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> when a university education was given to me, I thought I could just "follow my dream" and not concern myself too much with making an income, because why shou

> when a university education was given to me, I thought I could just "follow my dream" and not concern myself too much with making an income, because why should I? Making an income had never seemed like a concern, so I studied pure mathematics. Are you talking about your math undergrad degree, or graduate degree? Pure math is perhaps a bad example here: in my experience, damn near every high paying field is glad to see a math degree (including seemingly unrelated fields like law, medicine, etc). I've done really well in tech and my math degree (both on paper and in practice) has contributed a lot to that success. A math graduate degree is a little less of a definite pay-off, but I had a math PhD under me at Google who got hired in with no engineering experience whatsoever at something like 200k/yr. It took him about six months of a bit of handholding but he ended up being one of my most dependably talented people.

jordigh 10y ago
Sure, I got jobs programming, but not jobs doing math. It was good enough to wave the degree around to impress people, but the actual stuff I learned was utterly irrelevant to programming. I could have studied chess and still gotten programming jobs, if only they gave out chess degrees and people admired chess. I wanted to keep doing math and that's why I was having a hard time finding money.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  Oh gotcha, I misunderstood you as saying that finishing a math degree wouldn't be worth the financial investment. FWIW, I kept my eye on the ball and five years after finishing undergrad I mostly have work that's heavy in math but is still as lucrative (more actually) than a programming job. It's not a guarantee, but if you like it enough and try to point each step forward towards doing more math, it's definitely possible. I did get other degrees during undergrad though, so that probably shaped the opportunities available to me.

jordigh 10y ago

Sure, I got jobs programming, but not jobs doing math. It was good enough to wave the degree around to impress people, but the actual stuff I learned was utterly irrelevant to programming. I could have studied chess and still gotten programming jobs, if only they gave out chess degrees and people admired chess. I wanted to keep doing math and that's why I was having a hard time finding money.

wutbrodo 10y ago
Oh gotcha, I misunderstood you as saying that finishing a math degree wouldn't be worth the financial investment. FWIW, I kept my eye on the ball and five years after finishing undergrad I mostly have work that's heavy in math but is still as lucrative (more actually) than a programming job. It's not a guarantee, but if you like it enough and try to point each step forward towards doing more math, it's definitely possible. I did get other degrees during undergrad though, so that probably shaped the opportunities available to me.