Twitter pays engineer $10 million as Silicon Valley tussles for talent

I don't think that has much to do with the original topic, though.

Sure, people can make life changes. I'm a prime example of that. It helps if you have a lot of savings, no family and a willingness to live in poverty for the stretch of time it takes to develop that new career.

But there's a lot of ground between a $10m engineer and minimum wage. The point of the thread, I think anyway, was that not everyone is cut out to do every type of job.

 

Not everyone has the mental acumen to learn to be an ultrasound tech. I'm sure your friend has had some classmates fail, or drop out.

 

Regarding the nations that have students who are better in math and science than those in the United States (regardless of how it's determined), let's ask the following questions:

How are their educational systems structured? Who decides what will be taught? What training is required of teachers?

When we compare ourselves to other nations, we seem to think those other nations have structures and processes that are the same as the United States but they just have better personnel. But are the structures and processes really the same?

And more importantly... if it turned out that, in order to do better in math and science, it required expanding the Department of Education and letting the federal government set all the standards, how many of you would be OK with that?

As far as the rest of the discussion goes: I got A's and B's in math until I was taking pre-calculus and it bored me, so I got a C. Sure, you need to know basic math for a lot of functions in life, but sometimes we have to ask ourselves just how much math students really need, or if we are just thinking, "Well, if we require everyone to do this and that, surely everyone will get it and want to enter a certain career field."

 

Not everyone, but perhaps a greater percentage.