The real question is that $125k as a Senior Data Analyst in NYC seems low.
> I have this creative side, which comes in handy when thinking through challenging problems, but there is only so much creativity that I can use when in data analysis.
This I disagree with; in data analysis/science, there's more than way to highlight/analyze a problem, and more than one way to solve it. In my experience, the best solutions are often the craziest.
Apologies, not entirely clear that the post is taken from somewhere/ how to get to the original post. Don't think I can update the URL the submission points to :|
Really? $125k doesn't seem low to me based on experience. Also, just looked on Payscale and it says Senior Data Analyst (with 6 years experience) salary range was $63-113k.
I run a SaaS analytics product company in NYC. I help refer data analysts and data scientists to my customers. Sharp analysts can command $140k base with about 3 years of experience right now.
Just because they can, doesn't mean it's average or to be expected.
I think a lot of people on here (and Blind) constantly say everyone is underpaid. It might be trying to help educate people they can be paid more. But it's usually framed in a way most people find insulting.
Only 5% of laborers in cities like LA and NYC make over $200k a year. That number is a bit higher in The Bay. Only about 12-15% of people make over $125k.
Again, it's nice to know that you can do better. But it's also nice to give yourself a pat on the back sometimes. $125k is decidedly NOT bad by any standards.
Thank you so, so much for pointing this out. I am so tired of basically everybody believing they are under-paid by making $120k+
It puts out the wrong expectations.
Most people under-estimate, what kind of life they can live with $60-80k anyways.
Some people underestimate the options and freedom (including being ready for the effects of recession/ageism in the industry) that living on $60k with a $200k salary can provide.
How do you pay for $200k level taxes on a $60k salary? I make low six figures and pay an effective tax rate of about 35%. You’d only have about $5k left over for living expenses for the year...
- their living expenses match those of a person living with a $60k salary and presumably spending everything they earn after tax (in response to “what kind of life they can live with $60-80k”)
It’s a very common HN trope: go to any thread where tech salaries are mentioned and you’ll find someone whose sister’s boyfriend’s roommate makes $400k at Facebook, so therefore that’s a normal, expected salary for all tech workers. Point out actual publicly available data like Glassdoor or Salary.com and you’ll get a whole bunch of nit picks about their methodology or the fact that they report base salary only, etc.
Yes, there are likely outlier employees at outlier companies making huge comp but those have to be at least 2 to 3 standard deviations right of the average.
> Point out actual publicly available data like Glassdoor or Salary.com and you’ll get a whole bunch of nit picks about their methodology or the fact that they report base salary only, etc.
So you don't have a counter argument is what you're saying? The truth is those site are insanely flawed and if that's what you're using to form your basis for negotiation then you're at a disadvantage period.
Compensation is often base + bonus + equity. For sufficiently senior positions, the equity component can be almost as much as the base salary. If the equity is liquid, then why is that not relevant?
FYI new grads at any of the big tech companies are bringing in close to ~$200k in total compensation their first year. It's not just someone's sister's cousin. It's a majority of engineering new grads who work at any of the BigCos which employ A LOT of people and are constantly hiring.
Unfortunately, due to a lack of public data, these discussions always devolve into anecdote battles. I would love to see actual data that shows these huge salaries as average. It would really help my next salary negotiation! I’ve been in tech for over 20 years and so far, “Hacker News says we should make $400K” hasn’t really worked with recruiters yet.
Those salaries are prevalent pretty much only at "big" tech companies (FAANG) in the Bay Area.
Even in the Bay Area the 50th percentile base salary for a relatively junior hire is closer to $100k than $150k. Add in bonus and equity and some might top out around $140k-$150k total compensation. That's in the Bay Area specifically. Most other places TC is going to top out just above $100k--high salaries are uncommon outside of tech hubs and the Bay Area itself is on the high end even in that group.
I think you’re reading into it a bit too much. The comment you’re responding to is just a simple statement that with xyz skill your market rate is n dollars. There’s nothing there about how you should feel about it
Market rate seems to vary widely for programming jobs (less familiar with data science, but it's probably similar), as sone companies can afford to pay a lot more than others, and some developers are willing to accept a lot less than others. And this is often independent of skill levels.
Technologists systemically undervalue themselves. Partly because the barrier to entry to software/analysts is so low, and most people are pretty bad. It's also because interviewing is such a time-consuming task that most people only look at 1-3 offers when getting a new job.
If you look in comment history you'll see a few references to me paying engineers/data scientists/data analysts $400 to spend an afternoon with me solving a real world problem. If I felt like you were someone I would work with, I personally introduce you to the head of a team at a companies that I know pays great money and has a great team, and you're fast tracked to the final interview (mostly culture and talking tech. No bullshit).
I always knew what the position paid, and the candidates would always sell themselves 10-20% of what they could get (I obviously helped them get the most they could).
Just because the market is skewed with a lot of bad candidates and poor negotiators doesn't mean the market price is accurate. We can all do better.
Not even close. But ugh, it is sort of getting there as far as what inflated titles are being offered/used. Going to be as watered down as today's "DBA" vs 20 years ago "DBA" at this rate.
When I see Data Science in industry, it means an analyst. When I see Data Science in academia, I see Michael Jordan and Alex Smola. I think this is the core disconnect.
It really doesnt matter whether the startup gives you 4500, 1500, or 45000, or a million. You are being given the numerator without knowing the denominator, so it is all worth zero until you get to see the Cap Table. Most startups wont let you see the Cap Table.
Even if you saw the Cap Table, there is still a lot of uncertainty, tons of illiquidity, and a long horizon.
Options are nice, but they are not cash and do not belong in the same conversation as salary.
I feel like you didn't actually read/understand his comment. He stated they were worth $0, implying that it doesn't matter how many they give; they're still worth $0. It was cheekily pointing out how worthless stock options in a pre-IPO startup are.
Specifically what I said was that they are worthless until you get to see the cap table (which most startups will not show you.)
Stocks are shares in a company. Imagine you have a box with money in it. And I tell you you get 4500 parts of this box. But I dont tell you how many parts there are total -- you see the numerator but not the denominator. In that situation it is impossible to discern the value of your 4500 parts since you dont know how many ways the money gets split.
It gets trickier, because cap tables also have liquidity preferences. So you can have 4500 parts of the box. And another person can have 4500 parts, but their 4500 might be worth a whole lot more than your 4500 because there are different classes of stocks. It isn't uncommon to have one class paid first, in whole or 1.x greater than whole before the next class gets paid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidation_preference
Oh, then there is the actual business -- there is tons of business risk. Even if the business does well, it may be in the red and the future of the company (and worth of your shares) are dependent on successive rounds of funding and their implied valuation. You get a down-round and you might be wiped out.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/downround.asp
Even if everything gets well, depending on the classes of shares of decision-makers, you can end up in a situation where the founders/board might have an incentive to sell at just an amount where they make out well but employees get wiped out.
Case:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/technology/when-a-unicorn...
The Net-Net of all this is: stock options are not worthless, their worth is based on a formula with a dozen+ variables, almost none of which you know the values/ranges/distributions for -- and a formula where many combinations of theoretical inputs result in zero value.
Certainly startup equity is a) a risk and b) sometimes hard to quantify in real dollar terms. But if the startup is successful, equity value is very real and should not be ignored or swept aside. My advice: Don't join a startup unless you believe in its growth potential and your compensation package includes equity. Without the equity and the potential that comes with it, there is little reason to join a startup. You might as well just go with an established company instead.
Your financial advice is solid. However I hate Big Co politics (it’s caused me mental health issues in the past) and I enjoy being able to be a generalist. Of course some people thrive in highly politicized environments or enjoy being specialists, so in that case, a Big Co makes perfect sense.
Politics exist no matter where you are; it's the art of convincing other people that they also want to do the thing you want to do. Improving your political skills will make you a better engineer because an engineer without influence isn't getting much done. For what it's worth "show don't tell" is one of the basic tenets of politics.
> You are being given the numerator without knowing the denominator, so it is all worth zero until you get to see the Cap Table. Most startups wont let you see the Cap Table.
Every single time I've accepted a job at a startup that offered ISO stock options, I knew # of shares outstanding (the denominator), terms of all funding rounds, strike price, exit strategy, total amount of money raised, who the major investors are on the cap table, etc.
The jobs were at startups funded by the best investors in the world and high caliber founders who valued transparency. One went on to become a unicorn, and the other is an extremely early seed stage company where I work now.
If a startup isn't willing to give you information beyond # of options granted, then that is a red flag in my book. Not all startups are like that.
Why would you join taking compensation not knowing it’s value? In my experience companies will always tell you some mix of shares outstanding, current fair market value and sometimes even the valuation for the next venture stage (I don’t see why as an employee you need to see the cap table). While predicting the future is impossible, this information helps to assign a non-zero value to the options.
> Options are nice, but they are not cash and do not belong in the same conversation as salary.
Also, options are usually tied to continued employment. If you leave the company, you will need to exercise your options within a certain amount of time (often, 3 months). This can easily be an outlay of (tens of) thousands of dollars. It depends on the number of options and the exercise price, which is set at time of the option grant based on the then-current 409b valuation of company shares.
So at that point you are left with a choice: spend a lot of money to exercise your options and buy a bunch of illiquid common stock, which may or may not be worth something someday. Or, just walk away from the options then and there.
Interesting view, I'm curious about what you mean when you write, "In my experience, the best solutions are often the craziest." Do you mean having unique mindsets/strategies in approaching problems? Can you explain more about "craziest" types of solutions?
Yes. One thing I dislike about data science/data analysis MOOCs is that they imply that there is a best way / one way to solve a given problem with a given dataset. The real world is much more messy (data cleaning, data pipelining, data normalization, etc.), and on the statistics side, solutions to problems often come from the weirdest places (in my case, it's often where there's a hole in the data).
>"I analyze data on a day-to-day basis, which means building dashboards or writing code to summarize various datasets. I usually partner up with teams across the company to solve different problems. That sometimes means defining metrics, creating visualizations to see changes over time, or making sense of the large datasets that we have."
Sounds like mostly dashboarding, data viz, and simple analysis, so I actually thought it was kinda high. Perfect for senior maybe.
>in data analysis/science, there's more than way to highlight/analyze a problem, and more than one way to solve it. In my experience, the best solutions are often the craziest.
I strongly disagree. I have hired, mentored, and/or managed 20+ data scientists and analysts over my career; in my experience the ones who come up with "crazy"/creative solutions are often the least effective in the long run. This is especially true on the product analytics side, where there are 5 ways to shoot yourself in the foot in non-obvious and subtle ways. The best analysts I've worked with follow fairly regimented best practices around the way they analyze problems and present solutions. By its very nature, non-standard solutions are more error-prone and harder to explain, which breaks institutional trust in the analyst.
That said, there is plenty of room for analysts to grow into more creative fields like machine learning or product management, but I don't think the person being interviewed falls in one of these categories.
Title seems pretty click baity. She acknowledges that her side passions (creative/design/art) may not be what will pay the bills and that she is happy in the role for now.
So I left my 'typical' role type for a massive paycut due to being done with working in SF and Silicon Valley for something I am passionate about.
I turned down a job at $180,000 and took a job at $52,000.
(previous to that I was making $228,000 - as a consultant)
Because I have literally no passion for what I used to do, the ageism, cut-throat bullshit in silicon valley has quite a toll. Housing is retarded. Transportation in the bay area is horrific, and the quality of life-work-balance is terrible.
I know that I am going to make a heck-ton of a lot more money soon.. but I am pretty much done trying to work in startups in SF/SV.
Thats a job for 20-somethings.
EDIT: Since people asked.
I joined as director of tech for a cannabis startup that has a lot of licenses and has a valuation in hundreds of millions.
It is all bootstrapped from the founders, and has zero debt nor investors (thus the low pay)
And I am building out MRP/ERP/OPs/Sales-ops/data for them.
Further, We are building something amazing on the vape-pen production market.
(the valuation is based on investors who have been trying to buy into the company... and keep getting turned down)
There's a lot of jobs outside of that bubble that pay well. I won't disclose my numbers, but I have no reasons to go elsewhere, I'm 42, I'm able to work with the languages and tools I want, and I live in Houston and work from home pretty much whenever I want.
Totally agree. I live in Portland and the attitude is much more relaxed, but I make well above the typical SV salary. I get to choose my technologies, work from home when I want, my company has no interest in anyone working more than 40 hours a week, etc. I'm sure I could make a bit more with the right job at the right company in SV, but the quality of life here is so good that I won't even consider it.
If it were 80% of the year I'd move, ha! Hell, if it were half that I'd move. I don't want it to get too dry, one of the upsides of regular rain showers is everything stays pretty clean.
20-something here, we get it too, or people in late 20s anyways. I recently quit a $220k job to pursue a passion startup. I can at least say this: 3 months in and the health metrics I track are significantly better - sleep, heart rate, HRV, blood glucose, and inflammation markers.
While it's a great stepping stone for gaining skills and credentials, there's really nothing "high status" about being an employee for someone else, giving your work away to your employer. It's anti-innovation thinking otherwise, and wish the status driven careerists in this town would reflect on this.
I hope the Apple Watch eventually becomes something that can track all of these metrics, especially sleep, but I don't think the battery life is there yet.
I've gotta charge mine sometime and at night seems like the best time to do it...
I have a series zero Apple Watch from the day it was released and still wear it now.
I have figured out how to use it to track my sleep: charge Apple Watch less. I charge Apple Watch twice a day, once in the morning, once at night, for about 15min each time.
My Apple Watch has enough energy for me to use all day and track my sleep using the Sleep++ app.
Same. I'm now $90k/year behind my peers that haven't left Silicon Valley but every time we talk I'm clearly better off overall financially and emotionally. I think a lot of people aren't satisfied in their careers and double-down on investment in their careers thinking that'll fix it (and sometimes it might, but not always). You gotta prioritize and keep things in perspective.
Life is a lot better in Seattle. I'm over 50, no problem working as a dev or other roles, endless opportunity. If a job gets too stressful tell them to change it, or get a new job that probably pays more.
Idk if real world engineering is often about passion. Who is passionate about legacy code, constantly changing design requirements and live site issues/on call? I love to build things but at the end of the day it's more of a job than it is a passion project.
Passion is a tricky thing because even great jobs require some combination of cool, interesting things and wading through shit. A job that you're passionate about doesn't mean one that's shit-free--it just means that you get enough fulfillment out of the good parts that you're happy to tolerate the stench.
Yeah, passion is overused recruiter-speak. Sure it's nice for cheerleading if everyone feels passionate about their job, but it's really just short-hand for being engaged and focused which is orthogonal to passion.
There is however something which I believe software engineers need: an innate desire to understand how things work, and a tenacity to debug them when they don't. If you don't have this internal drive, then you'll never get over the hump of the vast background knowledge you need to be a productive programmer in any interesting job.
I don't know, sounds too much ego to write on something that is not exceptional. Making $125K in our field (developer/programmer/analyst/devOps/architect/data scientist/full stack developer/...) is not a big deal.
I often wonder how/why professional developers got into this profession - and basically came to conclusion that it’s not for everyone (basically solving puzzles all day long in front of monitor), and most folks move out from it (into management or wherever) after about 10 years. Especially those that got into it for money.
Personally I got into it by accident - and couldn’t believe that I get paid to basically continuing playing games that I was into as teenager and solving various puzzles all day long.... I was doing it for free before, and frankly would still be if not for all the money bull shit all around us.
I find the last two paragraphs on this web page to be hilariously juxtaposed:
> "Slow down and enjoy the moment. It's not worth stressing about how to become a partner in ten years or make money as quickly as possible. Set an attainable goal (something you can achieve in six months or a year) and work towards that."
> Are you a woman under 35 with a six-figure salary ($100,000+) and want to tell your story? Submit it here.
That implies that culture comes from universities, and I don't think that's true. They may be first among those describing culture, but they aren't creating it.
And recently, I feel a lot of them tried to force change, leaving their role of scientist and becoming backseat politicians. They don't run for office but still try to make the rules.
Yes, but should people take on substantial debt to get a 'meaningful' degree that will not provide a real ROI? Studying fluffy majors is only logical for 1%ers, basically, because you don't really have to work for a living and you can get set up with some prestigious non-profit through connections. For everyone else, they should probably get cultured on their own, without paying tens of thousands of dollars.
Turns out that a lot of people would rather live comfortably. Same with me, I'm making more than triple what I would make if I had pursued my original studies into a career. My only regret is that I didn't study computer science so I could be making more than I currently earn.
It's not. But the news is full of people who got degrees and giant college debt and it's a terrible anvil hanging over their entire lives. They can't buy a house or car (or its tremendously harder), the need to service the debt is a central part of their decision making.
If you want to look at it in another lense, it hurts our whole economy because many younger people in this group aren't able to help our economy grow through buying stuff like previous generations did. When I went to college long long ago it was really cheap, like $1000 a semester. The states stopped subsidizing it so much. I was a beneficiary of this.
If you only have Federal loans (which are about 90% of total disbursements), you will qualify for income based repayment. That means that you will never pay more than 10% of any income over 1.5x the Federal poverty level.
It will also be cancelled after 20 years of payments.
I would vastly prefer more direct subsidies though.
Right, tell that to a person in 3rd world who doesn't know where their next meal is going to come from. Money is not the most important thing in the world when you are making more than maybe $60-$70k/year in NA, but if you are making anything less than that, it definitely is the one of the most important thing if not the most important thing in the world.
I get that "bills aren't important" is a thing if you don't have trouble paying them, but that's not the situation for everybody. "Hey, lighten up, have some fun, you don't need to work that hard" is cool if you're wealthy. It's an insult to somebody living paycheck to paycheck. They do have to work that hard.
Yeah, my dad grew up very poor and he has worked 10 hours a day, 6 days/week for 30 years without ever being "burnt out".
I sometimes complain about being burnt out and needing a vacation after working for about 3 years, 9-5 max, 5 days a week that includes one day a week working from home.
Come on.. most of the people studying the arts in college are not seeking deeper meaning. They study what they enjoy and then get jobs elsewhere. And many people in non-arts majors are still taking lots of electives in the arts, getting double majors, pursuing it later in life. I was part of a group of computer science students in my undergrad college that took many years worth of philosophy courses and advanced rhetoric courses just because we all loved philosophy.
I seriously doubt that a reduction in number of degrees granted in arts-focused majors actually equates to a populace that is less appreciative or knowledgeable regarding the arts.
It’s not about actual arts & culture (which any given person learns through many walks of life)... it’s about these expensive arts-only degrees simply not conferring economically meaningful labor market skills.
I assign my own meaning to things in life. I don't need other people to study humanities at universities in order to do that. As far as I know none of my favorite cultural icons/entertainers have even gone to university.
Is that what the arts and humanities graduates serving my coffee in Starbucks are generating - culture?
Don't conflate culture with those who study it. The vast majority of non-STEM graduates generate no activity of either cultural or economic significance. All such degree programmes could be dropped tomorrow with no detriment to society.
And possibly even a net benefit to society as many of these degree programs have become little more than people believing they are highly educated because they have been trained to hold certain cultural and political opinions.
A major which the labor market doesn't need in the quantities that are being churned out by colleges, such as the classic "would you like fries with that" English major.
It's not "bullshit" if you're independently wealthy and can pay to "study" for "fun", or as a second major to something that's in demand. But for everybody else I'd consider more in-demand professions, even though they're usually much harder.
You can go even farther, if less than 50% of the people studying it work in that field, maybe less than 20% work there? And their expected wages can't pay for the cost of the college education in 20 years, then it's very questionable to study in that field. Unless you are rich already.
>You can go even farther, if less than 50% of the people studying it work in that field, maybe less than 20% work there?
By that metric, one of my undergrad majors (physics) is a bullshit major as very few of us went into that field. But it prepared us very well for many other fields, so I'd say that metric is not meaningful.
That doesn't make the degrees bullshit, though, it merely means that studying the respective field is less likely to be very economically rewarding. You need to make a difference between practical life advice and evaluations of areas and disciplines, or otherwise you'd also have to say that Vincent van Gogh and H.P. Lovecraft were total losers. They weren't. Wittgenstein gave away most of his inherited wealth when he was a young man. That doesn't make him an idiot either.
That being said, there are some crappy degrees out there. Some disciplines are mostly just watered down philosophy and I'd go for philosophy instead anytime.
>> it merely means that
>> studying the respective field is less likely
>> to be very economically rewarding
Um, no, I'm gonna have to disagree with you on that one. Paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in borrowed money for something which doesn't provide any ROI is IMO bullshit, particularly so if you can't discharge the debt under bankruptcy.
Your examples are bad too, because back in the day all those painters, writers, etc, were either independently wealthy already, or did other jobs before they became famous. H.P. Lovecraft, for instance, worked as a traveling salesman. Van Gogh both comes from a wealthy family _and_ had a job at an art dealer. And there are very few of such people anyway, it's not a viable route for most people, it's more like a lottery.
Again, this doesn't mean that the degree is bullshit; it means the degree is grossly overpriced. In reality, almost all degrees are overpriced right now.
This is either a low effort bait post or exactly the kind of bullshit tech-worship I've come to despise. There's more to life and learning than STEM and whatever rides the current economic wave.
One of the guys running DE Shaw has a psychology degree. One of their early hires had an undergrad degree in English romantic poetry. Pretty sure they're doing OK.
IMO most talented/flexible degree per year studied is electrical engineering.
Best degree is no degree though. One Vitalek or Bram Cohen is worth 10000 Harvard computer science graduates.
I consider virtually all the time I spent in higher education to be wasted. The actually educational pieces of a Ph.D. in physics; probably about 2 years worth of effort, using existing didactic techniques. Probably a year if you did it right -then maybe another year to work on a problem. Einstein getting his Ph.D. when he was 21 was considered normal once.
"Higher education" is mostly make-work for pedants and busy work for students; the result is pretty similar to what high school was 100 years ago. It's also a form of dysgenic population control, and a way of growing debt peonage among the more intelligent half the of the population, which is probably useful for social control.
I've considered trying to raise a bunch of little Vitaleks myself, just to see if it can be done. Cathedral scholar style. While his and, say, Bram's output is exceptional: I think one of the big reasons it was is they never went to college. Greatest individual systematic trader I know: same story -he never want to college either.
Also your sigdifs are way off. I bet you learned that in collitch. ;-)
It's not bullshit. But at the same time, I wonder why so many people do these majors. They mostly end up working on a unrelated field. If they go to university just because they are passionate about learning the subject and are willing to pay for it, that's great! But I feel it's just that they are pressured to go to college, they are pressured to "follow their passions" even when it will not work out, and in fact some menial jobs require a degree nowadays.
We don't really need (economically speaking) lots of philosophy majors. And maybe that's okay if people are doing philosophy majors for the knowledge, but I don't think that's the case. And if they want a good job, I think we should discourage these majors.
That doesn't mean we don't need philosophy. It's really important. But it doesn't make much difference if the people who have a degree on that work on unrelated things.
Philosophy teaches logic and analysis, and teaches you to break down texts into their core points and arguments, then both support and refute them as well as apply them to other situations. It teaches you to see multiple perspectives, to compare and synthesize them, and use them in practice, whether or not you actually agree with them. Those abilities are needed in the working world, (and not just by lawyers), and absolutely could help our economy.
We can even look at my Fine Arts degree the same way. My whole career people have said it is odd for a Fine Arts major to be a coder, until I explain what that degree really taught me - to look at the existing body of work in a field, learn the techniques, and look for new and innovative ways to change those techniques. Then to create a vision of something you want to deliver, start from scratch, and build up to a final product that takes the field a step or two forward, while also effectively communicating with, and engaging, your audience.
You could draw similar parallels with any humanities degree. That process of deconstructing an entire body of work, learning the ins and out of its components, and reconstructing it into something completely new is common to all liberal arts educations. And that is why people with liberal arts degrees are often not the slightest bit concerned whether their degree and their career are a 'match'.
Glad to hear that - I can share my perspective too. Even given my graduate computer science degree, I only apply what I learned in a very shallow way to my work, which has generally been apps of some sort or another, web mobile etc. For example I studied a lot about operating systems that don't even come up in my projects, other than a process vs thread vs coroutine, blocking or nonblocking io. Similarly with algorithms and architecture. Of course, it's easy to shrug off what you already know as supposedly obvious, but I sure as hell never had to implement a complex algorithm and perform asymptotic analysis on it for my CRUD app, and all the concurrency and object-oriented programming stuff I learned has become more obsolete now that we have horizontal/vertical scaling, databases and cache servers handling concurrent state, and a tendency toward trivially parallelized code and event loops. What has really stuck? Discrete mathematics and deductive systems, theory of computation - abstract stuff I could not appreciate at the time and now wish I really tried at. So altogether, I feel that my CS degree helped in the short term, but on the long term, has left me only marginally advantaged over either not having a degree or having an unrelated degree, and still leaves me unsatisfied with my understanding of honestly more fulfilling subjects. And while I can pick up plenty of books and information on the engineering side, I face a much more uphill battle trying to understand concepts in economics, math, and physics, and my comprehension of creative writing, art, and philosophy is still really lackluster.
There is absolutely pressure to go to college, but there is hardly pressure to follow passions. If there was, then the two would be in conflict. The pressure is: don't follow your passions, go to college, major in STEM or "something useful". What has that resulted in? An inflation of watered-down STEM-lite degrees not just from the standard degree factories but accredited state research universities, that provide none of the benefits of a liberal arts education and still leaving one poorly trained to produce.
I am willing to bet that given a population of philosophy majors and a population of engineering majors, if you gave them an equivalent year of quality mentorship in programming, the philosophy majors would perform better. Because philosophy heavily emphasizes critical and abstract thinking. Better yet they might be able to really think about the consequences of the systems they build, whereas the tech industry mostly seems to have no problem and no concerns about building a global surveillance apparatus. Engineers learn how to do now the stuff that is relevant now. As a software engineer I am constantly battling with abstraction, and I constantly feel held back by my limited understanding of math, science, and philosophy.
The cost of college is an issue of its own and it's irrelevant to choice of major. School is the one place where we have an institutionalized system to study and progress the liberal arts as a whole, which teach us how we got here, what we value, and how we ought to live. One episode of The Wire should be sufficient demonstration of the need for our understanding of sociology to improve, among other things. Discouraging any of the liberal arts due to the overwhelming cost of college exacerbates our problems and risks turning universities into trade schools, directionless and with all the volatility of economic cycle.
> Because philosophy heavily emphasizes critical and abstract thinking.
I've taken a few classes in philosophy (it was my major for a while), and I can't tell if this is super different in the US vs Europe or you're just making stuff up, but this is just not what I saw. Yes, logic is part of philosophy, and everybody needs to take that class, but it's not heavily emphasized for the majority of students. Being able to write summaries and essays is, and learning the lingo, and reading (and hopefully understanding, or being able to pretend so well enough) the classics.
> Better yet they might be able to really think about the consequences of the systems they build, whereas the tech industry mostly seems to have no problem and no concerns about building a global surveillance apparatus.
Please don't. Studying in the humanities doesn't make you a better person, and it doesn't make you consider ethics in everything you do either.
> School is the one place where we have an institutionalized system to study and progress the liberal arts as a whole
Except not everybody agrees that is what life is all about, what's best for society, the country, humanity or whatever you choose. Somebody has to do the actual work, you know? Sure, we can all become philosophers and then starve to death, or we can make sure that we have enough people that know how to grow food. When it comes down to it, yeah, with all of my ethics training, I very much prefer people that know how to grow food over people that will explain that the ethical thing to do is to feed them first, because only they can lead progress and advance the liberal arts. But then again, I always had a thing for utilitarianism and was highly suspicious of the bourgeois elitism in intellectual circles.
Oh, and STEM is different? Let me try: math and physics aren't about understanding quantity and the universe; they are about memorizing equations and pretending you know them just in time for the test. Computer science is about more about copying and pasting code and getting away with it. What you're describing - where gaming the system is the norm - is entirely valid, and a problem with education institutions as a whole, but it's completely independent of the subject matter.
I don't understand your last paragraph at all. Not everybody agrees, so therefore liberal arts education is invalid? Or not everybody agrees, so let's give up? These are defeatist attitudes to take in either case. Implicit in your argument, as a response to this whole thread, is that not "somebody has to do the work", which I have never argued against; you're saying "nobody should do anything but the work". Meaning STEM, or whatever BigCo is hiring for right now. We continue to have huge problems globally that either have nothing to do with technology or are directly caused by technology, that need to be solved with entirely different skillsets. People perform better when they are motivated, and money is a poor motivator after a certain point. You make a very poor assumption that someone studies one of these subjects and their skills and experiences just go into this void, and/or that I'm advocating that people major in something and strictly do that for the rest of their lives. If you want to do the hands-on work and major in Hands-On Working, then do it. But don't discourage others from doing what they want and are good at during the narrow window of their lives when society supports them to do it.
You're making claims about philosophy, I'm not making claims about STEM - I don't know what you're trying to accomplish.
> Not everybody agrees, so therefore liberal arts education is invalid?
No. Not everybody agrees, thereforce "liberal arts advances humanity" isn't agreed upon and shouldn't guide us. Let's agree upon it first.
> you're saying "nobody should do anything but the work"
No. I'm saying "please contribute". And by "contribute" I mean "do something that all/most/many consider to be of value". If we start defining "contributing" to mean something that the individual believes to be valuable, then it's just random. Build houses, grow roses, torture people, whatever, as long as you feel like it's a good idea, you're contributing.
> But don't discourage others from doing what they want
I'd never dream of doing that. I'm just saying: if you want to do what you want, please pay for it yourself. Don't make me give you part of my money to indulge in your personal pleasures.
We’re getting nowhere with this. This entire thread was about STEM vs other majors, and you were singling out philosophy. You can’t just decouple yourself and your arguments from the context of the conversation and claim i’m straw-manning you. And again, you have a severe misconception that none of these “bullshit majors” are useful, and that somehow a lack of consensus on everything invalidates competing ideas. And come on, “torture people” is bringing your argument to absurity. You’re basically arguing that individuality is a bad thing now. I can’t change your perspective, but suffice to say it’s short sighted.
No, I wasn't. You made claims about philosophy and I uttered my doubts because they didn't match my personal experience at all. You then decided to tell me how bad STEM was, which I hadn't even mention.
> you have a severe misconception that none of these “bullshit majors” are useful
That's not what I said. They might very well be useful, my point is that we should let the market decide whether they are. Vague statements about some loss of culture or a descent into dystopian nightmares if we don't finance them just isn't that - it's fear mongering to push something through without giving those a vote that are supposed to pay for it.
> “torture people” is bringing your argument to absurity
You should've taken a few philosophy classes, especially logic. Using extremes and hypothetical situations is what you do to test an argument/claim. If you present a claim and I present to you an example that makes your claim fall short, there's no "well, exceptions prove the rule", that's not how logic works.
> You’re basically arguing that individuality is a bad thing now.
Somewhat, sure. I don't like the kind of individuality that wants all the freedom but puts the responsibility (that is: footing the bill) on other people. Either say "I want to be free, and I will suffer the consequences of my decisions" or enjoy the protection of the collective at the cost of having to also submit to the collective's rules & needs, and limit your freedom. If you want the collective to pay for what you study & work in, choose something that the collective needs and it will gladly pay for it.
I disagree. Without significant advances in STEM the last 200 years would be pretty much identical to the 200 years before them, and another 200 before them, etc.
No, I think the thing went haywire after the invention of the printing press, which enabled more people to access STEM, causing them to invent more things.
History is very complicated thing. But the quick spread of the trend would not be possible without communications and expanding transocean travel to name the least.
There are ripple effects with everything, and yes technology always provides disruption, but it would be absurd to say that technology accomplished these things.
Surprisingly, STEM helped the North win the Civil War [0].
One of the big differences at the time was the use of "repeaters" by the North. Having a gun that can shoot again quickly when the other side cannot is a huge advantage.
With the North winning the Civil War, they put both Reconstruction and the 15th Amendment in place, causing Blacks to have the right to vote (of course many people tried to thwart that law for almost a century).
> if the tech bubble bursts, computer science may even be riskier than a humanities degree, which gives graduates a broader set of knowledge.
How do humanities degrees provide "broader knowledge" than CS degrees? Different, sure, but broader?
Good CS degrees are not coding bootcamps. CS students take a lot of mathematics and logic-heavy courses and can easily pivot from programming to jobs in insurance, finance, accounting, education, project management, and even law.
Good CS degrees also require a lot of technical writing, which opens up all of the stuff that's usually associated with humanities degrees.
Bad CS degrees exist. But then, so do bad English departments.
This also ignores the fact that a lot of CS students are taking courses in English/poli sci/History/etc, but very few humanities students are taking CS courses. E.g., I didn't have a major or minor in any of the above fields, but I took upper-division courses in the English, Relgiion, poli sci, and history departments. However, I only ever encountered one non-STEM major in CS courses beyond CS 101.
That's a very important observation. It's been almost 20 years since I was an undergraduate, but at the time (I went to UCSD), general college requirements were overwhelmingly tilted toward the humanities. Specific requirements varied on which particular college you attended, but often required a 2 lower division survey of world history and cultures, 2 years of a foreign language, and 1-2 courses in performing arts. Often considerable upper division work in a branch of the humanities was required as well (for instance, an upper division series in literature or history). Science requirements were much lighter, and could often be fulfilled without taking calculus (non-calc based stats or symbolic logic for math, non-calc based physics, that sort of thing).
I don't really understand why people act like humanities majors are "well rounded" compared to science or engineering majors - it seems like the absolute opposite. To confirm this, just pick a respectable college and read the degree requirements for students in different majors (I don't mean elite colleges, there are hundreds of colleges that meet this standard).
Gen-ed humanities courses taught to giant lecture halls aren't quite the same as the much smaller courses the majors take. You are extremely likely to be put on the spot and made to defend a subjective position you've taken. They're tough and require you have tons of knowledge at hand to succeed in them. In math, and to some extent engineering or science, you can often reason your way through if you get stuck, or at worse there are often simple procedures you can rote memorize.
I do agree that non-STEM degrees should have stronger math requirements. But K-12 math education in the US is such a disaster that the universities wouldn't stand a chance if they wanted to do it.
> Gen-ed humanities courses taught to giant lecture halls aren't quite the same as the much smaller courses the majors take
This depends on the type of institution. Liberal arts and most honors colleges at large universities have small class sizes with high-quality instruction for their gen-ed humanities.
> You are extremely likely to be put on the spot and made to defend a subjective position you've taken.
This is also true in (good) mathematics and computer science programs, where you'll need to learn how to communicate well to technical audiences and defend all manner of subjective positions.
Also, something similar is true for the transferability of humanities skills! The writing skills you develop in humanities courses do not directly transfer to technical writing. Learning to write well for any audience will teach you a lot about good writing, but your random English major will probably be completely useless when it comes to writing proofs, design/requirements documents, technical documentation, or especially useful comments in their code. And if I had a dollar for ever business person with a humanities background who made an ass out of themselves in a technical meeting because they have no idea how to communicate with a technical audience about a technical subject... ;-)
> In math, and to some extent engineering or science, you can often reason your way through if you get stuck, or else there are simple procedures you can rote memorize.
I disagree. Your observation about lower vs. upper division courses is as true for STEM as it is for humanities courses. There's a lot of subjectivity/taste involved in upper-division courses, especially any proof-based or project-based course!
> But K-12 math education in the US is such a disaster that the universities wouldn't stand a chance if they wanted to do it.
That's a big problem. It's also a chicken-and-egg problem. Our elementary and middle school teachers are often innumerate, which makes it hard to prepare students for HS (where the quality is often still bad despite subject-area qualifications), which in turn creates problems for gen ed STEM at universities.
I agree, but I also believe stem majors are more likely to take upper division humanities courses than the other way around. Gen ed requirements are sufficient to take an upper division history course, whereas upper div stem courses typically require two years of calculus, linear algebra, and ordinary differential equations.
I have one more anecdata point to add in your favour, and mine's more recent (past 5 years), as well as in a different continent (Europe).
I'm a CS/Engineering grad that had some of those, and my colleagues in other STEM degrees had requirements that weren't dissimilar from what you describe. We were required to take classes in philosophy (with emphasis on ethics), history, as well as required to take some electives that could be in all sorts of areas, some in other scientific areas, others in arts, theatre, music. Effectively, it was required of us to at least be cognizant of the goings-on in other fields, even if just the conversational basics.
As for colleagues of mine in humanities degrees, most of them didn't see a single STEM class, and if they did, they were very superficial one-semester courses on Excel spreadsheeting, LaTeX, or very basic physics/probability mathematics, which were effectively a rehashing of high school, but with easier exams.
I echo your sentiment, maybe at some point in the distant past, STEM degrees were isolated in their own bubble and only had very theoretical classes, but I don't know anyone who experienced that, and that's most certainly not been a reality for the past couple of decades.
My understanding is that colleges used to focus more on humanities because they allowed one to better understand culture. However, it seems like the view of college has changed to that of vocational training and with that the the running of schools like a business where costs are inflated and degree economics are emphasized.
I less concerned about the tech bubble bursting in and of itself. My concern is that it seems like tech is the last thing people can do to earn themselves a decent living nowadays, if that bubble bursts where does it leave us?
If you can create software/services to solve problems that humans will pay money for then you are in a unique position with leverage. I'd be more worried about AI/ML making developer's skill sets redundant. Thoughts?
Being able to form a useful business isn't nearly as accessible as something like programming, if we get to that point it feels like only the privileged will be going anywhere.
For society it is not good to have a dearth of skilled writers, historians & teachers, but for the individual they don't want to end up with no job or a crappy $35k a year job in the middle of nowhere.
Hasn't it already? It certainly is in Western Europe, a way to distinguish yourself from the filthy masses that need to do physical labor and the slightly smarter but soulless engineers and lawyers and what have you.
In USA (among the social group I grew up around), it seems like it’s mocked unless you’re also wealthy, in my opinion (eg the Starbucks barista who knows Latin). Even with eg Zuckerberg I think it’s mostly unknown that he has some knowledge of these things, or among many considered an eccentricity. Among very high level societal elites or extremely educated people perhaps it’s viewed differently (I would know nothing about this)
Yeah, I've seen part of that on the web, but I never know how much of it is ironic.
It's very different in Europe, there may be some mocking, and we also don't create unlimited jobs for every graduate, but they'll most likely not end up doing minimum wage jobs, and most of them easily transition into working in the media, for the government, large corporations or foundations.
My not exceptionally informed impression as a non elite US UMC tech guy: in the very high levels of society and at top US universities, that would be very normal interpretation. Among “normal” people you’d probably be viewed as kind of nerdy and easily excitable, head a bit in the clouds
STEM is such a broad category that anyone promoting STEM fields as a solution to the college debt problem is obviously just repeating what they heard from other people. There are a ton of underpaid and overworked people in STEM.
Grad students are treated poorly, but the same 2-3 field split in STEM is true there as well.
E.g., CS PhD have plentiful $200K+ job opportunities after graduation and a relatively labor-friendly faculty market. Meanwhile, many mathematics PhDs postdoc into their 40s.
I agree we should separate stem into maybe 3 areas. 2 are doing pretty well. programming-related fields (dev or software engineering type jobs, there's spectrum that goes to data scientist), other engineering jobs, other stem.
The third category isn't as fortunate in the job market, like say a biology major. How about Dev OE, OS. Doeos? Wow, that almost works. But it kind of reminds me of nxivm though :-)
Fewer people learning humanities is a bad thing. Fewer people putting themselves in debt slavery for humanities to perpetuate the economics of the college bubble is a very good thing.
These things aren't binary (more humanities bad! more humanities good!), and it's a disservice to the topic to treat them as such.
There's not much content to work with here. Her success runs counter to the prevailing media narrative that young people are always broke and struggling. Yes, many are, but many are not, especially in STEM fields. The short-term inconvenience in exchange for making a lot of money (especially if one keeps expenses low) makes it worthwhile in the long-run by being able to retire sooner. 10 years in a high-paying job that is not one's passion beats 40+ years n a low-paying job and never having enough to retire. Her parents paying for most of her college helped a lot, but so does a high IQ to get a good paying job as she did.
A small dose of reality: $125K is only "good" pay these days and that's only if you aren't living in the Bay Area, NYC, or Chicago. The reality is that half or more of that disappears in taxes--state and federal, Social Security, and every little fee and tax you pay on everything else you do. It gets whittled down a lot and most people aren't even realizing how bad off we are as workers as compared to how things were in say, 1965. Before the end of the gold standard, before the massive inflation and before liberalism spread like a disease from sea to shining sea, a waitress, yes a waitress, could own a house in most cities.
But what is so bad is what is said in the comments--only about 15% of Americans even make six figures these days. We're a nation in deep denial about our future as things stand.
Btw, my CEO made over $21,000,000 last year. I make about .6% of his pay. He flies in private jets and gets to live the life we all want. He is really nothing special, though. Not a genius or anything, just a player.
I thought devs make more than data scientists? It's my experience that devs are in much shorter supply related to the demand, and their (comp or) value is usually higher.
If you can make $125k in your 20s, work that soul killing job for 10 years and put as much away as you can. Then at least you have the start of a nest egg by the time you reach retirement. If you do it backwards and save when you're older, it's 10x harder.
Do your passion when you actually have a passion. Until then, work to live, and save save save. (But don't forget to travel)
That is sound advice for a limited amount of time, as you said ten years.
The risk is that before you know it you find yourself with a "fully-funded" retirement account, a stable career, and your vitality gone with your life now behind you. The trick is hard to pull off.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadThe real question is that $125k as a Senior Data Analyst in NYC seems low.
> I have this creative side, which comes in handy when thinking through challenging problems, but there is only so much creativity that I can use when in data analysis.
This I disagree with; in data analysis/science, there's more than way to highlight/analyze a problem, and more than one way to solve it. In my experience, the best solutions are often the craziest.
I think a lot of people on here (and Blind) constantly say everyone is underpaid. It might be trying to help educate people they can be paid more. But it's usually framed in a way most people find insulting.
Only 5% of laborers in cities like LA and NYC make over $200k a year. That number is a bit higher in The Bay. Only about 12-15% of people make over $125k.
Again, it's nice to know that you can do better. But it's also nice to give yourself a pat on the back sometimes. $125k is decidedly NOT bad by any standards.
- they earn a $200k salary
- their living expenses match those of a person living with a $60k salary and presumably spending everything they earn after tax (in response to “what kind of life they can live with $60-80k”)
Does that make sense?
Yes, there are likely outlier employees at outlier companies making huge comp but those have to be at least 2 to 3 standard deviations right of the average.
So you don't have a counter argument is what you're saying? The truth is those site are insanely flawed and if that's what you're using to form your basis for negotiation then you're at a disadvantage period.
Compensation is often base + bonus + equity. For sufficiently senior positions, the equity component can be almost as much as the base salary. If the equity is liquid, then why is that not relevant?
FYI new grads at any of the big tech companies are bringing in close to ~$200k in total compensation their first year. It's not just someone's sister's cousin. It's a majority of engineering new grads who work at any of the BigCos which employ A LOT of people and are constantly hiring.
Even in the Bay Area the 50th percentile base salary for a relatively junior hire is closer to $100k than $150k. Add in bonus and equity and some might top out around $140k-$150k total compensation. That's in the Bay Area specifically. Most other places TC is going to top out just above $100k--high salaries are uncommon outside of tech hubs and the Bay Area itself is on the high end even in that group.
Technologists systemically undervalue themselves. Partly because the barrier to entry to software/analysts is so low, and most people are pretty bad. It's also because interviewing is such a time-consuming task that most people only look at 1-3 offers when getting a new job.
If you look in comment history you'll see a few references to me paying engineers/data scientists/data analysts $400 to spend an afternoon with me solving a real world problem. If I felt like you were someone I would work with, I personally introduce you to the head of a team at a companies that I know pays great money and has a great team, and you're fast tracked to the final interview (mostly culture and talking tech. No bullshit).
I always knew what the position paid, and the candidates would always sell themselves 10-20% of what they could get (I obviously helped them get the most they could).
Just because the market is skewed with a lot of bad candidates and poor negotiators doesn't mean the market price is accurate. We can all do better.
When I see Data Science in industry, it means an analyst. When I see Data Science in academia, I see Michael Jordan and Alex Smola. I think this is the core disconnect.
This would explain the salary
"My current company couldn't give me more in signing bonus but gave me more in equity."
Even if you saw the Cap Table, there is still a lot of uncertainty, tons of illiquidity, and a long horizon.
Options are nice, but they are not cash and do not belong in the same conversation as salary.
Stocks are shares in a company. Imagine you have a box with money in it. And I tell you you get 4500 parts of this box. But I dont tell you how many parts there are total -- you see the numerator but not the denominator. In that situation it is impossible to discern the value of your 4500 parts since you dont know how many ways the money gets split.
It gets trickier, because cap tables also have liquidity preferences. So you can have 4500 parts of the box. And another person can have 4500 parts, but their 4500 might be worth a whole lot more than your 4500 because there are different classes of stocks. It isn't uncommon to have one class paid first, in whole or 1.x greater than whole before the next class gets paid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidation_preference
Oh, then there is the actual business -- there is tons of business risk. Even if the business does well, it may be in the red and the future of the company (and worth of your shares) are dependent on successive rounds of funding and their implied valuation. You get a down-round and you might be wiped out. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/downround.asp
Even if everything gets well, depending on the classes of shares of decision-makers, you can end up in a situation where the founders/board might have an incentive to sell at just an amount where they make out well but employees get wiped out. Case: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/technology/when-a-unicorn...
Or Levandowski's side startup where the company got sold for just enough for Levandowski to make out golden https://www.wired.com/story/god-is-a-bot-and-anthony-levando...
The Net-Net of all this is: stock options are not worthless, their worth is based on a formula with a dozen+ variables, almost none of which you know the values/ranges/distributions for -- and a formula where many combinations of theoretical inputs result in zero value.
Every single time I've accepted a job at a startup that offered ISO stock options, I knew # of shares outstanding (the denominator), terms of all funding rounds, strike price, exit strategy, total amount of money raised, who the major investors are on the cap table, etc.
The jobs were at startups funded by the best investors in the world and high caliber founders who valued transparency. One went on to become a unicorn, and the other is an extremely early seed stage company where I work now.
If a startup isn't willing to give you information beyond # of options granted, then that is a red flag in my book. Not all startups are like that.
Also, options are usually tied to continued employment. If you leave the company, you will need to exercise your options within a certain amount of time (often, 3 months). This can easily be an outlay of (tens of) thousands of dollars. It depends on the number of options and the exercise price, which is set at time of the option grant based on the then-current 409b valuation of company shares.
So at that point you are left with a choice: spend a lot of money to exercise your options and buy a bunch of illiquid common stock, which may or may not be worth something someday. Or, just walk away from the options then and there.
Sounds like mostly dashboarding, data viz, and simple analysis, so I actually thought it was kinda high. Perfect for senior maybe.
I strongly disagree. I have hired, mentored, and/or managed 20+ data scientists and analysts over my career; in my experience the ones who come up with "crazy"/creative solutions are often the least effective in the long run. This is especially true on the product analytics side, where there are 5 ways to shoot yourself in the foot in non-obvious and subtle ways. The best analysts I've worked with follow fairly regimented best practices around the way they analyze problems and present solutions. By its very nature, non-standard solutions are more error-prone and harder to explain, which breaks institutional trust in the analyst.
That said, there is plenty of room for analysts to grow into more creative fields like machine learning or product management, but I don't think the person being interviewed falls in one of these categories.
I turned down a job at $180,000 and took a job at $52,000.
(previous to that I was making $228,000 - as a consultant)
Because I have literally no passion for what I used to do, the ageism, cut-throat bullshit in silicon valley has quite a toll. Housing is retarded. Transportation in the bay area is horrific, and the quality of life-work-balance is terrible.
I know that I am going to make a heck-ton of a lot more money soon.. but I am pretty much done trying to work in startups in SF/SV.
Thats a job for 20-somethings.
EDIT: Since people asked.
I joined as director of tech for a cannabis startup that has a lot of licenses and has a valuation in hundreds of millions.
It is all bootstrapped from the founders, and has zero debt nor investors (thus the low pay)
And I am building out MRP/ERP/OPs/Sales-ops/data for them.
Further, We are building something amazing on the vape-pen production market.
(the valuation is based on investors who have been trying to buy into the company... and keep getting turned down)
While it's a great stepping stone for gaining skills and credentials, there's really nothing "high status" about being an employee for someone else, giving your work away to your employer. It's anti-innovation thinking otherwise, and wish the status driven careerists in this town would reflect on this.
I want to know this as well.
I need a mobile blood-pressure monitor.
I've gotta charge mine sometime and at night seems like the best time to do it...
I have figured out how to use it to track my sleep: charge Apple Watch less. I charge Apple Watch twice a day, once in the morning, once at night, for about 15min each time.
My Apple Watch has enough energy for me to use all day and track my sleep using the Sleep++ app.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleep/id1038440371?mt=8
I _sometimes_ have to charge it at work, but in general, this charging method has worked for me.
There is however something which I believe software engineers need: an innate desire to understand how things work, and a tenacity to debug them when they don't. If you don't have this internal drive, then you'll never get over the hump of the vast background knowledge you need to be a productive programmer in any interesting job.
Personally I got into it by accident - and couldn’t believe that I get paid to basically continuing playing games that I was into as teenager and solving various puzzles all day long.... I was doing it for free before, and frankly would still be if not for all the money bull shit all around us.
> "Slow down and enjoy the moment. It's not worth stressing about how to become a partner in ten years or make money as quickly as possible. Set an attainable goal (something you can achieve in six months or a year) and work towards that."
> Are you a woman under 35 with a six-figure salary ($100,000+) and want to tell your story? Submit it here.
The humanities and social sciences have fallen off a cliff, heath care and STEM has soared. I'm skeptical that this is a good thing.
And recently, I feel a lot of them tried to force change, leaving their role of scientist and becoming backseat politicians. They don't run for office but still try to make the rules.
If you want to look at it in another lense, it hurts our whole economy because many younger people in this group aren't able to help our economy grow through buying stuff like previous generations did. When I went to college long long ago it was really cheap, like $1000 a semester. The states stopped subsidizing it so much. I was a beneficiary of this.
It will also be cancelled after 20 years of payments.
I would vastly prefer more direct subsidies though.
I get that "bills aren't important" is a thing if you don't have trouble paying them, but that's not the situation for everybody. "Hey, lighten up, have some fun, you don't need to work that hard" is cool if you're wealthy. It's an insult to somebody living paycheck to paycheck. They do have to work that hard.
I sometimes complain about being burnt out and needing a vacation after working for about 3 years, 9-5 max, 5 days a week that includes one day a week working from home.
I seriously doubt that a reduction in number of degrees granted in arts-focused majors actually equates to a populace that is less appreciative or knowledgeable regarding the arts.
It’s not about actual arts & culture (which any given person learns through many walks of life)... it’s about these expensive arts-only degrees simply not conferring economically meaningful labor market skills.
Don't conflate culture with those who study it. The vast majority of non-STEM graduates generate no activity of either cultural or economic significance. All such degree programmes could be dropped tomorrow with no detriment to society.
That is such an outrageous and untestable claim that it is basically meaningless.
It's not "bullshit" if you're independently wealthy and can pay to "study" for "fun", or as a second major to something that's in demand. But for everybody else I'd consider more in-demand professions, even though they're usually much harder.
For an example, take a gander at this list: https://www.washington.edu/students/gencat/degree_programsTO.... All the bullshit majors are very easily identifiable. Most, but not all of them have "studies" in their name.
By that metric, one of my undergrad majors (physics) is a bullshit major as very few of us went into that field. But it prepared us very well for many other fields, so I'd say that metric is not meaningful.
That being said, there are some crappy degrees out there. Some disciplines are mostly just watered down philosophy and I'd go for philosophy instead anytime.
Your examples are bad too, because back in the day all those painters, writers, etc, were either independently wealthy already, or did other jobs before they became famous. H.P. Lovecraft, for instance, worked as a traveling salesman. Van Gogh both comes from a wealthy family _and_ had a job at an art dealer. And there are very few of such people anyway, it's not a viable route for most people, it's more like a lottery.
If you don't mind being broke and living on welfare, by all means, get that liberal arts degree.
IMO most talented/flexible degree per year studied is electrical engineering.
Best degree is no degree though. One Vitalek or Bram Cohen is worth 10000 Harvard computer science graduates.
For the unicorns that can pull that off, sure. For the other 99.9999999999999% of the population of the planet it's really bad advice.
"Higher education" is mostly make-work for pedants and busy work for students; the result is pretty similar to what high school was 100 years ago. It's also a form of dysgenic population control, and a way of growing debt peonage among the more intelligent half the of the population, which is probably useful for social control.
I've considered trying to raise a bunch of little Vitaleks myself, just to see if it can be done. Cathedral scholar style. While his and, say, Bram's output is exceptional: I think one of the big reasons it was is they never went to college. Greatest individual systematic trader I know: same story -he never want to college either.
Also your sigdifs are way off. I bet you learned that in collitch. ;-)
We don't really need (economically speaking) lots of philosophy majors. And maybe that's okay if people are doing philosophy majors for the knowledge, but I don't think that's the case. And if they want a good job, I think we should discourage these majors.
That doesn't mean we don't need philosophy. It's really important. But it doesn't make much difference if the people who have a degree on that work on unrelated things.
We can even look at my Fine Arts degree the same way. My whole career people have said it is odd for a Fine Arts major to be a coder, until I explain what that degree really taught me - to look at the existing body of work in a field, learn the techniques, and look for new and innovative ways to change those techniques. Then to create a vision of something you want to deliver, start from scratch, and build up to a final product that takes the field a step or two forward, while also effectively communicating with, and engaging, your audience.
You could draw similar parallels with any humanities degree. That process of deconstructing an entire body of work, learning the ins and out of its components, and reconstructing it into something completely new is common to all liberal arts educations. And that is why people with liberal arts degrees are often not the slightest bit concerned whether their degree and their career are a 'match'.
I am willing to bet that given a population of philosophy majors and a population of engineering majors, if you gave them an equivalent year of quality mentorship in programming, the philosophy majors would perform better. Because philosophy heavily emphasizes critical and abstract thinking. Better yet they might be able to really think about the consequences of the systems they build, whereas the tech industry mostly seems to have no problem and no concerns about building a global surveillance apparatus. Engineers learn how to do now the stuff that is relevant now. As a software engineer I am constantly battling with abstraction, and I constantly feel held back by my limited understanding of math, science, and philosophy.
The cost of college is an issue of its own and it's irrelevant to choice of major. School is the one place where we have an institutionalized system to study and progress the liberal arts as a whole, which teach us how we got here, what we value, and how we ought to live. One episode of The Wire should be sufficient demonstration of the need for our understanding of sociology to improve, among other things. Discouraging any of the liberal arts due to the overwhelming cost of college exacerbates our problems and risks turning universities into trade schools, directionless and with all the volatility of economic cycle.
I've taken a few classes in philosophy (it was my major for a while), and I can't tell if this is super different in the US vs Europe or you're just making stuff up, but this is just not what I saw. Yes, logic is part of philosophy, and everybody needs to take that class, but it's not heavily emphasized for the majority of students. Being able to write summaries and essays is, and learning the lingo, and reading (and hopefully understanding, or being able to pretend so well enough) the classics.
> Better yet they might be able to really think about the consequences of the systems they build, whereas the tech industry mostly seems to have no problem and no concerns about building a global surveillance apparatus.
Please don't. Studying in the humanities doesn't make you a better person, and it doesn't make you consider ethics in everything you do either.
> School is the one place where we have an institutionalized system to study and progress the liberal arts as a whole
Except not everybody agrees that is what life is all about, what's best for society, the country, humanity or whatever you choose. Somebody has to do the actual work, you know? Sure, we can all become philosophers and then starve to death, or we can make sure that we have enough people that know how to grow food. When it comes down to it, yeah, with all of my ethics training, I very much prefer people that know how to grow food over people that will explain that the ethical thing to do is to feed them first, because only they can lead progress and advance the liberal arts. But then again, I always had a thing for utilitarianism and was highly suspicious of the bourgeois elitism in intellectual circles.
I don't understand your last paragraph at all. Not everybody agrees, so therefore liberal arts education is invalid? Or not everybody agrees, so let's give up? These are defeatist attitudes to take in either case. Implicit in your argument, as a response to this whole thread, is that not "somebody has to do the work", which I have never argued against; you're saying "nobody should do anything but the work". Meaning STEM, or whatever BigCo is hiring for right now. We continue to have huge problems globally that either have nothing to do with technology or are directly caused by technology, that need to be solved with entirely different skillsets. People perform better when they are motivated, and money is a poor motivator after a certain point. You make a very poor assumption that someone studies one of these subjects and their skills and experiences just go into this void, and/or that I'm advocating that people major in something and strictly do that for the rest of their lives. If you want to do the hands-on work and major in Hands-On Working, then do it. But don't discourage others from doing what they want and are good at during the narrow window of their lives when society supports them to do it.
You're making claims about philosophy, I'm not making claims about STEM - I don't know what you're trying to accomplish.
> Not everybody agrees, so therefore liberal arts education is invalid?
No. Not everybody agrees, thereforce "liberal arts advances humanity" isn't agreed upon and shouldn't guide us. Let's agree upon it first.
> you're saying "nobody should do anything but the work"
No. I'm saying "please contribute". And by "contribute" I mean "do something that all/most/many consider to be of value". If we start defining "contributing" to mean something that the individual believes to be valuable, then it's just random. Build houses, grow roses, torture people, whatever, as long as you feel like it's a good idea, you're contributing.
> But don't discourage others from doing what they want
I'd never dream of doing that. I'm just saying: if you want to do what you want, please pay for it yourself. Don't make me give you part of my money to indulge in your personal pleasures.
No, I wasn't. You made claims about philosophy and I uttered my doubts because they didn't match my personal experience at all. You then decided to tell me how bad STEM was, which I hadn't even mention.
> you have a severe misconception that none of these “bullshit majors” are useful
That's not what I said. They might very well be useful, my point is that we should let the market decide whether they are. Vague statements about some loss of culture or a descent into dystopian nightmares if we don't finance them just isn't that - it's fear mongering to push something through without giving those a vote that are supposed to pay for it.
> “torture people” is bringing your argument to absurity
You should've taken a few philosophy classes, especially logic. Using extremes and hypothetical situations is what you do to test an argument/claim. If you present a claim and I present to you an example that makes your claim fall short, there's no "well, exceptions prove the rule", that's not how logic works.
> You’re basically arguing that individuality is a bad thing now.
Somewhat, sure. I don't like the kind of individuality that wants all the freedom but puts the responsibility (that is: footing the bill) on other people. Either say "I want to be free, and I will suffer the consequences of my decisions" or enjoy the protection of the collective at the cost of having to also submit to the collective's rules & needs, and limit your freedom. If you want the collective to pay for what you study & work in, choose something that the collective needs and it will gladly pay for it.
Same applies to coordinated protest activities.
One of the big differences at the time was the use of "repeaters" by the North. Having a gun that can shoot again quickly when the other side cannot is a huge advantage.
With the North winning the Civil War, they put both Reconstruction and the 15th Amendment in place, causing Blacks to have the right to vote (of course many people tried to thwart that law for almost a century).
[0] - https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/civil-war-...
> if the tech bubble bursts, computer science may even be riskier than a humanities degree, which gives graduates a broader set of knowledge.
How do humanities degrees provide "broader knowledge" than CS degrees? Different, sure, but broader?
Good CS degrees are not coding bootcamps. CS students take a lot of mathematics and logic-heavy courses and can easily pivot from programming to jobs in insurance, finance, accounting, education, project management, and even law.
Good CS degrees also require a lot of technical writing, which opens up all of the stuff that's usually associated with humanities degrees.
Bad CS degrees exist. But then, so do bad English departments.
This also ignores the fact that a lot of CS students are taking courses in English/poli sci/History/etc, but very few humanities students are taking CS courses. E.g., I didn't have a major or minor in any of the above fields, but I took upper-division courses in the English, Relgiion, poli sci, and history departments. However, I only ever encountered one non-STEM major in CS courses beyond CS 101.
I don't really understand why people act like humanities majors are "well rounded" compared to science or engineering majors - it seems like the absolute opposite. To confirm this, just pick a respectable college and read the degree requirements for students in different majors (I don't mean elite colleges, there are hundreds of colleges that meet this standard).
I do agree that non-STEM degrees should have stronger math requirements. But K-12 math education in the US is such a disaster that the universities wouldn't stand a chance if they wanted to do it.
This depends on the type of institution. Liberal arts and most honors colleges at large universities have small class sizes with high-quality instruction for their gen-ed humanities.
> You are extremely likely to be put on the spot and made to defend a subjective position you've taken.
This is also true in (good) mathematics and computer science programs, where you'll need to learn how to communicate well to technical audiences and defend all manner of subjective positions.
Also, something similar is true for the transferability of humanities skills! The writing skills you develop in humanities courses do not directly transfer to technical writing. Learning to write well for any audience will teach you a lot about good writing, but your random English major will probably be completely useless when it comes to writing proofs, design/requirements documents, technical documentation, or especially useful comments in their code. And if I had a dollar for ever business person with a humanities background who made an ass out of themselves in a technical meeting because they have no idea how to communicate with a technical audience about a technical subject... ;-)
> In math, and to some extent engineering or science, you can often reason your way through if you get stuck, or else there are simple procedures you can rote memorize.
I disagree. Your observation about lower vs. upper division courses is as true for STEM as it is for humanities courses. There's a lot of subjectivity/taste involved in upper-division courses, especially any proof-based or project-based course!
> But K-12 math education in the US is such a disaster that the universities wouldn't stand a chance if they wanted to do it.
That's a big problem. It's also a chicken-and-egg problem. Our elementary and middle school teachers are often innumerate, which makes it hard to prepare students for HS (where the quality is often still bad despite subject-area qualifications), which in turn creates problems for gen ed STEM at universities.
I'm a CS/Engineering grad that had some of those, and my colleagues in other STEM degrees had requirements that weren't dissimilar from what you describe. We were required to take classes in philosophy (with emphasis on ethics), history, as well as required to take some electives that could be in all sorts of areas, some in other scientific areas, others in arts, theatre, music. Effectively, it was required of us to at least be cognizant of the goings-on in other fields, even if just the conversational basics.
As for colleagues of mine in humanities degrees, most of them didn't see a single STEM class, and if they did, they were very superficial one-semester courses on Excel spreadsheeting, LaTeX, or very basic physics/probability mathematics, which were effectively a rehashing of high school, but with easier exams.
I echo your sentiment, maybe at some point in the distant past, STEM degrees were isolated in their own bubble and only had very theoretical classes, but I don't know anyone who experienced that, and that's most certainly not been a reality for the past couple of decades.
It's very different in Europe, there may be some mocking, and we also don't create unlimited jobs for every graduate, but they'll most likely not end up doing minimum wage jobs, and most of them easily transition into working in the media, for the government, large corporations or foundations.
E.g., CS PhD have plentiful $200K+ job opportunities after graduation and a relatively labor-friendly faculty market. Meanwhile, many mathematics PhDs postdoc into their 40s.
The third category isn't as fortunate in the job market, like say a biology major. How about Dev OE, OS. Doeos? Wow, that almost works. But it kind of reminds me of nxivm though :-)
These things aren't binary (more humanities bad! more humanities good!), and it's a disservice to the topic to treat them as such.
Bah!
All borrowed titles that try to make what we do sound more important to those who really do those things.
Coder. Programmer. You're either encoding logic or data into something a computer program can use. Even if all you do is draw fancy diagrams.
Off-topic whining. Downvote to oblivion.
But what is so bad is what is said in the comments--only about 15% of Americans even make six figures these days. We're a nation in deep denial about our future as things stand.
Btw, my CEO made over $21,000,000 last year. I make about .6% of his pay. He flies in private jets and gets to live the life we all want. He is really nothing special, though. Not a genius or anything, just a player.
The ultra wealthy have conned us good.
Do your passion when you actually have a passion. Until then, work to live, and save save save. (But don't forget to travel)
The risk is that before you know it you find yourself with a "fully-funded" retirement account, a stable career, and your vitality gone with your life now behind you. The trick is hard to pull off.