7 ms·

In the Salary Race, Engineers Sprint but English Majors Endure

42 points by tlb 7y ago

Yhippa 7y ago
Can't read the article, even through the web link above. It makes me think based on the title that lots of new college hires must be making insane amounts of money right out of school. What happens say, 10-15 years down the road when being a good developer won't cut it and you either go into management or IC it somehow? I don't think everyone can do that because as you move up there are fewer positions. Also, there are new college grads right behind you willing to do what you're doing for way cheaper. Even if you've kept up with your skills it seems like it's easier than ever to pick up new skills due to democratization of learning.
- dlphn___xyz 7y ago
  it really depends on the industry.
ajhurliman 7y ago
Bold claims with almost no citations? Thanks for the opinions, but I think I'll pass.
dpark 7y ago
> Computer science and engineering majors between the ages of 23 and 25 who were working full time earned an average of $61,744 in 2017, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. This was 37 percent higher than the average starting salary of $45,032 earned by people who majored in history or the social sciences (which include economics, political science and sociology). Large differences in starting salary by major held for both men and women. > Men majoring in computer science or engineering roughly doubled their starting salaries by age 40, to an average of $124,458. Yet earnings growth is even faster in other majors, and some catch up completely. By age 40, the average salary of all male college graduates was $111,870, and social science and history majors earned $131,154 — an average that is lifted, in part, by high-paying jobs in management, business and law. Uh, yeah. From 23-25 you’re comparing engineers vs random 4-year degrees. At 40 you’re comparing engineers vs a group that suddenly includes lawyers and MBAs. You’d find similar results if you compared baristas to premed students. At 23 the typical barista is earning at least minimum wage while the typical premed student is earning literally nothing (unless moonlighting as a barista...). Suddenly their fortunes reverse at 40 when a significant portion of premed students have turned into established doctors. 23-25 is the time that all the advanced degrees are being earned. If you want a fair comparison you have to compare equivalent education in each age group. You can’t suddenly change the cohort at 40.
- coliveira 7y ago
  I think it is a fair comparison, because this is measuring career progression. Social science professions progress toward management positions or law. What would be a similar path for engineers? If that doesn't exist, then it is a problem that needs to be dealt with.
  - dpark 7y ago
    It isn’t measuring career progression. That’s the point. It is conflating entirely unrelated career progressions. The set of people who have a sociology degree at 23 and are working as salespeople or office managers or whatever else are almost entirely disjoint from the set of people who have a JD or MBA at 40. Largely that second category is made of people who were not working at 23 because they were actively pursuing a postgraduate degree. There is actually no career progression that results in a post graduate degree being earned. That is simply not part of career progression. Earning an advanced degree is something that one can choose to do instead of investing in one’s present career. No amount of hard work at your job will turn a four year English degree into a law degree or MBA.
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      >are almost entirely disjoint from the set of people who have a JD or MBA at 40 My S.O. has a sociology degree, and worked at JC Penny's after college. She now has an MBA and a JD, and is COO for a healthcare delivery network of several hospitals and a whole load of clinics. I doubt she is the only one like that.
      - dpark 7y ago
        I’m fairly confident that your SO’s case and educational path is extremely atypical. Even if it weren’t, it wouldn’t say that a sociology degree is a good way to earn a high income or become a COO. It would say that a sociology degree followed by a JD and MBA is a good path for those things.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
apollo_ 7y ago
the effect of compounding is notably absent in the discussion.
- cellular 7y ago
  Author doesn't know what that is. :-)
mips_avatar 7y ago
We should have levels.fyi for more things in life. It really blew my mind how much the tech companies pay. Made me realize I needed to prioritize those companies for my job search.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  > Made me realize I needed to prioritize those companies for my job search. Ehh, or just do less work at a place that pays less.
  - solipsism 7y ago
    It's a common misconception that working at these companies requires selling your soul. Some company cultures are better than others. Some teams are better than others. Lots of people at these companies work a strict 40.
    - endtime 7y ago
      I've been a SWE at Google for a while, been promoted a couple times, been a tech lead a couple times. Pretty much always worked 40 hours a week, and I don't think this is unusual. There might be some folks working 50 hours, but I suspect in most cases that's because they want to work 50 hours.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    Google has a reputation for being fairly laid back.
    - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
      32 hours is currently my goal—that’s the cutoff for healthcare.
pockettanyas 7y ago
It seems like median would be a much better metric than mean here.
powerslacker 7y ago
So for nearly two decades take a pay cut of tens of thousands of dollars just to catch up at age 40? Even if there were any citations to back up the claims in this article, it wouldn't make any sense!
- dehrmann 7y ago
  Not just that, it didn't call out opportunity cost.
topkai22 7y ago
$141000/year is a shockingly large income for any broad group of people in the US. According to the ACS, the median earnings for all bachelor's degree holding full time make workers is $61k. That's for the full population, so it should in fact be centered somewhere near age 35-40. I don't know where the author is getting the $112k number for all men at age 40 is from, but it seems impossible from my knowledge of the ACS statistics. Perhaps the mean drifts that high with super star executive pay? Regardless, it makes me suspicious of the other numbers in this article- anyone have an idea of how the author could get these earnings statistics from ACS data?
- eloff 7y ago
  I was thinking the same thing, this doesn't seem possible.
dasil003 7y ago
My guess is this has more to do with technician roles having an acceptable baseline and the personality type not wanting to go into management. If you sampled just managers only, I doubt you'd see the same difference because technical expertise is extremely valuable in management. Regardless of the nuance of the stats though, the idea that you'd choose between wildly differing majors based on watered down averages strikes me as a really poor strategy. The variance on salary progression is huge, and it's not what you learned in school but what you do on the job that fuels your advancement. IMHO you're much better off starting by optimizing what you are naturally interested in at a young age, develop your skills along the way, but stay open and ready for new opportunities as you progress through your career.
- plutonorm 7y ago
  I've never been able to break into management and now I'm 40. Compared to most programmers I'm personable and outgoing. Getting a leg up into management is very difficult. In 13 years as a programmer I've never worked with anyone who achieved it. Don't bank on it being possible. If you want to get into management you need to take radical action. Don't drift along like I did and be bitterly dissapinted that you're stuck in development probably forever, like I did.
ltbarcly3 7y ago
The title of the article says "English majors", but the body says "Liberal Arts majors". "Liberal Arts" isn't a category of undergraduate major. It is it's own category, which is generally only offered at 'Liberal Arts' colleges which offer only that major. However, if you take 'Liberal Arts' to be a 'category of categories', it could potentially include: https://www.internationalstudent.com/study-liberal-arts/ https://www.internationalstudent.com/study-liberal-arts/ Humanities - English Literature, Modern Languages, History, and Philosophy Social Sciences - Anthropology, Economics, Geography, Political Science, and Sociology Creative Arts - Fine Art, Theatre, Speech, and Creative Writing Sciences – Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics Ok, nearly any major that existed before 1940 apart from Mathematics and Engineering. What did the survey say exactly? Well, first of all, from everything I can tell it only includes 4 states, Colorado, Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin. Not exactly representative, probably, but what schools are included? School list (for Colorado): ADAMS STATE COLLEGE AIMS COMMUNITY COLLEGE ARAPAHOE COMMUNITY COLLEGE COLORADO MESA UNIVERSITY COLORADO MOUNTAIN COLLEGE COLORADO NORTHWESTERN COMMUNITY COLLEGE COLORADO SCHOOL OF MINES COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY - GLOBAL CAMPU COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY - PUEBLO COMMUNITY COLLEGE OF AURORA COMMUNITY COLLEGE OF DENVER EMILY GRIFFITH TECHNICAL COLLEGE FORT LEWIS COLLEGE FRONT RANGE COMMUNITY COLLEGE LAMAR COMMUNITY COLLEGE METROPOLITAN STATE UNIVERSITY OF DENVER MORGAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE NORTHEASTERN JUNIOR COLLEGE OTERO JUNIOR COLLEGE PICKENS TECHNICAL COLLEGE PIKES PEAK COMMUNITY COLLEGE PUEBLO COMMUNITY COLLEGE RED ROCKS COMMUNITY COLLEGE TRINIDAD STATE JR COLLEGE UNIV OF COLORADO AT COLO SPRINGS UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO DENVER UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO - BOULDER UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN COLORADO WESTERN STATE COLORADO UNIVERSITY Well, I've never heard of any of those schools, but whatever, maybe most people go to schools I've never heard of so that's not exactly evidence of anything. I didn't want to go through every school, so I just picked University of Colorado, Denver, since it seems like it's probably one of the bigger schools? I used https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/searchresults.xhtml?refresh=t#acsST https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/searchresu... to compare all the majors. I couldn't find a single non-STEM major that had better incomes than even a single STEM major. I assume this is the dataset he is taking his data from since he links to it. So I guess what I'm saying is, this article seems to be predicated on a tiny dataset from a few select schools from a few select states, does not include flagship schools, (in fact it seems to only include 3rd and 4th tier schools, no Anne Arbor, Reed, University of Portland, University of Oregon, Rice, UofT Austin, Texas A&M, U of Wisconsin, Lawrence, Milwaukee School of Engineering, Marquette, etc etc etc. So before you debate 'what this means' you should know that, based on the above, it means nothing, and no general facts can be drawn from it. I couldn't even figure out what methodology he used to come to his conclusions (if any), or even what he means by 'liberal arts' since that's not a category in the data. All that, and the data I could find completely disagrees with his analysis, and in fact shows the complete opposite.
gautamcgoel 7y ago
I'm studying machine learning as a PhD student at Caltech. I have heard of graduating ML PhD students from my department making $400-500k/year as a starting salary. Heck, they could probably retire by 35. I doubt any English major could match that... I wish the NYT article also looked at starting salaries of fresh PhDs, not just new college grads.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  The thing is this, that's nice for people who go to CalTech and get PhD's. What about the guy with a Master's from University of Illinois, Georgia or Michigan? What about the guy who only has a BS? None of those guys are getting 500 grand. The point is that people like that should probably consider a long term plan to keep their incomes growing at the mid-life stage.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  > Heck, they could probably retire by 35. As a PhD student (PhD students are underpaid to an almost criminal extant), you might think that, but start with half of that going to taxes, a $2M home, and escalating expenses. You can make it happen, but you get a bit of a culture shock when you go from making that much money to living off $50k in interest and living in Toledo.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    'FIRE' pursuants do not generally buy $2M homes, or no, they wouldn't manage it!
- roel_v 7y ago
  Well sure and there are soccer players without any form of degree who make 10x that, what's your point?
laurencerowe 7y ago
> One of the largest and most popular courses in the Stanford computer science department is CS229 — Machine Learning, taught by the artificial intelligence expert and entrepreneur Andrew Ng. This course did not exist until 2003, when Professor Ng taught it for the first time with 68 students, and very little like it existed anywhere on college campuses 15 years ago. Today, the machine learning courses at Stanford enroll more than a thousand students. Machine Learning was a standard offering in CS departments in the early 2000's. It was already a venerable subfield with much of the basic theory having been developed in the 1970's and 1980's. I remember thinking it was something of a curiosity and not terribly practical but it's absurd to imply it sprung from nothing.
- _delirium 7y ago
  I was also surprised by that bit. Tom Mitchell's influential textbook [1] came out in 1997, and was already being used by quite a few courses within a few years of release. [1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/mlbook.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/mlbook.html
  - noneeeed 7y ago
    That was my textbook at York Uni back in 2000, it was a great book. I recently got a new copy and quickly realised that I have forgotten most of the maths that I used to know, so first I need to do a refresher on that :) That book taught me an important lesson that I wish I'd learned earlier, that for many of my courses reading the textbook would have been a good idea. My lecturer for the ML course was unbelievably tedious, and I realised I'd absorbed almost nothing. I sat down with Mitchell's book for a week before the exam, did all the exercises, and got the highest mark in my degree. I often wonder how much better I could have done, and how much more I'd have learnt, if I'd put that sort of work into all my other modules earlier in the course.
- danso 7y ago
  How does your assertion contradict the quoted excerpt? It merely states that Ng's course began in 2003 with a relatively small number of students, and that few other colleges had taught such a course 15 years ago. Not that Ng invented the field of machine learning.
timwaagh 7y ago
I speculate the cause is self selection. People who know they don't have what it takes to become manager or any job that depends on soft skills are unlikely to major in liberal arts and more likely to choose engineering. Hence, fewer engineers move up the ladder. I can speak from experience. My parents prevented me from choosing a masters in science management because of the management.
cryofan 7y ago
fake science bought and paid for by the college cartel, I would guess
regulation_d 7y ago
> Between the ages of 25 and 40, the share of STEM majors working in STEM jobs falls from 65 percent to 48 percent. Many of them shift into managerial positions, which pay well but do not always require specialized skills. While technically true, I would argue that many of the most successful managers are at least in part successful because they have a really strong background in the field they are managing. Most people want to be managed by people who understand some of the nuances of what they're doing.
ajbonkoski 7y ago
(sigh) They're comparing averages, so the whole theory is suspect. Averages are a terrible way to do a comparison. Averages aren't terribly useful unless you know that your data is Gaussian (or a sum of IID Random Variable => see the CLT). Folks love to erroneously assume Gaussian. In this particular problem, I would expect to see a multimodal distribution for the liberal arts majors.. (i.e. some folks have massive salaries (famous authors) and some have small salaries (high school English teachers)). In such a case, the average can end up at a value that basically doesn't exist in the underlying distribution. So you end up comparing nonsense.

42 points by tlb 7y ago

Can't read the article, even through the web link above. It makes me think based on the title that lots of new college hires must be making insane amounts of money right out of school. What happens say, 10-15 years down the road when being a good developer won't cut it and you either go into management or IC it somehow? I don't think everyone can do that because as you move up there are fewer positions. Also, there are new college grads right behind you willing to do what you're doing for way cheaper. Even if you've kept up with your skills it seems like it's easier than ever to pick up new skills due to democratization of learning.

dlphn___xyz 7y ago
it really depends on the industry.

ajhurliman 7y ago

Bold claims with almost no citations? Thanks for the opinions, but I think I'll pass.

dpark 7y ago

> Computer science and engineering majors between the ages of 23 and 25 who were working full time earned an average of $61,744 in 2017, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. This was 37 percent higher than the average starting salary of $45,032 earned by people who majored in history or the social sciences (which include economics, political science and sociology). Large differences in starting salary by major held for both men and women. > Men majoring in computer science or engineering roughly doubled their starting salaries by age 40, to an average of $124,458. Yet earnings growth is even faster in other majors, and some catch up completely. By age 40, the average salary of all male college graduates was $111,870, and social science and history majors earned $131,154 — an average that is lifted, in part, by high-paying jobs in management, business and law. Uh, yeah. From 23-25 you’re comparing engineers vs random 4-year degrees. At 40 you’re comparing engineers vs a group that suddenly includes lawyers and MBAs. You’d find similar results if you compared baristas to premed students. At 23 the typical barista is earning at least minimum wage while the typical premed student is earning literally nothing (unless moonlighting as a barista...). Suddenly their fortunes reverse at 40 when a significant portion of premed students have turned into established doctors. 23-25 is the time that all the advanced degrees are being earned. If you want a fair comparison you have to compare equivalent education in each age group. You can’t suddenly change the cohort at 40.

coliveira 7y ago
I think it is a fair comparison, because this is measuring career progression. Social science professions progress toward management positions or law. What would be a similar path for engineers? If that doesn't exist, then it is a problem that needs to be dealt with.
- dpark 7y ago
  It isn’t measuring career progression. That’s the point. It is conflating entirely unrelated career progressions. The set of people who have a sociology degree at 23 and are working as salespeople or office managers or whatever else are almost entirely disjoint from the set of people who have a JD or MBA at 40. Largely that second category is made of people who were not working at 23 because they were actively pursuing a postgraduate degree. There is actually no career progression that results in a post graduate degree being earned. That is simply not part of career progression. Earning an advanced degree is something that one can choose to do instead of investing in one’s present career. No amount of hard work at your job will turn a four year English degree into a law degree or MBA.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    >are almost entirely disjoint from the set of people who have a JD or MBA at 40 My S.O. has a sociology degree, and worked at JC Penny's after college. She now has an MBA and a JD, and is COO for a healthcare delivery network of several hospitals and a whole load of clinics. I doubt she is the only one like that.
    - dpark 7y ago
      I’m fairly confident that your SO’s case and educational path is extremely atypical. Even if it weren’t, it wouldn’t say that a sociology degree is a good way to earn a high income or become a COO. It would say that a sociology degree followed by a JD and MBA is a good path for those things.
  - lonelappde 7y ago

apollo_ 7y ago

the effect of compounding is notably absent in the discussion.

cellular 7y ago
Author doesn't know what that is. :-)

mips_avatar 7y ago

We should have levels.fyi for more things in life. It really blew my mind how much the tech companies pay. Made me realize I needed to prioritize those companies for my job search.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago
> Made me realize I needed to prioritize those companies for my job search. Ehh, or just do less work at a place that pays less.
- solipsism 7y ago
  It's a common misconception that working at these companies requires selling your soul. Some company cultures are better than others. Some teams are better than others. Lots of people at these companies work a strict 40.
  - endtime 7y ago
    I've been a SWE at Google for a while, been promoted a couple times, been a tech lead a couple times. Pretty much always worked 40 hours a week, and I don't think this is unusual. There might be some folks working 50 hours, but I suspect in most cases that's because they want to work 50 hours.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Google has a reputation for being fairly laid back.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    32 hours is currently my goal—that’s the cutoff for healthcare.

pockettanyas 7y ago

It seems like median would be a much better metric than mean here.

powerslacker 7y ago

So for nearly two decades take a pay cut of tens of thousands of dollars just to catch up at age 40? Even if there were any citations to back up the claims in this article, it wouldn't make any sense!

dehrmann 7y ago
Not just that, it didn't call out opportunity cost.

topkai22 7y ago

$141000/year is a shockingly large income for any broad group of people in the US. According to the ACS, the median earnings for all bachelor's degree holding full time make workers is $61k. That's for the full population, so it should in fact be centered somewhere near age 35-40. I don't know where the author is getting the $112k number for all men at age 40 is from, but it seems impossible from my knowledge of the ACS statistics. Perhaps the mean drifts that high with super star executive pay? Regardless, it makes me suspicious of the other numbers in this article- anyone have an idea of how the author could get these earnings statistics from ACS data?

eloff 7y ago
I was thinking the same thing, this doesn't seem possible.

dasil003 7y ago

My guess is this has more to do with technician roles having an acceptable baseline and the personality type not wanting to go into management. If you sampled just managers only, I doubt you'd see the same difference because technical expertise is extremely valuable in management. Regardless of the nuance of the stats though, the idea that you'd choose between wildly differing majors based on watered down averages strikes me as a really poor strategy. The variance on salary progression is huge, and it's not what you learned in school but what you do on the job that fuels your advancement. IMHO you're much better off starting by optimizing what you are naturally interested in at a young age, develop your skills along the way, but stay open and ready for new opportunities as you progress through your career.

plutonorm 7y ago
I've never been able to break into management and now I'm 40. Compared to most programmers I'm personable and outgoing. Getting a leg up into management is very difficult. In 13 years as a programmer I've never worked with anyone who achieved it. Don't bank on it being possible. If you want to get into management you need to take radical action. Don't drift along like I did and be bitterly dissapinted that you're stuck in development probably forever, like I did.

ltbarcly3 7y ago

The title of the article says "English majors", but the body says "Liberal Arts majors". "Liberal Arts" isn't a category of undergraduate major. It is it's own category, which is generally only offered at 'Liberal Arts' colleges which offer only that major. However, if you take 'Liberal Arts' to be a 'category of categories', it could potentially include: https://www.internationalstudent.com/study-liberal-arts/ https://www.internationalstudent.com/study-liberal-arts/ Humanities - English Literature, Modern Languages, History, and Philosophy Social Sciences - Anthropology, Economics, Geography, Political Science, and Sociology Creative Arts - Fine Art, Theatre, Speech, and Creative Writing Sciences – Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics Ok, nearly any major that existed before 1940 apart from Mathematics and Engineering. What did the survey say exactly? Well, first of all, from everything I can tell it only includes 4 states, Colorado, Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin. Not exactly representative, probably, but what schools are included? School list (for Colorado): ADAMS STATE COLLEGE AIMS COMMUNITY COLLEGE ARAPAHOE COMMUNITY COLLEGE COLORADO MESA UNIVERSITY COLORADO MOUNTAIN COLLEGE COLORADO NORTHWESTERN COMMUNITY COLLEGE COLORADO SCHOOL OF MINES COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY - GLOBAL CAMPU COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY - PUEBLO COMMUNITY COLLEGE OF AURORA COMMUNITY COLLEGE OF DENVER EMILY GRIFFITH TECHNICAL COLLEGE FORT LEWIS COLLEGE FRONT RANGE COMMUNITY COLLEGE LAMAR COMMUNITY COLLEGE METROPOLITAN STATE UNIVERSITY OF DENVER MORGAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE NORTHEASTERN JUNIOR COLLEGE OTERO JUNIOR COLLEGE PICKENS TECHNICAL COLLEGE PIKES PEAK COMMUNITY COLLEGE PUEBLO COMMUNITY COLLEGE RED ROCKS COMMUNITY COLLEGE TRINIDAD STATE JR COLLEGE UNIV OF COLORADO AT COLO SPRINGS UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO DENVER UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO - BOULDER UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN COLORADO WESTERN STATE COLORADO UNIVERSITY Well, I've never heard of any of those schools, but whatever, maybe most people go to schools I've never heard of so that's not exactly evidence of anything. I didn't want to go through every school, so I just picked University of Colorado, Denver, since it seems like it's probably one of the bigger schools? I used https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/searchresults.xhtml?refresh=t#acsST https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/searchresu... to compare all the majors. I couldn't find a single non-STEM major that had better incomes than even a single STEM major. I assume this is the dataset he is taking his data from since he links to it. So I guess what I'm saying is, this article seems to be predicated on a tiny dataset from a few select schools from a few select states, does not include flagship schools, (in fact it seems to only include 3rd and 4th tier schools, no Anne Arbor, Reed, University of Portland, University of Oregon, Rice, UofT Austin, Texas A&M, U of Wisconsin, Lawrence, Milwaukee School of Engineering, Marquette, etc etc etc. So before you debate 'what this means' you should know that, based on the above, it means nothing, and no general facts can be drawn from it. I couldn't even figure out what methodology he used to come to his conclusions (if any), or even what he means by 'liberal arts' since that's not a category in the data. All that, and the data I could find completely disagrees with his analysis, and in fact shows the complete opposite.

gautamcgoel 7y ago

I'm studying machine learning as a PhD student at Caltech. I have heard of graduating ML PhD students from my department making $400-500k/year as a starting salary. Heck, they could probably retire by 35. I doubt any English major could match that... I wish the NYT article also looked at starting salaries of fresh PhDs, not just new college grads.

bilbo0s 7y ago
The thing is this, that's nice for people who go to CalTech and get PhD's. What about the guy with a Master's from University of Illinois, Georgia or Michigan? What about the guy who only has a BS? None of those guys are getting 500 grand. The point is that people like that should probably consider a long term plan to keep their incomes growing at the mid-life stage.
dehrmann 7y ago
> Heck, they could probably retire by 35. As a PhD student (PhD students are underpaid to an almost criminal extant), you might think that, but start with half of that going to taxes, a $2M home, and escalating expenses. You can make it happen, but you get a bit of a culture shock when you go from making that much money to living off $50k in interest and living in Toledo.
- OJFord 7y ago
  'FIRE' pursuants do not generally buy $2M homes, or no, they wouldn't manage it!
roel_v 7y ago
Well sure and there are soccer players without any form of degree who make 10x that, what's your point?

laurencerowe 7y ago

> One of the largest and most popular courses in the Stanford computer science department is CS229 — Machine Learning, taught by the artificial intelligence expert and entrepreneur Andrew Ng. This course did not exist until 2003, when Professor Ng taught it for the first time with 68 students, and very little like it existed anywhere on college campuses 15 years ago. Today, the machine learning courses at Stanford enroll more than a thousand students. Machine Learning was a standard offering in CS departments in the early 2000's. It was already a venerable subfield with much of the basic theory having been developed in the 1970's and 1980's. I remember thinking it was something of a curiosity and not terribly practical but it's absurd to imply it sprung from nothing.

_delirium 7y ago
I was also surprised by that bit. Tom Mitchell's influential textbook [1] came out in 1997, and was already being used by quite a few courses within a few years of release. [1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/mlbook.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/mlbook.html
- noneeeed 7y ago
  That was my textbook at York Uni back in 2000, it was a great book. I recently got a new copy and quickly realised that I have forgotten most of the maths that I used to know, so first I need to do a refresher on that :) That book taught me an important lesson that I wish I'd learned earlier, that for many of my courses reading the textbook would have been a good idea. My lecturer for the ML course was unbelievably tedious, and I realised I'd absorbed almost nothing. I sat down with Mitchell's book for a week before the exam, did all the exercises, and got the highest mark in my degree. I often wonder how much better I could have done, and how much more I'd have learnt, if I'd put that sort of work into all my other modules earlier in the course.
danso 7y ago
How does your assertion contradict the quoted excerpt? It merely states that Ng's course began in 2003 with a relatively small number of students, and that few other colleges had taught such a course 15 years ago. Not that Ng invented the field of machine learning.

timwaagh 7y ago

I speculate the cause is self selection. People who know they don't have what it takes to become manager or any job that depends on soft skills are unlikely to major in liberal arts and more likely to choose engineering. Hence, fewer engineers move up the ladder. I can speak from experience. My parents prevented me from choosing a masters in science management because of the management.

cryofan 7y ago

fake science bought and paid for by the college cartel, I would guess

regulation_d 7y ago

> Between the ages of 25 and 40, the share of STEM majors working in STEM jobs falls from 65 percent to 48 percent. Many of them shift into managerial positions, which pay well but do not always require specialized skills. While technically true, I would argue that many of the most successful managers are at least in part successful because they have a really strong background in the field they are managing. Most people want to be managed by people who understand some of the nuances of what they're doing.

ajbonkoski 7y ago

(sigh) They're comparing averages, so the whole theory is suspect. Averages are a terrible way to do a comparison. Averages aren't terribly useful unless you know that your data is Gaussian (or a sum of IID Random Variable => see the CLT). Folks love to erroneously assume Gaussian. In this particular problem, I would expect to see a multimodal distribution for the liberal arts majors.. (i.e. some folks have massive salaries (famous authors) and some have small salaries (high school English teachers)). In such a case, the average can end up at a value that basically doesn't exist in the underlying distribution. So you end up comparing nonsense.