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Having done my BS in Match and CS at a school with a parallel Actuarial program, I got a good look at what being an actuary is about. If you're good at math, an

Having done my BS in Match and CS at a school with a parallel Actuarial program, I got a good look at what being an actuary is about. If you're good at math, and really good at standardized math exams you can advance through the various levels and work your way up the pay-scale ladder. I think this really appeals to people who are good at math, but maybe don't want to go into academia. That said of all the actuaries I went to school with, none liked their jobs and all eventually moved on to do something else.

dv_dt 8y ago
What do actuaries do from day to day? Are they old-school original data scientists, or something else?
- mr_overalls 8y ago
  A day in the life of an actuary: https://www.beanactuary.org/what/do/?fa=day-in-the-life https://www.beanactuary.org/what/do/?fa=day-in-the-life
  - stochastic_monk 8y ago
    Edit: this isn’t about the day-to-day, but it gives perspective from an actuary I know who has served other roles. My mother is an actuary. She was a stay at home mom for 25 years but returned to the workforce about 5 years ago and recently became VP at a large insurance company. She says she’s always enjoyed her work as an actuary, and she preferred it over college math instruction, which she could do because FSAs are considered PhD-level. (And did while her 6 children were home.)
  - roel_v 8y ago
    Does Karen have 36 hour work days? It's either that, or she should prefix every thing she did with 'dabbled a bit in ...'.
- tfehring 8y ago
  The day-to-day is basically a combination of: * Moving data around - mostly using Excel + SQL, though R is growing in popularity * Using that data to calculate figures that are significant to the business - including premiums, IRRs, profit margins, and the value of future claims * Presenting the results of those calculations to management and recommending a course of action I'm not sure what "old-school original data scientists" do/did or how similar this is.
  - sizzle 8y ago
    How is this not automated by some type of QuickBooks/Intuit type bookkeeping plug and chug numbers software? Startup opportunity?
    - tfehring 8y ago
      At least at my company, the vast majority of bullets 1 and 2 is automated already. Financial information is calculated and fed to the financial statements automatically every reporting period, all of the recurring analysis supporting those results is generated with one button click, etc. The manual parts of 1 and 2 are centered around ad-hoc analysis when results aren't as expected, updating our automated systems when we add new products or product features, refining and adding granularity to those calculations as needed, etc. But actuaries' main value-adds are (1) building and pricing new products and product features and (2) helping management understand the financial results and their business implications. If you're just re-pricing a commodity product like term life or home/auto insurance, a lot of the pricing can be (and is) automated. But that's where companies have started building out more complex ML-based pricing, and actuaries are heavily involved in building and steering that functionality and explaining the results. If you can come up with a compelling way to automate a significant portion of that work while still providing results that insurers' CFOs and Chief Actuaries will sign off on, sign me up. But in general, if you're looking for automation opportunities in insurance, there's far more low-hanging fruit on the operations side than in actuarial. Same goes for finance and accounting, though to a lesser extent than operations.
    - zv 8y ago
      Look at something like Tower Watson. I would say high barrier of entry.
microcolonel 8y ago
> That said of all the actuaries I went to school with, none liked their jobs and all eventually moved on to do something else. Part of that, from my perspective, involves the slow pace imposed by overbroad regulations on the applications of actuarial science. I personally think that a diverse market of specialized insurance products would be an immense moral good, but in the established jurisdictions where demand for such a thing is high, it is hard to gauge whether your novel insurance products are even legal to sell. My (admittedly anecdotal) impression is that this contributes a great deal to the drudgery and stagnancy of actuarial work.
- kaitai 8y ago
  Your comment points out something important. In finance, there are situations in which you can implement any investment strategy you can reasonably argue will make more money. Great returns are rewarded. Actuarial science has a much more defensive nature. There are many external regulations, but there are also many internal regulations, both on company levels and in the actuarial profession itself. It's still very much a guild and there is an actuarial code of conduct. I've come to appreciate the value of this drudgery and stagnancy, even though it's not my cup of tea.
- intended 8y ago
  Yep, that’s what the product is. Reliable defensiveness. So making it more fun, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s what the customer is buying.
fnayr 8y ago
Anecdotally, I just came back from New Zealand and was staying at a farm house rented out on Airbnb. The owner was previously an actuary in Sydney, and hated his job so switched mid career to farmer. Pretty large change.
- oneplane 8y ago
  It's not all that surprising when you think about this, the whole actuary field is basically taking people who love doing something, and trimming it down to a factory job for money making companies. As far as I've heard, there is no joy, no creativity and no sense of accomplishment; yet for people who rank salary and perceived status derived from a job title higher than those things, it's the perfect place to be. (ironically, the people with the capabilities and the people that actually enjoy the lifestyle inside an insurer, bank, or other hypercommercial/hypercapitalistic instance don't overlap that much)
- 50 8y ago
  That's pretty cool! Manual labor, personally, is appealing after a week of desk work in front of a computer - the sun, the frequent breeze, sweating, etc. It's one of the reasons I added philosophy as another major I'm pursing along with computer science - makes think about something other than computers and it gets me off the computer, even if it's for a tad bit.
  - roel_v 8y ago
    "Manual labor, personally, is appealing after a week of desk work in front of a computer" "It's one of the reasons I added philosophy as another major" Couldn't help but LOL at that juxtaposition, sorry :)
    - 50 8y ago
      No worries! It's a foolish mistake. I often don't know what I'm saying. I suppose what I was trying to say is that by manual labor, I like being outside, and by adding a philosophy major, I get to do work that doesn't always require using the computer so I can do work under a tree and I get to think about something else. If I didn't add a philosophy major, I would just be inside and engulfed in front of the computer, thinking about computers. If any of that makes any sense and has any correlation to each other whatsoever.
amigocontigo 8y ago
> If you're good at math, and really good at standardized math exams you can advance through the various levels and work your way up the pay-scale ladder I was able to more than double my starting salary (ending at around 135k with bonus) 3 years out of school. I worked in consulting and thought the work was incredibly boring. The main issue is that a lot of people in the field, even those good at passing exams, aren't particularly good at advanced modeling or programming. This means no one can or is interested in peer-reviewing complex models and as a result you end up spending most of your time shoveling numbers around in Excel. It was also very stressful. Leaving the profession, despite the time I sunk in it, was the best decision I ever made.
- mrep 8y ago
  >> If you're good at math, and really good at standardized math exams you can advance through the various levels and work your way up the pay-scale ladder > I was able to more than double my starting salary (ending at around 135k with bonus) 3 years out of school. Have you considered software engineering because current pay starts at around 150k in big tech and I'm now making 215k 2.5 years out of college? I say this because I work with a bunch of math and physics major people so it is definitely possible to switch careers (a lot of the advanced software we use utilizes complex concepts in physics and math so they are highly valued, though, you will definitely need to know basic algorithms and data structures but that isn't too hard to learn especially compared to advanced math and physics in my opinion).
  - sizzle 8y ago
    What kind of systems are you working on that require math and physics? Aviation? Rockets?
  - Nursie 8y ago
    > Have you considered software engineering because current pay starts at around 150k in big tech and I'm now making 215k This is highly area dependent though, surely? In the UK, outside of London, those figures would likely be $50k and $60k
TylerE 8y ago
Isn't it sort of a truism that high-paying jobs are not fun? Know who gets paid a lot (relative to education)? Sanitation workers. You know who doesn't? Pilots
- psandersen 8y ago
  Data science is pretty fun and quite well paid. I enjoy my work a lot and manage a good work life balance.
  - TylerE 8y ago
    There are certainly outliers (I'd argue that programming in general qualifies) but they also tend to be in things that - while I won't say you can't learn them - are things that a certain subset of people are just sort of naturally wired for.
    - sanxiyn 8y ago
      I'd say programming is an acquired taste.
      - burntrelish1273 8y ago
        Tomatoes, parmesan cheese, escargot, sushi ... coding. True that.
      - wolfgke 8y ago
        I loved programming naturally when I got an old pocket computer with built-in BASIC (Sharp-PC series) and some books for it from my father who did not need it anymore.
- oneplane 8y ago
  It depends on your definition of fun; some people enjoy office work, others don't. Some people derive joy from the status they assume from their job, others don't. Most 'workable' jobs have one thing in common: you get something out of it. If you are lucky, you get both material and immaterial, but often, people chose to deny themselves one for the other, instead of balancing it (and in turn often don't find themselves in a good work/life balance either).
plaguuuuuu 8y ago
I don't know any actuaries, but it always struck me as odd that the hardest working people in my last company were the actuaries. I mean these guys were on presumably amazing salaries, were some of the smartest people, could work at any related insurance/finance/whatever company (of which there are a LOT hq'd in Sydney) and had worse hours than most other teams. I just don't understand it.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  Is it implausible that they might be getting amazing salaries because they are the hardest-working? (Why?)
  - barrkel 8y ago
    There's often an inverse correlation between hard work and salary. People who have to work extra jobs to make ends meet work harder than anyone else. If you have a salary that makes you comfortable, you're less likely to try and kill yourself for the marginal money. Generally, rewards come from working smarter, not harder. Also, it's hard to make a lot of money purely on a wage. You usually need capital appreciation or other income streams for that.
    - mehrdadn 8y ago
      Extra jobs kind of misses the point... we're talking about working harder on your job in a given company, not working harder as a person in general on whatever life throws at you. To be honest I'm not even sure how you'd measure how hard someone is working when you're comparing across different jobs, but I would find it interesting if there was any kind of data on this. I'm not sure if I'd find it more surprising if the correlation was positive or negative, but what I do know is that in an ideal world the correlation would be positive...
      - barrkel 8y ago
        The better paid your job, the more unique it is, almost by definition: limited supply means the price of labour is higher. Well paid jobs aren't very fungible. Even within a single company, people with the same title don't do the same work. And working smarter - aligned with the company goals - still pays much more than longer hours.
kaitai 8y ago
While it's a stereotype, there's a bit of truth to the idea that actuarial jobs appeal to people who want a steady, non-adventurous 9-5. At most places, innovation is not prized in an actuarial position. A certain conservativism is demanded (I'm not talking politics here; I'm talking a cautious nature). That's one reason it's rare to see someone switch from actuarial science to machine learning, for instance. A lot of actuarial students just want to check some boxes and have a job that pays well without requiring a lot of attention. This is not true across the board, but it is a certain subset. Most people reading Hacker News don't have this mindset -- why bother reading things here if you do?
- dajohnson89 8y ago
  seems like a nice way to make good money, while being able to pursue your hobbies after work.
  - roel_v 8y ago
    But is it? Being an actuary at a big 4 consultancy would expose you to the same stresses and resultant lifestyle than others at such a firm, I'd imagine (although I don't know anyone who is actually an actuary, just extrapolating from others who I'd thought could have a quiet life at bigco's yet are still sucked into typical bigco lifestyle (or 'lack of', rather)).
  - salemh 8y ago
    My sibling is an actuary (5-6 years work experience) on a break to pursue passion projects. The only issue with that comment is you need to continually study/take actuarial exams on a frequent basis. Though others in this thread are probably far more knowledgeable then me on this. So his 40 hour work week turned into +15/30 hours with studying/exams for a number of years - perhaps not always consistent, but frequent enough to cause a bit of burnout.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

dv_dt 8y ago

What do actuaries do from day to day? Are they old-school original data scientists, or something else?

mr_overalls 8y ago
A day in the life of an actuary: https://www.beanactuary.org/what/do/?fa=day-in-the-life https://www.beanactuary.org/what/do/?fa=day-in-the-life
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  Edit: this isn’t about the day-to-day, but it gives perspective from an actuary I know who has served other roles. My mother is an actuary. She was a stay at home mom for 25 years but returned to the workforce about 5 years ago and recently became VP at a large insurance company. She says she’s always enjoyed her work as an actuary, and she preferred it over college math instruction, which she could do because FSAs are considered PhD-level. (And did while her 6 children were home.)
- roel_v 8y ago
  Does Karen have 36 hour work days? It's either that, or she should prefix every thing she did with 'dabbled a bit in ...'.
tfehring 8y ago
The day-to-day is basically a combination of: * Moving data around - mostly using Excel + SQL, though R is growing in popularity * Using that data to calculate figures that are significant to the business - including premiums, IRRs, profit margins, and the value of future claims * Presenting the results of those calculations to management and recommending a course of action I'm not sure what "old-school original data scientists" do/did or how similar this is.
- sizzle 8y ago
  How is this not automated by some type of QuickBooks/Intuit type bookkeeping plug and chug numbers software? Startup opportunity?
  - tfehring 8y ago
    At least at my company, the vast majority of bullets 1 and 2 is automated already. Financial information is calculated and fed to the financial statements automatically every reporting period, all of the recurring analysis supporting those results is generated with one button click, etc. The manual parts of 1 and 2 are centered around ad-hoc analysis when results aren't as expected, updating our automated systems when we add new products or product features, refining and adding granularity to those calculations as needed, etc. But actuaries' main value-adds are (1) building and pricing new products and product features and (2) helping management understand the financial results and their business implications. If you're just re-pricing a commodity product like term life or home/auto insurance, a lot of the pricing can be (and is) automated. But that's where companies have started building out more complex ML-based pricing, and actuaries are heavily involved in building and steering that functionality and explaining the results. If you can come up with a compelling way to automate a significant portion of that work while still providing results that insurers' CFOs and Chief Actuaries will sign off on, sign me up. But in general, if you're looking for automation opportunities in insurance, there's far more low-hanging fruit on the operations side than in actuarial. Same goes for finance and accounting, though to a lesser extent than operations.
  - zv 8y ago
    Look at something like Tower Watson. I would say high barrier of entry.

microcolonel 8y ago

> That said of all the actuaries I went to school with, none liked their jobs and all eventually moved on to do something else. Part of that, from my perspective, involves the slow pace imposed by overbroad regulations on the applications of actuarial science. I personally think that a diverse market of specialized insurance products would be an immense moral good, but in the established jurisdictions where demand for such a thing is high, it is hard to gauge whether your novel insurance products are even legal to sell. My (admittedly anecdotal) impression is that this contributes a great deal to the drudgery and stagnancy of actuarial work.

kaitai 8y ago
Your comment points out something important. In finance, there are situations in which you can implement any investment strategy you can reasonably argue will make more money. Great returns are rewarded. Actuarial science has a much more defensive nature. There are many external regulations, but there are also many internal regulations, both on company levels and in the actuarial profession itself. It's still very much a guild and there is an actuarial code of conduct. I've come to appreciate the value of this drudgery and stagnancy, even though it's not my cup of tea.
intended 8y ago
Yep, that’s what the product is. Reliable defensiveness. So making it more fun, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s what the customer is buying.

fnayr 8y ago

Anecdotally, I just came back from New Zealand and was staying at a farm house rented out on Airbnb. The owner was previously an actuary in Sydney, and hated his job so switched mid career to farmer. Pretty large change.

oneplane 8y ago
It's not all that surprising when you think about this, the whole actuary field is basically taking people who love doing something, and trimming it down to a factory job for money making companies. As far as I've heard, there is no joy, no creativity and no sense of accomplishment; yet for people who rank salary and perceived status derived from a job title higher than those things, it's the perfect place to be. (ironically, the people with the capabilities and the people that actually enjoy the lifestyle inside an insurer, bank, or other hypercommercial/hypercapitalistic instance don't overlap that much)
50 8y ago
That's pretty cool! Manual labor, personally, is appealing after a week of desk work in front of a computer - the sun, the frequent breeze, sweating, etc. It's one of the reasons I added philosophy as another major I'm pursing along with computer science - makes think about something other than computers and it gets me off the computer, even if it's for a tad bit.
- roel_v 8y ago
  "Manual labor, personally, is appealing after a week of desk work in front of a computer" "It's one of the reasons I added philosophy as another major" Couldn't help but LOL at that juxtaposition, sorry :)
  - 50 8y ago
    No worries! It's a foolish mistake. I often don't know what I'm saying. I suppose what I was trying to say is that by manual labor, I like being outside, and by adding a philosophy major, I get to do work that doesn't always require using the computer so I can do work under a tree and I get to think about something else. If I didn't add a philosophy major, I would just be inside and engulfed in front of the computer, thinking about computers. If any of that makes any sense and has any correlation to each other whatsoever.

amigocontigo 8y ago

> If you're good at math, and really good at standardized math exams you can advance through the various levels and work your way up the pay-scale ladder I was able to more than double my starting salary (ending at around 135k with bonus) 3 years out of school. I worked in consulting and thought the work was incredibly boring. The main issue is that a lot of people in the field, even those good at passing exams, aren't particularly good at advanced modeling or programming. This means no one can or is interested in peer-reviewing complex models and as a result you end up spending most of your time shoveling numbers around in Excel. It was also very stressful. Leaving the profession, despite the time I sunk in it, was the best decision I ever made.

mrep 8y ago
>> If you're good at math, and really good at standardized math exams you can advance through the various levels and work your way up the pay-scale ladder > I was able to more than double my starting salary (ending at around 135k with bonus) 3 years out of school. Have you considered software engineering because current pay starts at around 150k in big tech and I'm now making 215k 2.5 years out of college? I say this because I work with a bunch of math and physics major people so it is definitely possible to switch careers (a lot of the advanced software we use utilizes complex concepts in physics and math so they are highly valued, though, you will definitely need to know basic algorithms and data structures but that isn't too hard to learn especially compared to advanced math and physics in my opinion).
- sizzle 8y ago
  What kind of systems are you working on that require math and physics? Aviation? Rockets?
- Nursie 8y ago
  > Have you considered software engineering because current pay starts at around 150k in big tech and I'm now making 215k This is highly area dependent though, surely? In the UK, outside of London, those figures would likely be $50k and $60k

TylerE 8y ago

Isn't it sort of a truism that high-paying jobs are not fun? Know who gets paid a lot (relative to education)? Sanitation workers. You know who doesn't? Pilots

psandersen 8y ago
Data science is pretty fun and quite well paid. I enjoy my work a lot and manage a good work life balance.
- TylerE 8y ago
  There are certainly outliers (I'd argue that programming in general qualifies) but they also tend to be in things that - while I won't say you can't learn them - are things that a certain subset of people are just sort of naturally wired for.
  - sanxiyn 8y ago
    I'd say programming is an acquired taste.
    - burntrelish1273 8y ago
      Tomatoes, parmesan cheese, escargot, sushi ... coding. True that.
    - wolfgke 8y ago
      I loved programming naturally when I got an old pocket computer with built-in BASIC (Sharp-PC series) and some books for it from my father who did not need it anymore.
oneplane 8y ago
It depends on your definition of fun; some people enjoy office work, others don't. Some people derive joy from the status they assume from their job, others don't. Most 'workable' jobs have one thing in common: you get something out of it. If you are lucky, you get both material and immaterial, but often, people chose to deny themselves one for the other, instead of balancing it (and in turn often don't find themselves in a good work/life balance either).

plaguuuuuu 8y ago

I don't know any actuaries, but it always struck me as odd that the hardest working people in my last company were the actuaries. I mean these guys were on presumably amazing salaries, were some of the smartest people, could work at any related insurance/finance/whatever company (of which there are a LOT hq'd in Sydney) and had worse hours than most other teams. I just don't understand it.

mehrdadn 8y ago
Is it implausible that they might be getting amazing salaries because they are the hardest-working? (Why?)
- barrkel 8y ago
  There's often an inverse correlation between hard work and salary. People who have to work extra jobs to make ends meet work harder than anyone else. If you have a salary that makes you comfortable, you're less likely to try and kill yourself for the marginal money. Generally, rewards come from working smarter, not harder. Also, it's hard to make a lot of money purely on a wage. You usually need capital appreciation or other income streams for that.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    Extra jobs kind of misses the point... we're talking about working harder on your job in a given company, not working harder as a person in general on whatever life throws at you. To be honest I'm not even sure how you'd measure how hard someone is working when you're comparing across different jobs, but I would find it interesting if there was any kind of data on this. I'm not sure if I'd find it more surprising if the correlation was positive or negative, but what I do know is that in an ideal world the correlation would be positive...
    - barrkel 8y ago
      The better paid your job, the more unique it is, almost by definition: limited supply means the price of labour is higher. Well paid jobs aren't very fungible. Even within a single company, people with the same title don't do the same work. And working smarter - aligned with the company goals - still pays much more than longer hours.

kaitai 8y ago

While it's a stereotype, there's a bit of truth to the idea that actuarial jobs appeal to people who want a steady, non-adventurous 9-5. At most places, innovation is not prized in an actuarial position. A certain conservativism is demanded (I'm not talking politics here; I'm talking a cautious nature). That's one reason it's rare to see someone switch from actuarial science to machine learning, for instance. A lot of actuarial students just want to check some boxes and have a job that pays well without requiring a lot of attention. This is not true across the board, but it is a certain subset. Most people reading Hacker News don't have this mindset -- why bother reading things here if you do?

dajohnson89 8y ago
seems like a nice way to make good money, while being able to pursue your hobbies after work.
- roel_v 8y ago
  But is it? Being an actuary at a big 4 consultancy would expose you to the same stresses and resultant lifestyle than others at such a firm, I'd imagine (although I don't know anyone who is actually an actuary, just extrapolating from others who I'd thought could have a quiet life at bigco's yet are still sucked into typical bigco lifestyle (or 'lack of', rather)).
- salemh 8y ago
  My sibling is an actuary (5-6 years work experience) on a break to pursue passion projects. The only issue with that comment is you need to continually study/take actuarial exams on a frequent basis. Though others in this thread are probably far more knowledgeable then me on this. So his 40 hour work week turned into +15/30 hours with studying/exams for a number of years - perhaps not always consistent, but frequent enough to cause a bit of burnout.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]