4 ms·

I hate to sound mean spirited, but I have a hard time being sympathetic to intelligent well educated people who chose to pursue careers that obviously don't pay

I hate to sound mean spirited, but I have a hard time being sympathetic to intelligent well educated people who chose to pursue careers that obviously don't pay well. If you like being on college campus, teaching, and don't care about money - hey, that's fantastic. More power to you. Be an adjunct professor. If you do care about money - think about a different career. I just don't get why this is a problem. You chose to study mideval literature. Chose to get a PhD in it. Chose to be an adjunct professor. Kept choosing to keep doing it, etc. If it's a bad job, stop doing it.

ardy42 8y ago
> but I have a hard time being sympathetic to intelligent well educated people who chose to pursue careers that obviously don't pay well. The problem is that those people went through their schooling being told that they were awesome and should be a professor (by people who successfully became tenured professors, and who didn't experience failure). Then they finished school, tried to actually become a tenured professor, and found out being awesome isn't good enough. You actually have to be spectacular. So they failed, unlike their old professors who encouraged them the whole way. So there they are. Ph.D in hand after a decade of hard work, but no tenure in sight. What would you do in their position? Find and adjunct job that's at least someone related to what you've spent your life doing? Or roll the dice again and spend thousands of dollars you don't have to go to some javascript bootcamp or something (that you'll probably fail, since you're no technical whiz kid, because you spent the last decade focusing on medieval literature)?
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  If you do not know that your chances of getting a tenure track job in your field are very, very low before you are finished your first semester you are deluding yourself. Even more so for marginal graduate programmes with negligible placements. Adjuncting is not on the academic track. If you are adjuncting you have already lost. If you choose to keep making the same mistake over and over again you don’t generally get much sympathy if it’s gambling or sticking with a partner who beats you. Why does chasing a dream you’ve failed at get so much more sympathy? Teaching high school is very much not what most people want to do but it’s at least better than adjuncting. Lots of people do things they don’t want do for money, if adjuncts would prefer to do something they want to fit very little money, great. Their choice, the consequences are theirs too. Lambda School is free until you get paid so if they want to do a boot camp that’s the way to go, not borrowing money.
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    Being an academic has a certain amount in common with founding a startup. Everyone knows it's hard to get tenure but everyone thinks they're special and their hard work and talent will let them succeed when most people fail. But while second place for failing to start a startup is you go make high six figures at a FAANG, second place in academia is you're fucked.
    - ALittleLight 8y ago
      This is like saying that skydiving has something in common with Russian Roulette. It's true, both are dangerous, but one is clearly a much better choice for exactly the difference you articulate.
- minor3rd 8y ago
  > The problem is that those people went through their schooling being told that they were awesome and should be a professor (by people who successfully became tenured professors, and who didn't experience failure). IMO it's still on them if they didn't do the research on what their outcome might look like. I absolutely loved physics in high school and chose to study computer science because I knew it would pay my bills. 8 years later I am not regretting my decision at all.
  - ardy42 8y ago
    > IMO it's still on them if they didn't do the research on what their outcome might look like. I absolutely loved physics in high school and chose to study computer science because I knew it would pay my bills. 8 years later I am not regretting my decision at all. This is that corrosive individualist idea that the community has zero responsibility for its members, so we get to wash our hands of each individual's failure. It's wrong. Often the individual can't "do the research" to accurately estimate their outcome, such as when they're so disadvantaged they don't know where to start, or when they've been lied to.
povertyworld 8y ago
People encourage this stuff. I don't know how many times I've been told to get my masters in history so I can "teach credit classes". No. I made a mistake with my undergrad. I'm not doubling down on it.
chrstphrhrt 8y ago
We should fund medieval literature well too. Some of the best CTOs are humanities people for whom engineering just isn't fully satisfying at intellectual life scale. Applying symbolic logic, hermeneutics, retroduction, and criticism are higher abstract levels of creative problem solving, via inference to the likely explanation with respect to priors, a.k.a. the scientific method. These kinds of reasoning simply aren't practically doable by math alone yet, not to mention deep learning tools in the field. The next wave of AI methods will need to go beyond statistics to come full circle, because classification is not reasoning. What else is there? All the GOFAI stuff, prolog, expert systems, knowledge graphs, fuzzy/modal logics. These things were always great at reasoning but the last winter happened because they were bad at dealing with uncertainty. Now the stats methods have solved that problem but they suck at reasoning. It is time for a synthesis. As a startup I don't want a data science PhD to tinker with an optimal CNN design for a year to eke out that extra 1 or 2 percent of precision and recall. I want an ensemble of specialized models, ideally pre-trained, grafted together in a logically consistent way that is configurable and introspect-able via text/data at runtime. The economy is misconfigured! That said, humanities people should probably learn how to code as a research skill.
- azhenley 8y ago
  If someone with a humanities PhD can market/apply themself the way you just did, they will have no problem finding a high paying position.
- povertyworld 8y ago
  I like to tell myself that having a humanities or social science background will give me some kind of different insight into AI/ML, but other than knowing what a gerund is without having to look it up, or nodding knowingly when someone drops a Wittgenstein quote, it's really not helping. Then again, I can't be sure that I'm not stupid.
- dx87 8y ago
  When I was doing a training exercise in the military, I was talking to an Air Force General who told us that their best cybersecurity officers had undergrads in non-tech fields. They said that computer science and software engineering undergrads weren't good at thinking outside the box because they were used to questions being provably right or wrong with no middleground. Their officers with political science, philosophy, or other humanities undergrads were better at handling big picture problems that needed a "best" answer, not necessarily a verifiably 100% correct answer. They needed more technical training after graduation, but usually ended up being superior cybersecurity officers.
julius_set 8y ago
From a capitalist standpoint your comment makes sense but from a larger picture perspective negating knowledge and the spreading of said knowledge for monetary pursuits is an overall net negative for our species. I don’t have an answer on how to solve apart from coming up with a better alternative to capitalism
mazelife 8y ago
> I hate to sound mean spirited, but I have a hard time being sympathetic to intelligent well educated people who chose to pursue careers that obviously don't pay well. I think the issue that the author is raising is that in the not-so-distant past, these jobs did pay well. They weren't wildly lucrative, but one could live comfortably as an academic. At some point though things started to change. College costs have massively outpaced inflation in the last two decades [0] and yet with all this extra money sloshing around in the system, salaries for tenured professors have not seen anything even close to that kind of growth in the same time period [1]. In fact most institutions actually employ fewer full-time faculty than they did 20 or 30 years ago, shifting more and more to part-timers and adjuncts [3]. There are a lot of people in this thread saying "it's just supply and demand!" and that's part of the story, but it's not the whole story. Conscious choices were made by university administrators, trustees, and boards to hollow-out and undercut the professorial class, even as they have massively expanded their own bureaucratic and administrative class, gone on building sprees, and spent lavishly on student amenities. I think it's fair for us to question the morality of this and to question whether the result of all this has been a net gain or loss for the cause of higher education. > You chose to study medieval [sic] literature. That kind of attitude towards the humanities and academia in general is distressing to me, but all too common these days. I think it's also a bit shortsighted as what's happening to academics is part of a larger hollowing-out of the middle class in this country; hardly something to be celebrated. Today it's college professors, but it's not at all unlikely that in a decade or two people will be saying similar things about people who "chose" to study software engineering. [0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-13/college-tuition-in-the-u-s-again-rises-faster-than-inflation http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-13/college-tu... [1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_316.10.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_316.10.as... [2] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_315.10.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_315.10.as...
- max76 8y ago
  > Conscious choices were made by university administrators, trustees, and boards to hollow-out and undercut the professorial class, even as they have massively expanded their own bureaucratic and administrative class, gone on building sprees, and spent lavishly on student amenities. This was the worst part about paying for college. So much of what I was buying had little direct impact on my education.

ardy42 8y ago

> but I have a hard time being sympathetic to intelligent well educated people who chose to pursue careers that obviously don't pay well. The problem is that those people went through their schooling being told that they were awesome and should be a professor (by people who successfully became tenured professors, and who didn't experience failure). Then they finished school, tried to actually become a tenured professor, and found out being awesome isn't good enough. You actually have to be spectacular. So they failed, unlike their old professors who encouraged them the whole way. So there they are. Ph.D in hand after a decade of hard work, but no tenure in sight. What would you do in their position? Find and adjunct job that's at least someone related to what you've spent your life doing? Or roll the dice again and spend thousands of dollars you don't have to go to some javascript bootcamp or something (that you'll probably fail, since you're no technical whiz kid, because you spent the last decade focusing on medieval literature)?

barry-cotter 8y ago
If you do not know that your chances of getting a tenure track job in your field are very, very low before you are finished your first semester you are deluding yourself. Even more so for marginal graduate programmes with negligible placements. Adjuncting is not on the academic track. If you are adjuncting you have already lost. If you choose to keep making the same mistake over and over again you don’t generally get much sympathy if it’s gambling or sticking with a partner who beats you. Why does chasing a dream you’ve failed at get so much more sympathy? Teaching high school is very much not what most people want to do but it’s at least better than adjuncting. Lots of people do things they don’t want do for money, if adjuncts would prefer to do something they want to fit very little money, great. Their choice, the consequences are theirs too. Lambda School is free until you get paid so if they want to do a boot camp that’s the way to go, not borrowing money.
- saalweachter 8y ago
  Being an academic has a certain amount in common with founding a startup. Everyone knows it's hard to get tenure but everyone thinks they're special and their hard work and talent will let them succeed when most people fail. But while second place for failing to start a startup is you go make high six figures at a FAANG, second place in academia is you're fucked.
  - ALittleLight 8y ago
    This is like saying that skydiving has something in common with Russian Roulette. It's true, both are dangerous, but one is clearly a much better choice for exactly the difference you articulate.
minor3rd 8y ago
> The problem is that those people went through their schooling being told that they were awesome and should be a professor (by people who successfully became tenured professors, and who didn't experience failure). IMO it's still on them if they didn't do the research on what their outcome might look like. I absolutely loved physics in high school and chose to study computer science because I knew it would pay my bills. 8 years later I am not regretting my decision at all.
- ardy42 8y ago
  > IMO it's still on them if they didn't do the research on what their outcome might look like. I absolutely loved physics in high school and chose to study computer science because I knew it would pay my bills. 8 years later I am not regretting my decision at all. This is that corrosive individualist idea that the community has zero responsibility for its members, so we get to wash our hands of each individual's failure. It's wrong. Often the individual can't "do the research" to accurately estimate their outcome, such as when they're so disadvantaged they don't know where to start, or when they've been lied to.

povertyworld 8y ago

People encourage this stuff. I don't know how many times I've been told to get my masters in history so I can "teach credit classes". No. I made a mistake with my undergrad. I'm not doubling down on it.

chrstphrhrt 8y ago

We should fund medieval literature well too. Some of the best CTOs are humanities people for whom engineering just isn't fully satisfying at intellectual life scale. Applying symbolic logic, hermeneutics, retroduction, and criticism are higher abstract levels of creative problem solving, via inference to the likely explanation with respect to priors, a.k.a. the scientific method. These kinds of reasoning simply aren't practically doable by math alone yet, not to mention deep learning tools in the field. The next wave of AI methods will need to go beyond statistics to come full circle, because classification is not reasoning. What else is there? All the GOFAI stuff, prolog, expert systems, knowledge graphs, fuzzy/modal logics. These things were always great at reasoning but the last winter happened because they were bad at dealing with uncertainty. Now the stats methods have solved that problem but they suck at reasoning. It is time for a synthesis. As a startup I don't want a data science PhD to tinker with an optimal CNN design for a year to eke out that extra 1 or 2 percent of precision and recall. I want an ensemble of specialized models, ideally pre-trained, grafted together in a logically consistent way that is configurable and introspect-able via text/data at runtime. The economy is misconfigured! That said, humanities people should probably learn how to code as a research skill.

azhenley 8y ago
If someone with a humanities PhD can market/apply themself the way you just did, they will have no problem finding a high paying position.
povertyworld 8y ago
I like to tell myself that having a humanities or social science background will give me some kind of different insight into AI/ML, but other than knowing what a gerund is without having to look it up, or nodding knowingly when someone drops a Wittgenstein quote, it's really not helping. Then again, I can't be sure that I'm not stupid.
dx87 8y ago
When I was doing a training exercise in the military, I was talking to an Air Force General who told us that their best cybersecurity officers had undergrads in non-tech fields. They said that computer science and software engineering undergrads weren't good at thinking outside the box because they were used to questions being provably right or wrong with no middleground. Their officers with political science, philosophy, or other humanities undergrads were better at handling big picture problems that needed a "best" answer, not necessarily a verifiably 100% correct answer. They needed more technical training after graduation, but usually ended up being superior cybersecurity officers.

julius_set 8y ago

From a capitalist standpoint your comment makes sense but from a larger picture perspective negating knowledge and the spreading of said knowledge for monetary pursuits is an overall net negative for our species. I don’t have an answer on how to solve apart from coming up with a better alternative to capitalism

mazelife 8y ago

> I hate to sound mean spirited, but I have a hard time being sympathetic to intelligent well educated people who chose to pursue careers that obviously don't pay well. I think the issue that the author is raising is that in the not-so-distant past, these jobs did pay well. They weren't wildly lucrative, but one could live comfortably as an academic. At some point though things started to change. College costs have massively outpaced inflation in the last two decades [0] and yet with all this extra money sloshing around in the system, salaries for tenured professors have not seen anything even close to that kind of growth in the same time period [1]. In fact most institutions actually employ fewer full-time faculty than they did 20 or 30 years ago, shifting more and more to part-timers and adjuncts [3]. There are a lot of people in this thread saying "it's just supply and demand!" and that's part of the story, but it's not the whole story. Conscious choices were made by university administrators, trustees, and boards to hollow-out and undercut the professorial class, even as they have massively expanded their own bureaucratic and administrative class, gone on building sprees, and spent lavishly on student amenities. I think it's fair for us to question the morality of this and to question whether the result of all this has been a net gain or loss for the cause of higher education. > You chose to study medieval [sic] literature. That kind of attitude towards the humanities and academia in general is distressing to me, but all too common these days. I think it's also a bit shortsighted as what's happening to academics is part of a larger hollowing-out of the middle class in this country; hardly something to be celebrated. Today it's college professors, but it's not at all unlikely that in a decade or two people will be saying similar things about people who "chose" to study software engineering. [0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-13/college-tuition-in-the-u-s-again-rises-faster-than-inflation http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-13/college-tu... [1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_316.10.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_316.10.as... [2] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_315.10.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_315.10.as...

max76 8y ago
> Conscious choices were made by university administrators, trustees, and boards to hollow-out and undercut the professorial class, even as they have massively expanded their own bureaucratic and administrative class, gone on building sprees, and spent lavishly on student amenities. This was the worst part about paying for college. So much of what I was buying had little direct impact on my education.