Smoldering coals light the warmest fires.

Then it was “major in STEM”

Then it was “one year experience”

Then it was “three years experience”

Then it was “three years of DIRECTLY RELATED experience”

Then it was five years of DIRECTLY RELATED experience"

Now, if you didn’t practically invent the technology a company uses, you’ve got no shot.

“but I started in the mailr..”

My dad worked for the federal government after he and Mom both got their Master’s degrees. Mom had all three of us and stayed home with us full-time. We lived in a 3 bedroom house in the suburbs and when my brother was a baby, my mom started going back to school at night. I remember pretty clearly my dad heating up the breast milk from the freezer for Jake’s dinner because Mom was at classes.

In 1988, my mom finished her Ph.D. in mathematics. So, to be clear, my dad’s job – just a rando mid-level federal job – covered food and clothes for 3 kids, the mortgage, the bills, and Mom’s college expenses. We were broke as hell when I was young – Mom made our clothes, grew food in the backyard, and did everything she could to stretch every dime – but at the end of it, Mom got her job as a college professor, got tenure (almost impossible today), and did it without piles and piles of inescapable college debt. We moved to Northeast PA, they bought their house, which was 4 years old when we bought it, for about ¼ of what it’s worth today.

When I had @mistresskabooms 23 years ago, we were able to rent a townhouse & cover our expenses so that I could stay home, and on what? MK’s dad tending bar and both of us working at the Renaissance Faire in season. I was able to stay home and take care of MK for the first three years of her life, which means she got the advantages of spending a lot of time with her parents, she got to be breastfed (which is better for kids immune systems if possible, and kids who are in daycare tend to stop breastfeeding sooner), she wasn’t exposed to tons of germs from being in daycare, etc. Now, for part of that time we had our partner living with us, but not the whole time – some of it we did fully on our own. It’s next to impossible to do that now, if not fully impossible, for a family to survive like that.

Even ten years ago, it was possible, if difficult, for Emet to cover our mortgage and living expenses on a job that she got with a “some college” education. There’s no way we could do that now with what mortgage processors make.