6 ms·

So, if (or, perhaps, when) all the people with liberal arts degrees go back to Javaschool and emerge in a couple of years with M.S. degrees in CS, is your compa

So, if (or, perhaps, when) all the people with liberal arts degrees go back to Javaschool and emerge in a couple of years with M.S. degrees in CS, is your company going to hire them all? Or are you just jerking them around? We've been down this road before. In the 1990s, everyone flocked to "CS" school to get in on all the sweet, sweet jobs of the future. Was the aftermath of that fun for anyone? It is often read, on HN, that it isn't enough to just go through the motions of getting a technical degree. You need other qualities to succeed. The person with all the right qualities is rare. True enough. But does this mean that only those rare people with the right qualities deserve to live outside of poverty, or the imminent risk of poverty? My father has a degree in political science. Fortunately, the economy wasn't broken in the 1960s, so he was able to get a white-collar job, buy a house, and have kids, like most other people with "basic" college degrees in the 1960s. Back then it was even expected that you could have a decent life with a mere high school diploma, or that GED you mention. That doesn't work so well anymore. Is that a good thing? Be careful what you wish for. We are well on our way to building a society in which you can't have a middle-class lifestyle as, say, an insurance underwriter or medical records clerk without a college degree in a technical or professional field, or maybe an M.S. degree. I think that's a bad idea. Many people have more education than they need, and an increasing number of people have more education than they want (considering that they have to go into debt for it, up front). Forcing unwilling people to struggle through advanced degrees tends to produce a lot of stress and pain, water down the advanced degrees, dilute the pool of degree holders, and waste absolutely enormous amounts of time. Oh, and it produces unnecessary barriers to entry. We could require all hotel administrators to hold an advanced degree in hotel administration. How does that sound to the AirBnB folks? And all it does is buy time. In the end, jobs are as much about the demand for labor as the quality of the supply. Ph.D.s can be unemployed too. Highly trained semiconductor engineers can be unemployed. Automotive engineers are probably not doing so well right now. Shadenfreude has an evil reputation for a reason. Please try to resist the temptation.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
Fortunately, the economy wasn't broken in the 1960s, so he was able to get a white-collar job, buy a house, and have kids,[...] That doesn't work so well anymore. [...] We are well on our way to building a society in which you can't have a middle-class lifestyle as, say, an insurance underwriter or medical records clerk... This statement just reflects a lack of understanding of what "middle class" meant in 1960. The standard of living of the American poor today is quite high, in many regards higher than the standard of living of the middle class in 1960. http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2004/01/understanding-poverty-in-america http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2004/01/understandi... Fun fact: in 1960, a coffee maker cost $29.95 and the average household income was just under $5000. In 2010, the coffee maker costs $12.95 and the average salary is about $50,000. http://www.dadsvintageads.com/viewitem.php/dadsvintageads/pd959405/Vintage_Ad_1960_Toastmaster_Toaster_Coffee_Maker_Fry_Pan http://www.dadsvintageads.com/viewitem.php/dadsvintageads/pd...
- hga 16y ago
  According to the BLS, the $29.95 that coffee maker cost in 1960 would be $221 in 2010 dollars. I know your $5,000 vs. $50,000 figures are very rough, but $5,000 in 1960 would be $36,855 in 2010 dollars (and after taxes is not trivial, e.g. the personal exemptions that sheltered average families from the full and very high tax rates in the '50s were largely nullified by inflation over the next couple of decades before Reagan started a variety of corrections).
  - mhb 16y ago
    He's saying that the quality of life improvement provided by a coffee maker in 1960 consumed 0.6% of the typical 1960 middle class salary vs. 0.03% of a typical 2010 middle class salary. A 20x reduction in cost for the same quality of life improvement for the middle class, in this example. What additional insight do your numbers provide?
    - hga 16y ago
      I think it's easier to understand how much cheaper the coffee maker is today, both in terms of absolute price and what people can afford, if you translate it into today's dollars. "It would cost $221" is a lot more visceral than 0.6% of a putative generic annual salary. One thing I added was "doing the math"; yummyfajitas didn't go that far (which is no reflection on his posting) ... plus I think it's useful to point out just how significant inflation has been over the years.
      - mhb 16y ago
        The value of the percentage metric is that it allows you to compare a certain benefit in terms of the work it took to obtain it at different times. Given 2000 hours/year of work, it would have taken 12 hours of work to buy a coffee maker in 1960 vs. 0.6 hours of work in 2010. To me, this makes the comparison exceedingly easy to understand.
        hga 16y ago
drewcrawford 16y ago
> But does this mean that only those rare people with the right qualities deserve to live outside of poverty, or the imminent risk of poverty? Send all your impoverished down to OKC. I'm not sure where you live, but absolutely everybody is hiring entry-level jobs here with minimal or no skills required. Lifeguards and childcare-providers are paid $10-12 an hour, entry-level librarian positions are in the $10 range, upscale retail is $10-12, even food service jobs are $7-8. I see "help wanted" signs everywhere I look. As long as you don't have debt and live frugally, you can get a clean apt, eat 3 meals a day, have broadband internet, and stash a good chunk away for a rainy day with a job like that. Cost of living is low here; that pay is far above the poverty level. The problem is, a bunch of twentysomethings went in debt to to get a polysci degree under the mistaken assumption that it would automagically give them a better job. They can still return to the job they did in highschool and be a perfectly functioning member of society. They don't want to, because they think it's beneath them.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  They don't want to, because they think it's beneath them. For good reason. The opportunity cost of settling for a $20k/year job is very high, especially if the job is in a distant city from your hometown. Sure, you can save money on housing by moving a thousand miles to OKC, but you can't save money on plane tickets. So you aren't going to see your family very often -- better use Facetime. (Incidentally, does AT&T have special OKC rates, or does my iPhone family plan cost $100/month in OKC just as it does everyplace else? For a $20k/year earner $100/month is 6% of pretax salary, so better not use Facetime after all.) If an entry-level job on your desired career track opens up in your hometown of Atlanta, you might have a hard time landing that job when you live in Oklahoma City, make $20k per year, and have four years of "lifeguard" and "childcare provider" on your resume. It is notoriously difficult to get two days' time off from your food service job to travel to an interview, even if you can afford to do so. But don't worry. Contrary to popular belief, people's hopes and dreams and lifestyles don't shatter instantly: The shattering happens in slow motion, over months or even years. Eventually, if the economy doesn't get jumpstarted, the new college grads will lose hope and realize that their best alternative is to work as a lifeguard or entry-level librarian, even if they have to move to OKC to do so. I hope OKC has a lot of libraries and swimming pools. Is there a library industry out there, making more libraries? Are they building more houses with pools, to go along with the surplus of houses we already have?
gaius 16y ago
We see this in the UK: legions of unemployed graduates, yet you can't get a plumber or an electrician born here anymore: they all come from Eastern Europe, and thank God that there are some countries where they still respect tradesman otherwise we'd be in a lot of trouble when our houses fell apart...
nandemo 16y ago
> So, if (or, perhaps, when) all the people with liberal arts degrees go back to Javaschool and emerge in a couple of years with M.S. degrees in CS, is your company going to hire them all? This argument is not terribly relevant. It's like I tell you about this cheap, underrated restaurant and you reply with "but if everybody follows your recommendation, it will be too crowded and prices will rise and it won't be underrated anymore!". Which is true, but it's not the case that everybody will suddenly go there. If more people did technical degrees (and CS is not the only one) instead of liberal arts degrees, gradually the salaries for technical jobs would go down a little and salaries for liberal arts jobs would go up a little. That said, I agree that more and more people getting university degrees -- whether due artificial legal requirements or societal expectations -- is not necessarily a good thing. In Japan, going to a trade school for 2~3 years and then getting a job is a common alternative to going to college or junior college.
geebee 16y ago
Of course there's no guarantee that getting a CS degree (or any other degree of the moment) will get you a job. But still, there's a huge difference between someone who at least made an effort to use college to become employable, and someone who majored in liberal arts. For me, it really has nothing to do with shadenfreude, it has to do with expectations. I think someone who majored in chemical engineering should be surprised and disappointed to discover the jobs aren't there. I take no pleasure in watching a communications major struggle to get a good first job, but he had to know that going in. This guy really seems surprised that going to school and doing well in Poly Sci didn't open the magic door to jobs. Really? Has he been living under a rock?

yummyfajitas 16y ago

Fortunately, the economy wasn't broken in the 1960s, so he was able to get a white-collar job, buy a house, and have kids,[...] That doesn't work so well anymore. [...] We are well on our way to building a society in which you can't have a middle-class lifestyle as, say, an insurance underwriter or medical records clerk... This statement just reflects a lack of understanding of what "middle class" meant in 1960. The standard of living of the American poor today is quite high, in many regards higher than the standard of living of the middle class in 1960. http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2004/01/understanding-poverty-in-america http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2004/01/understandi... Fun fact: in 1960, a coffee maker cost $29.95 and the average household income was just under $5000. In 2010, the coffee maker costs $12.95 and the average salary is about $50,000. http://www.dadsvintageads.com/viewitem.php/dadsvintageads/pd959405/Vintage_Ad_1960_Toastmaster_Toaster_Coffee_Maker_Fry_Pan http://www.dadsvintageads.com/viewitem.php/dadsvintageads/pd...

hga 16y ago
According to the BLS, the $29.95 that coffee maker cost in 1960 would be $221 in 2010 dollars. I know your $5,000 vs. $50,000 figures are very rough, but $5,000 in 1960 would be $36,855 in 2010 dollars (and after taxes is not trivial, e.g. the personal exemptions that sheltered average families from the full and very high tax rates in the '50s were largely nullified by inflation over the next couple of decades before Reagan started a variety of corrections).
- mhb 16y ago
  He's saying that the quality of life improvement provided by a coffee maker in 1960 consumed 0.6% of the typical 1960 middle class salary vs. 0.03% of a typical 2010 middle class salary. A 20x reduction in cost for the same quality of life improvement for the middle class, in this example. What additional insight do your numbers provide?
  - hga 16y ago
    I think it's easier to understand how much cheaper the coffee maker is today, both in terms of absolute price and what people can afford, if you translate it into today's dollars. "It would cost $221" is a lot more visceral than 0.6% of a putative generic annual salary. One thing I added was "doing the math"; yummyfajitas didn't go that far (which is no reflection on his posting) ... plus I think it's useful to point out just how significant inflation has been over the years.
    - mhb 16y ago
      The value of the percentage metric is that it allows you to compare a certain benefit in terms of the work it took to obtain it at different times. Given 2000 hours/year of work, it would have taken 12 hours of work to buy a coffee maker in 1960 vs. 0.6 hours of work in 2010. To me, this makes the comparison exceedingly easy to understand.
      - hga 16y ago

drewcrawford 16y ago

> But does this mean that only those rare people with the right qualities deserve to live outside of poverty, or the imminent risk of poverty? Send all your impoverished down to OKC. I'm not sure where you live, but absolutely everybody is hiring entry-level jobs here with minimal or no skills required. Lifeguards and childcare-providers are paid $10-12 an hour, entry-level librarian positions are in the $10 range, upscale retail is $10-12, even food service jobs are $7-8. I see "help wanted" signs everywhere I look. As long as you don't have debt and live frugally, you can get a clean apt, eat 3 meals a day, have broadband internet, and stash a good chunk away for a rainy day with a job like that. Cost of living is low here; that pay is far above the poverty level. The problem is, a bunch of twentysomethings went in debt to to get a polysci degree under the mistaken assumption that it would automagically give them a better job. They can still return to the job they did in highschool and be a perfectly functioning member of society. They don't want to, because they think it's beneath them.

mechanical_fish 16y ago
They don't want to, because they think it's beneath them. For good reason. The opportunity cost of settling for a $20k/year job is very high, especially if the job is in a distant city from your hometown. Sure, you can save money on housing by moving a thousand miles to OKC, but you can't save money on plane tickets. So you aren't going to see your family very often -- better use Facetime. (Incidentally, does AT&T have special OKC rates, or does my iPhone family plan cost $100/month in OKC just as it does everyplace else? For a $20k/year earner $100/month is 6% of pretax salary, so better not use Facetime after all.) If an entry-level job on your desired career track opens up in your hometown of Atlanta, you might have a hard time landing that job when you live in Oklahoma City, make $20k per year, and have four years of "lifeguard" and "childcare provider" on your resume. It is notoriously difficult to get two days' time off from your food service job to travel to an interview, even if you can afford to do so. But don't worry. Contrary to popular belief, people's hopes and dreams and lifestyles don't shatter instantly: The shattering happens in slow motion, over months or even years. Eventually, if the economy doesn't get jumpstarted, the new college grads will lose hope and realize that their best alternative is to work as a lifeguard or entry-level librarian, even if they have to move to OKC to do so. I hope OKC has a lot of libraries and swimming pools. Is there a library industry out there, making more libraries? Are they building more houses with pools, to go along with the surplus of houses we already have?

gaius 16y ago

We see this in the UK: legions of unemployed graduates, yet you can't get a plumber or an electrician born here anymore: they all come from Eastern Europe, and thank God that there are some countries where they still respect tradesman otherwise we'd be in a lot of trouble when our houses fell apart...

nandemo 16y ago

> So, if (or, perhaps, when) all the people with liberal arts degrees go back to Javaschool and emerge in a couple of years with M.S. degrees in CS, is your company going to hire them all? This argument is not terribly relevant. It's like I tell you about this cheap, underrated restaurant and you reply with "but if everybody follows your recommendation, it will be too crowded and prices will rise and it won't be underrated anymore!". Which is true, but it's not the case that everybody will suddenly go there. If more people did technical degrees (and CS is not the only one) instead of liberal arts degrees, gradually the salaries for technical jobs would go down a little and salaries for liberal arts jobs would go up a little. That said, I agree that more and more people getting university degrees -- whether due artificial legal requirements or societal expectations -- is not necessarily a good thing. In Japan, going to a trade school for 2~3 years and then getting a job is a common alternative to going to college or junior college.

geebee 16y ago

Of course there's no guarantee that getting a CS degree (or any other degree of the moment) will get you a job. But still, there's a huge difference between someone who at least made an effort to use college to become employable, and someone who majored in liberal arts. For me, it really has nothing to do with shadenfreude, it has to do with expectations. I think someone who majored in chemical engineering should be surprised and disappointed to discover the jobs aren't there. I take no pleasure in watching a communications major struggle to get a good first job, but he had to know that going in. This guy really seems surprised that going to school and doing well in Poly Sci didn't open the magic door to jobs. Really? Has he been living under a rock?