to think about differential equations, in tools like Laplace, Body, Nyquist, root-locus, and so on.
They also give a lot of applied experience in applying those, including in contexts with nonlinearities. An op amp will clip on both sides, which you model as a linear differential equation (which is easy enough to reason about) and a memoryless, time-invariant nonlinearity. You squint. You kinda ask yourself how it would work if it /were/ linear, and the nonlinearity just cut gain. And at some point, after doing it enough, you have intuition for what it will do.
With the EE-specific stuff, I can intuitively reason about these things think through to design.
EE is all about modeling -- building simpler equations which approximate more complex ones in ways which give intuition -- so this is also usually correct or almost correct. Indeed, if you go onto grad level courses in control theory, you'll see formalizations of this intuition, where for example, a time-variant system or a nonlinear system is modeled as a linear time-invariant system, together with a bounded error.
A lot of the mathy stuff -- which I've learned a fair bit of as well -- is in abstract more general, but in practice, gives much less intuition.
My experience with the real world is that there are rarely actual differential equations handed to me. I kinda get that we've set up some pricing structure, or some incentive design, or whatnot, but I can't model it formally. I know which way things push, and whether those integrate or not. I can draw a block diagram and reason about how it will behave, in a way the math side doesn't let me do.
>Germany, where engineers have a similar status to doctors and lawyers
Errr, no they don't. In terms of pay and status Doctors and Lawyers trump Engineers every day of the week in Germany, the only exception being the engineers with PhDs who are tech leads in some well known research institute or big-brand company like Audi or Porsche.
I think you over promote the utility of the formal methods taught in the degree.
Not once did I use Laplace in EE. It was all cheat sheets or applying data sheets and doing some adhoc calculations in excel or taking a wild guess and iterating.
After twenty years of doing IT related stuff I’ve forgotten how to even differentiate stuff.
1. I did learn them well, and so I did use Laplace quite often in EE.
2. I jumped careers not into IT, but into tracks which leveraged both programming and a mathematical skill set.
I'll mention: I'd be bored out of my wits doing just IT. The intersection of IT and math includes computer graphics, visualizations, robotics, machine learning, fintech, image processing, and a ton of other stuff I find much more fun and fulfilling.
That's not an implicit commentary on your path, by the way, just an explanation of mine. We all have different goals, desires, values, constraints, etc.
Yeah, I have an EE degree but have only worked in software, and I have to say you can bring any kind of mathematics to the job if you have the imagination to find the places where it is an advantage.
I sought areas where I could learn more math and use it to stand out from the crowd, albeit to mixed results, because if your manager can’t read your analysis paper he may not be impressed either, and sometimes the reverse.
If you know a little bit of math, there's no benefit.
If you know enough math to jump to e.g. medical imaging, robotics, controls, simulators, image processing, ML, or similar, there's a ton of benefit.
An EE degree ought to give enough background to get there, although it may involve a year or two of study in a particular domain, and a side project to prove you have the skills.
I think some of it must be 'sticky' culture. I'm another former EE who left the field to develop with much better pay so the inter-discipline competition does exist in some form. What I saw of EE jobs didn't have the dress codes and comfortable offices.
Same answer as any underpaid field: an oversupply of labor in that field vs demand.
The absolute worst fields are the “sexy” or trendy ones. Unless you are strongly driven to enter a field for non-monetary reasons always look into employment opportunities.
"The ideal degree if you want to hire someone" is different from "the ideal degree if you want a high salary".
To get a high salary, you need to be in a good negotiating position, such that if company X won't hire you for US$150,000(/year), then company Y will hire you for US$145,000 (a strong BATNA). There are three possible reasons company Y might not hire you for US$145,000:
1. They are badly managed and making irrational decisions.
2. It would be unprofitable for them to hire someone like you for US$145,000; in an engineering position, this is because their revenues minus cost of sales would go up by less than US$145,000, risk-adjusted.
3. They can hire someone else like you for a lower cost, such as US$130,000.
Item #1 can mostly be discounted as a difference across fields; there are badly managed companies in every field, but generally they aren't the ones who hire a lot of people, and they aren't the ones providing your BATNA. However, in the case of programming, company Y might be you and your college roommate setting up Pinboard or Tarsnap, so there is perhaps a relevant difference here.
A thing about items #2 and #3 is that "someone like you" means "like you" from the company's perspective before they hire you. The fact that you can solve hard leetcode puzzles during the interview in ten minutes figures into this, because that's something they can observe before they hire you, unless they go through a recruiter, in which case it doesn't. If you can do a board layout with 166 MHz DDR and it will work right on the first spin with no signal integrity issues, that doesn't figure into "like you", because that takes at least a week, so you can't do it as part of the interviewing process.
The bigger difference, though, about item #2, is that the returns to NRE work in either EE or programming depends on volume. If your EE innovations give them a working board that costs $3.80 to produce instead of the other guy's $4.30, then if they're producing 100 units, you've produced $50 of value for the company. But if they're producing 100,000 units, that same amount of work on your part has produced $50,000. And similarly if the product brings an $0.50 higher price instead of having an $0.50 lower cost. And similarly if we're talking about lowering the cost per user of operating a server farm, or increasing the ad spend per user.
So why is that a difference if they're both NRE work? Because producing 100,000 units of an electronic device requires a huge amount of up-front capital investment. You can't produce 10 units one day, then 15 units the next day, then 25 units the day after that. So if Company X is investing $3 million in your project and Company Y is investing $0.3 million, the Company X devices are likely going to get produced in ten times higher volume, so every design decision you make is worth ten times as much money.
Now, of course if you're working on Google's backend systems that serve, ultimately, 5 billion people, an 0.1% improvement produces more value than an 0.1% improvement in the systems of a company with only 1 million clients. So FAANG can afford to pay hackers more than the average health plan, ISP, or venture-funded satellite imagery startup. But, even in those cases, the capital investment needed to get a lot of value out of a programmer's work is fairly small, maybe US$10k to US$100k, rather than the US$1M or more that is common for EE projects. This puts programmers in a much better negotiating position.
So, though the two fields have similar diversity of applications, type of work, and intellectual difficulty, electrical and electronic engineers are reduced to begging for scraps from rich employers and then have to sit in bunny suits on factory floors with shitty coffee, while programmers get free massages, incentive stock options, and private offices. Except in countries where companies hire programmers through recruiters.
(Why do they do that? I think it's mostly an industrywide case of #1: companies in England and Australia use recruiters because everybody else uses recruiters, and so the ambitious programmers leave the country, reducing the large advantages obtainable by black-sheep companies who hired directly and could thus hire only competent programmers, to whom they could profitably offer twice as much money. But maybe there are legal reasons or something.)
Same for physics. I earn over 3X what I could make as a top-tier researcher paying myself out of grant money and have had a handsome seven-figure IPO (close to 8 figures, if the market price holds). It's quite shameful, as physics research is almost uniformly more important and relevant to society. Now that I'm set for life, financially, I very well might return to physics.
In America, we value frivolous crap over serious scientific and artistic endeavors, mainly because the masses are terribly dumb. Idiocracy was quite close to the truth, as good satire must be.
I had almost exactly the same career arc. Perl became Python, Sun became Linux and I eventually moved beyond sysadmin work into automation, then API development and now I lead software development teams. Are you still doing sysadmin work?
> I burned 5 years in industry being paid crap and then discovered it was actually a fairly low paying profession in the UK
I was absolutely dumbfounded when I looked up engineering salaries in the UK. I mean, even in the US, I don't consider most engineering fields particularly high paying, but the UK is something else.
In hindsight this may seem wrong but I don’t completely blame him.
The offshoring of IT was so novel unlike say manufactured goods. Governments can’t stop it although I think they should in some form if you think it’s important for your country
I'm really sorry for the relationship you have with your father.
I've had similar experiences, but not as drastic as yours -- my father didn't allow me to use my bike for YEARS as a punishment for smashing my bike as a 10 year old (faulty chain, impulsive child).
I guess this I would call the real toxic masculinity.
Unfortunately there's nothing much you can do, except build your life around it, keep your boundaries firm and perhaps psychotherapy.
That's a harsh punishment. What kind of effect did it have on you? I remember I biked to school at that age (~10-15 min). If I damaged one of my tools, such as my bike or my shoes, it'd look damaged, and I disliked that. But I had to cope with that. That was a punishment by itself.
I wasn't able to get a job as system administrator (even though I believe I'd liked it) because I can't program. I tried it various times, and the reason I always quit is because I get frustrated and get migraine symptoms. I tried C, Lua, Python (multiple times), and all I ended up being able to is some Unix kung-fu and shell scripting. Which seemed to be not good enough for system administration. It kind of feels like my failure in life, to be frank. Tho I'm happy I ended up with something else, IT security related.
> I guess this I would call the real toxic masculinity.
HN is the last place I would have expected to see these words.
Which is slightly interesting take on a parent - I presume they housed you, fed you, got you educated and relatively safe...I cant possibly imagine you are writing this from a rehab facility or jail. And yet, for denying you a bicycle deems that man "toxic"? And what does a parent taking away a privilege have to do with masculinity? Which one of your human rights were infringed upon exactly?
>> my father didn't allow me to use my bike for YEARS as a punishment for smashing my bike as a 10 year old
Seriously, being so strict to punish a 10yrs old kid for years is not a sign of a toxic personality? Parents suppose to build theirs kids character and not stomp on it to make them 'tough'.
toxic masculinity is not being manly man man. Its being insecure and lashing out at anyone who disagrees with you or is not 'with you'. Any father that thinks their kid misbehaving is somehow a personal attack.
The last bit fits the bill the most in his case -- he took it as a huge personal attack that I smashed the bike he bought, and the tough discipline he was raised in is why I labeled it as toxic masculinity.
Why do you associate this with masculinity though? Yes, your father is man but I'm not sure if his masculinity has anything to do with it?
I recognize the character traits. I know someone raised without a father who also shows them. Perhaps in his case a result of having a tough time financially their entire youth? This put a huge value on stuff (because almost everything is irreplaceable, literally, and there was hardly any time to fix things), leaving little room for error and no reasonable room for breaking stuff, as children do?
As I am getting older I really realize that I do things like my parents did them. It is really difficult to just decide to do it differently because of the emotions involved. It is difficult to be rational the whole time, the monkey brain sometimes leads. What is important is to be able to admit your mistakes and being able to apologize. For all my flaws I hope to show my kids at least that there is no shame in this.
I'm sometimes harsh on the children only to later apologize and tell them I actually do believe they should be able to make mistakes and that whatever they broke can be fixed again, and if not, no lives were lost (ideally).
I wonder why I get so down-voted, perhaps my non-native speaker brain has a wrong understanding of the term "masculinity"? In this context I take it to mean that being unreasonably angry at kids that wreck stuff is a typical thing for men, and that women don't suffer from this? Is this wrong?
Denying a child his bike for YEARS, and I mean years gatheting dust in the shed is toxic by my definition, obviously not the single thing my father did that I would label this as an example of toxic masculinity, otherwise I'd call it "odd", also my dad had enough qualities that I don't label him as abusive, in my mind this is an example of over the top discipline + the other cultural stuff that in my mind I would call toxic masculinity.
I am certainly grateful to my father for all the material support he provided, and he did provide a lot and still insists he does, even though I constantly remind him I'm an adult and quite well off myself.
You don't need to be a drunkard to drink alcohol, and you don't need to be permanently toxic to exhibit toxic masculinity. I dislike the term (because people immediately get defensive) but the concept is definitely useful and describes a real phenomena.
It's not about masculinity being inherently toxic, it's about toxic expectations men are expected to fulfill by the society.
And you don't have to have your human rights infringed, for example something as simple as saying "you are useless" is toxic, yet it doesn't infringe on any rights. Not everything that's legal is good.
I have a lot of respect for your perseverance, it was the right thing to do. Make your own mistakes, making someone else's is just so... Painful. And it makes you feel weak.
Similarly someone once advised me not to do a Masters in Molecular Biology because the market was screaming for Bachelors (back then in the Netherlands a Bachelor meant working in a production lab or something). I didn't listen and this also turned around in about 3-4 years and I love how my career went (and is going).
I had a similar (but much less intense) situation with my Father in law by the way. He has some experience in "home improvement". I like to read and watch YouTube before starting any activity. So we had a big discussion/argument on how we would re-do our ceilings. In the end I said: I prefer to do it my way and mess it up than to do it yours and regret that. He agreed, we had a fun time working together after that. He learned a thing or two and now he consults me on many things he does around the house.
"I honestly don't know which way is right. In case something _does_ go wrong, though, I'd rather have only myself to hold it against because I made the wrong decision than also hold it against you and let that make its way into our relationship."
I think this just made its way into my "life rules for dealing with family and close friends."
It's up there with "give money freely, but never lend it," and, "don't hire a friend to perform work for you on a deadline."
It's for sure something I try to keep in mind raising my children now. It's a form of admitting that you never have 100% of the facts + knowing that making mistakes is very good for learning. You can definitely learn things from how even the youngest of kids solve problems.
This of course does not mean you should let them die screaming "yolo!", there is a balance to be found, but having this mantra keeps the balance a bit more on the "open mind" side of things.
Kudos for sticking to it, I'm not sure I could have done that in your place! I'm always horrified at stories of parents who act this way. "Do it because I say so, I'm infallible as far as you are concerned, if you disobey me I'll hurt you."
I was not aware of how much damage he did until my mid 20's and it led to about 2 years in therapy to work through it all. This story is one of countless stories where he has acted out of line. A benefit of my career is that I had enough capital to pay out of pocket for a very effective therapist.
I ended up gaining a far better understanding of who he is as a person and perhaps even why he is the way he is. This has allowed me to come to terms with his actions enough to forgive and forget (for the most part) and move forward with my life. I still call him once a year on fathers day, an attempt to extend the proverbial olive branch, but he never picks up.
All in all my life goes on and I am happy and healthy. I am extremely grateful for the community I live in, the fantastic friends I have surrounded myself with and (most importantly) my incredible wife who helped me through a lot of the pain over the years. I wouldn't be where I am today were it not for her.
I'm not trying to put everyone on the same level as your situation, but many (most, I might guess?) have had parental situations that are less than good. Sometimes for a short period, sometimes for the entire childhood.
My childhood wasn't bad (as in horrific) but there were enough ... episodes that stuck with me for a long time, and sharing with friends (both at the time and afterwards) raised a lot of eyebrows (mostly saying "that's really not normal/acceptable").
"This has allowed me to come to terms with his actions enough to forgive and forget (for the most part) and move forward with my life."
I'm glad you got there. I've come to a similar place (without a lot of therapy, but over a longer period of time). My parents did the best they could, and on looking back, they were in a situation they didn't want to be in (kids at a young age, money problems, etc). With enough time and distance, and knowing them as an adult, they're generally OK people. They did the best they could, they just didn't know very much at the time, and ... they got a lot of bad advice (imo) during a pre-internet time when it wasn't fast/easy to get a lot of information. I'm still rather fortunate, in that they're both overall good people (just... were not prepared for parenthood) - many folks are bad at parenting and ... are just overall not great people either. I have a sibling that is still struggling to come to terms with some of this, and is still searching for 'answers' to things that I don't really think have 'answers'.
And yes, a good spouse can really help balance you out, give you some grounding and perspective. You can get some of that through therapy as well, I'm sure, but having a spouse with you is a different sort of grounding and perspective.
"If you pursue this career, you'll live under a bridge in 5 years, so I'm kicking you out and giving you no money, so you'll live under a bridge right now."
edit: kudos to you for sticking to it really! You should be proud of yourself!
I know you made the point in jest but you’re right. To be adaptable you need to embrace change and opinion is the hardest to change. I’ve seen people die holding an opinion which has been thoroughly disproven. Embrace change!
Needless to say he was completely wrong. I was out-earning him within 2 years of entering the market and I have probably the greatest job security in my immediate friendship circle.
Despite my efforts, he refuses to talk to me to this day. The man does not like being wrong nor disobeyed. A shame really.