14 ms·

Why Are Harvard Graduates In The Mailroom

103 points by kqr2 15y ago

redthrowaway 15y ago
I'm constantly reminded that we, as programmers, have excellent opportunities in both fields: we can both shoot for the stars in a startup, and have a comfortable fallback in enterprise. I can't think of many other professions with this great a degree of both opportunity and security.
- brandnewlow 15y ago
  For now, that is. The robots came for the content creators last decade. They're coming for the educators now. They will come for programmers, too, eventually.
  - benmathes 15y ago
    We are the ones making the robots, though.
    - smackay 15y ago
      The sense of solidarity between the robot makers and the lower ranks of the profession might not be a strong as you might like.
      - seclorum 15y ago
        So who will make the machines to disrupt the robots? Makers are always going to be at the top of the chain.
        sammyo 15y ago
        The guy that can negotiate a huge robot sales contract and use that to do a leveraged buyout that puts him in the CEO chair is at the top of the chain. (what a lovely reddit style chain of comments ; -)
      - bwarp 15y ago
        The higher ranks of the profession are still the bearers of all the keys. We will probably go all Luddite and smash the tools before this happens.
        arjunnarayan 15y ago
        Speak for yourself. I have no intention of preventing the robot revolution.
        bwarp 15y ago
        Until you are replaced with a very small shell script...
        bwarp 15y ago
        Until you are replaced with a very small shell script...
    - a_a_r_o_n 15y ago
      Until the robots make the robots.
      - angersock 15y ago
        You ever tried to use cmake without it shitting the bed in some way? We're a ways off.
        a_a_r_o_n 15y ago
        We're there now. How many people lay out CPU circuits at Intel any more? Computer (using a CPU) does that. How many people physically make chips at a foundry? "Robots" do that. There are a lot of tasks in designing and building computers that can only be done with computers these days. Sure, someone runs them, and someone does some significant level of design, but the final designs and products are no longer possible without the very products that those efforts produce. Lather, rinse, accelerate.
        angersock 15y ago
        I agree with both of your examples, but the post being responded to involved the replacement of programmers. Until we can come up with a conveniently numeric way of specifying, analyzing, and solving computational problems in the general case, I don't think I need to fear being replaced. Now, a lot of modern webdev, on the other hand... nextBigThing = WebBizFactory.createNewSite(ecommerceSingelton.getInstance().createNewMerchantAccount(), socialMediaFlywheel.getInstance().createSocialAdaptor(SocialAdapter.TWITTER), AWS.getInstance().getKVStoreFlavorOfWeek());
sskates 15y ago
"The Oscars make clear that there is only so much room at the top." I hate when people make this fallacy. It may be true to some extent for entertainment but there doesn't seem to be any limit to the number of businesses that can be created. As long as people want stuff then there is opportunity.
- _delirium 15y ago
  Since wealth is at least in part relative, there's some limit for how many people can be at the very top in tech as well. If millions of people had as much money as Sergey Brin has, then having $15b dollars wouldn't mean as much, or buy him as much. One way of thinking of it is how many people you could hire to work for you, which depends on the ratio between your wealth and their salaries.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    What limits the number of spots at the top is the total amount of resources allocated there. If the über-rich got less über, there would be more free spots there. Plus, if the gap between the very rich and the very poor is smaller, with a fairly large middle class in between, a lot of social tensions disappear.
  - Drbble 15y ago
    But don't confuse money (which can be inflated an has no inherent unit of conversion to the material world or labor) with material wealth. If everyone had, say, a Star Trek 3-D printer and power/atom supply, we'd all be pretty well off.
    - kaybe 15y ago
      If I compare what we have to what a typical Roman had, I'd say we're pretty well off already.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      I agree they're different, but I think something like labor-wealth is what a lot of people aspire to when they say they want to be wealthy. They don't just want to have a lot of stuff, but want to not have to work anymore to have it (i.e. own 100% of their own time), and they often want to be able to hire significant amounts of services from others (hire a personal chef, stay at fancy full-staff resorts, have a personal trainer, etc.). At least for now; perhaps as high-level robotics advances the wealthy will no longer be as interested in hiring human services. I think it'll remain true at the higher levels of wealth, though, because if you have a lot of wealth, what it really translates into isn't just material goods (there's diminishing returns on how many of those you really need past a few hundred million $s), but the power to significantly change what a non-trivial number of people work on. You can start a company and hire 5,000 people to work on a project you think should be worked on; you can take a different route by initiating a prize like the X-Prize to encourage people to work on it that way; you can start a foundation or grant program; you can singlehandedly decree that [movie genre] is going to be a significant new segment, by promising to plow $1 billion into it; etc. The main thing huge sums of money buy you, imo, is this relative power in the economy, to push people to work on what you think should be worked on--- which necessarily requires that your wealth has to be large in relative terms, as a fraction of the economy.
tpatke 15y ago
There is another aspect to this which the OP fails to mention - moving the needle. If you think about how much money you need to retire (f u money if you are under 30) then figure out how much money you need to save in order to achieve that...well, chances are you are not going to retire anytime soon. Now, say you were given a 20% raise. How would that affect our retirement prospects? Well, chances are you are not going to retire anytime soon. Even a large raise on an “employees” salary will not make a big difference on a, say, $2m retirement target. If you are working a 9-5 you are fighting for a 5% raise that just will not have any effect on your life. The "lottery jobs" offer a way out. Of course, it is not a perfect system so if you have any better ideas...
- kahawe 15y ago
  Though once I got a 300% raise instead of a 5% one, would I really want to retire at the living standard I had before or after the 5% raise? So, chances are you are STILL not going to retire anytime soon...
  - coopdog 15y ago
    I've had something similar happen to me (maybe not 300%) and I'm aware of the higher money but mentally I keep myself on my lower rate and standard of living, because I don't want to do this job forever. The sooner I can get to passive income funding an 'acceptable' life the better. Not everything that's worth doing takes money, just time, which you just don't have in a 9-5
- shin_lao 15y ago
  You make it sound like the purpose of life is retiring. I find that a little sad.
  - tatsuke95 15y ago
    You're both right, I think. The OP describes what I view as the reality for most people. But then I read your comment, and agree: that is pretty sad. Funny thing is, that seems to be an artifact of my parent's generation, the halcyon days of years past when America was a manufacturing powerhouse that we seem to want to get back to. Work sucks, so put in your time, then get out and start enjoying life. At 60 (if you're lucky) or 65 years old. But who wants to be touring around the world when you're old? Find something you love to do, and you'll be able to do it successfully until you drop dead. It's not all about wealth.
csomar 15y ago
The author forgets market demand. If the society needs 1 Oscar winner, then there will be 1 Oscar. After all, it's the viewer who finance Hollywood. There is a need for talent in the Tech (and other related industries) industry. Youth bootstrap startups so they get paid the right price for their talent. If you have the right talents and skills (programming, some design, marketing, market analysis, costumer support, networking...) there is little reasons that you fail your business. There is always some demand in the market, in some field. You have to figure it out and solve the problem. It's the problem here in Tunisia. We don't have a decent infrastructure (roads, schools, houses...) and we have a huge number of art, language, IT... graduates who can't find a job. They complain about the poor infrastructure, but solving it is actually finding a job, and a new business. There is a demand for workers in that field, and there are people with lots of money despite the country being a poor one.
dasil003 15y ago
I don't like the playing the lottery analogy. I get that your odds of joining the ranks of a mega-corp and climbing the ladder to one day become CEO are infinitesimal, but it's not dumb luck either. Unlike the lottery, many things are under your control, and if you have the proper drive and dedication you will quickly pull ahead of all the people who are there for an easy paycheck. When applied to startups, the assertion is downright offensive. At a startup the point is you take equity and you play a key role in the success of the company. There is luck involved as with anything in life, but chances are if you are en early employee, many parts of your success or failure can be traced back to specific actions that you personally decided and acted on. It's not easy and it's not always fair, but it's as close to a meritocracy as humanity has achieved so far.
- ht_th 15y ago
  Yes, but there are also a lot of things not under your control. You might be able to pull ahead quickly of the easy paycheck people, but then you're surrounded by other people with proper drive and dedication. To get ahead of them you need luck to have been given the right opportunity (in hindsight) that payed out, or to be liked more by those who promote you than your colleague, or to be the right sex (which is often irrelevant for the job), or be more beautiful (which often is irrelevant for the job), or being promoted just before the economic down turn and getting another turn when the economy comes up again, or having a family with some problems (like a sick child or spouse), and so on. A lot of these things will have unconscious effects on yourself, your colleagues, and the people that can promote you. It isn't a clear cut choice to perform well anymore to get ahead.
  - paulhauggis 15y ago
    Maybe so, but a person that truly wants to succeed will continue on and find other opportunities and act on them when one passes them by or they fail.
    - bartonfink 15y ago
      If that's not a one true scotsman, I don't know what is. Life happens. No matter how hard you try to roll with the punches, sometimes you get hit, and it's foolish to say that you really didn't want to dodge the punch that knocked you out.
robyates 15y ago
"many graphic designers have been replaced by Photoshop" ... I'm not sure that's how it works.
- gaius 15y ago
  Bad analogy, but the others work.
- JEVLON 15y ago
  "not-especially-creative professions" ...So Graphic Design is not creative. Apart from the excess use of Helvetica, calling Graphic Design uncreative is a sort of oxymoron.
- jackalope 15y ago
  Like his example of TurboTax, it's a DIY alternative to hiring a professional. For example, my 80's band hired a graphic designer and professional print shop to produce a poster with a blank spot to hand write information for our latest gig. Today, I could easily create a unique poster for every gig and print it out myself. I'm confident the quality of the design would be better (the printing itself would probably be inferior, but good enough).
  - dfxm12 15y ago
    I think the point OP is trying to make is that just because you have Photoshop, that does not mean you have graphic design skill (and artistic skill it is not as simple as following directions on a tax form).
    - a_a_r_o_n 15y ago
      There's another point in there: just because you have a need for graphics doesn't mean you have a need for a graphics professional. Without Photoshop you needed a graphics professional for anything beyond a cardboard sign. Now you can do very well on your own, well beyond some definition of "good enough," before you need to pay a graphics professional.
- deleted 15y ago
retube 15y ago
> Wall Street, however, is a special case. It offers extremely high entry salaries and enormous potential earnings. Ha ha. No wall street in fact fits this analogy perfectly. 1) The number of "producer" roles vs suport/finance/tech/legal/admin etc is small. 90% of employees are toiling long hours in the hope of making the jump across. 2) And even in "producer" roles you're still playing the lottery system. While grad/starting salaries may seem high - say $120k, do you know how many hours you'll work? Double a regular 9 - 5, and often on the weekends. On an hourly basis it's really not high. And you'll need to put in many years of this to get to a position where you're "winning the lottery". I dare say the few that make it that far feel they deserve it.
- lix2333 15y ago
  I was going to say the same thing. It's very much the same. Making 120k sounds like a lot, but when people realize how much we're giving up, you can see that its not worth the money. But people (like me) do it anyway to get great experience and get ahead of the game. If it was only for the money, I'd be out in a heartbeat. The people that do want to do it for life are gambling that by the time they're 30-40, they'll be an actual investment banker with relationship and closing deals. Chances of that are slim these days.
timcederman 15y ago
This article is representative of why I dislike Planet Money so much - anecdotes and conjecture presented as data.
rmc 15y ago
Of course there are people now who have a much better chance of getting to the top now than they did in the Good Old Days™. Women, black people, asian people, etc.
kahawe 15y ago
> In their book "Freakonomics" Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt explain, among other things, the odd economic behavior that guides many drug dealers. In one gang they described, the typical street-corner guy made less than minimum wage but still worked extremely hard in hopes of some day becoming one of the few wildly rich kingpins. This behavior isn’t isolated to illegal activity. There are a number of professions in which workers are paid, in part, with a figurative lottery ticket. The worker accepts a lower-paying job in exchange for a slim but real chance of a large, future payday. This example is indeed listed in "Freakonomics" and was contributed to the book by a sociologist called Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. What this paragraph fails to say, however, is that the chapter in the book makes it clear the "soldiers" slinging on the corners either had the option of taking a minimum wage job working 9-5 plus overtime or taking the minimum wage "job" slinging and have a chance at making it big time PLUS the gang provided certain social services and security to their members and their families - something the minimum wage 9-5 job also did not have to offer. So while they were clearly in a tight spot, they took the more economic of the two options. And the guy leading the gang was described as very capable, social, if I remember correctly he even had finished school or was working on a degree and was capable of handling all financial matters of the gang. So his skills, qualifications and killings got him the job but ultimately his performance kept him there - otherwise he would have been replaced long ago. Clearly he had something more to offer over his soldiers. A point this chapter was making was that these jobs take practically zero skill, have no entry-level barriers and there is an abundance of people willing to do them who don't have other options - that's why they the pay was so absolutely terrible while the job of being injured or killed on the job was ten-folds more likely than the most dangerous, "regular" job in the States.
- kahawe 15y ago
  I am sorry, the last part was of course meant to say "that's why the pay was so absolutely terrible while the chance of being injured or killed on the job was ten-folds more likely than the most dangerous, "regular" job in the States."
- jeffcoat 15y ago
  I picked up Venkatesh's book _Gang Leader for a Day_ on the strength of the work cited here ... and ended up throwing it out. He's not an economist: he has a very clear idea of which jobs are useful in a society and which jobs aren't, and no interest at all in what the market has to say. I'm sure he has useful data, but everything he writes goes through that filter, and there's no way to trust what he says about people dealing drugs, because he makes it so clear that everyone doing anything outside the law is Evil, and so everything they do is tainted.
jdc 15y ago
Fluff piece with a catchy title. The author conveyed as much by saying "we have a 'winner takes all economy' which might not be a good thing if employees realize this and lose their interest in working hard."
zaidrahman 15y ago
The title was catchy. Misleading in the end. No Harvard grad works in the mailroom, sir! Even if they do, it is for a very brief period of their lives.
cperciva 15y ago
He's right about the "Plan B" at least where I'm concerned: I wouldn't have started Tarsnap if I hadn't received a job offer from Google to prove to me that I had a safe fallback plan.
- Drbble 15y ago
  Are you sure that job offer would be open in a year or few down the road? Why not bank the Plan B security money first before launching a startup?
  - gwern 15y ago
    I don't think Colin means he takes the offer as a guarantee of a position at Google in a few years if he so chooses - although I doubt his Tarsnap and other work have hurt his chances - but rather that it's proof that he can get 'a high paid tech job somewhere'.
    - cperciva 15y ago
      Yes, that's quite right.
Drbble 15y ago
I worked in the mailroom as a Harvard undergrad. It paid overtime for 7am shift and paid a 3 hour shift even if we finished work in 90 minutes. Best workstudy gig ever, if you don't mind crossing the bridge over the Charles River at 6:45am. I apologize for sending Chauncy mail to Quincy, I didn't know Chauncy was real.
wavephorm 15y ago
You'd think an article about top tier graduates working in mailrooms might have an interview with one such person, or some rough numbers to back up this claim. Then they go on to state this will create a situation where people no longer need to be innovative or creative... which these jobs didn't require in the first place. This article is fluff and full of fallacies.
- jessriedel 15y ago
  I'd definitely take the numbers, but I'll pass on the interview. A few soundbites from a college student who fits the mold imagined by the author is the only thing I can think of that would be less useful than the fluff and conjecture filling the rest of the article.
yabai 15y ago
Does this article point to a failure in capitalism?
jonnathanson 15y ago
I worked in the mailroom at a major Hollywood talent agency after graduating from a top school. Granted, the literal "mailroom" phase of my employment lasted all of a month or two, after which I was promoted to assistant. As an assistant, you're basically a secretary to one of the agents in the firm. Eventually, you prove your competence and rise to the ranks of the training program, in which case you're still doing secretarial work -- but you're doing it for one of the firm's partners. And you're steadily accruing other responsibilities, such as script evaluation, client scouting, studio networking, and so forth. Depending on the agency, your workday is usually a minimum of 10 hours (mine were typically 14 to 15 hour days, and the occasional 20 hour day was not unheard of). The pay was in the $20-30k range. There were plenty of Ivy League grads in my mailroom class. Even a few MBAs, and a Harvard JD. Landing the mailroom gig at this particular agency was extremely difficult, and the folks playing the "lottery" all could have taken six-figure (or close to it) entry-level jobs elsewhere. Why did we do it? For no better reason than the fact that "it's always been this way," and "this is the way it is." (Or the more economically rationalized supply/demand explanation: there are 500 bazillion gajillion people lining up at the door to get these jobs, so demand always exceeds supply, and thus wages are low and the work brutal). For those who really love the entertainment business, and who are ambitious enough to "pay their dues" in the toughest epicenter of it -- the agency world -- it's the best way to get a foot in the door. If you survive the agency meatgrinder, you are highly sought-after among other Hollywood firms: be they studios, networks, production companies, or what have you. It's not unheard of to hit the mailroom at 22, make junior agent by 25 or 26, and be making a very respectable living somewhere by 30. And for those truly ambitious, ruthless souls who go on to be big-time producers or studio heads, you can be making obscene amounts of money in your late-30s to 40s. It's definitely a "lottery ticket" model, with some echoes of the ancient apprenticeship model thrown in for good measure (all the bigshots in Hollywood were, themselves, in the mailroom back in the day). The model burns out probably greater than 90% of the hopefuls who leap into it. And that seems a pretty inefficient way to find a small handful of Katezenbergs, Geffens, Dillers or Eisners in the haystack. More important, the model burns through a lot of would-be superstars who simply don't have the tolerance for the indignity, BS, and luck-dependency[1] that comes along with the dues-paying years. These are people who may leave the business and go on to do some pretty amazing things in other industries (tech, for instance). Seems to me that you could still find your Dillers and Katzenbergs in a more tech-style model -- i.e., putting people to work actually making product, rather than answering telephones -- while probably finding a lot more of them in the process. The problem with the Hollywood hiring model, as it currently exists, is that it selects solely for the most ruthlessly ambitious candidates -- the ones who can survive years of toil in pursuit of a big paycheck. If they are also great thinkers, or innovators, or creative geniuses, that's sort of a secondary consideration. The model gets what it selects for, and often nothing more than that. [1]Ultimately, what burns out most people isn't the indignity of the work, but the dependency on dumb luck: the fact that there is no guarantee of work in / reward out. You may kick serious ass in your apprenticeship, only to find out that there are simply no spots open at the next level up. (It's understandable that someone who's just spent 4 of the best years of her life as an indentured servant, only to be told that she needs to put in another 4, would opt out altogether.)
fasteddie31003 15y ago
I believe industries where workers need to "Pay Dues" to get to the higher echelons are ripe for disruption. It is a sign that the big players they "Think" they have monopolistic power in their economies and run their businesses such. However, this is a sign that they are complacent and could be disrupted.
mirsadm 15y ago
Right now I earn $200 a month but it is doing something I love. Not long ago I was earning more than twice that a day. I wish there was a nicer balance between the working for someone else with a nice salary and working for yourself. It seems to me the start up scene is loaded with people looking to strike it rich. What about ones that would be happy with an average salary but working for themselves? What could you do to achieve that balance?
sritch 15y ago
I think that people these days are being taught or encouraged to only do what you love, and the thing is, we all can't. You have to take the crappy job at one point or another or you'll end up unemployed if you're too picky. However, in the case of this article, it's funny that the crappy job is the one that is most sought after.

103 points by kqr2 15y ago

I'm constantly reminded that we, as programmers, have excellent opportunities in both fields: we can both shoot for the stars in a startup, and have a comfortable fallback in enterprise. I can't think of many other professions with this great a degree of both opportunity and security.

brandnewlow 15y ago
For now, that is. The robots came for the content creators last decade. They're coming for the educators now. They will come for programmers, too, eventually.
- benmathes 15y ago
  We are the ones making the robots, though.
  - smackay 15y ago
    The sense of solidarity between the robot makers and the lower ranks of the profession might not be a strong as you might like.
    - seclorum 15y ago
      So who will make the machines to disrupt the robots? Makers are always going to be at the top of the chain.
      - sammyo 15y ago
        The guy that can negotiate a huge robot sales contract and use that to do a leveraged buyout that puts him in the CEO chair is at the top of the chain. (what a lovely reddit style chain of comments ; -)
    - bwarp 15y ago
      The higher ranks of the profession are still the bearers of all the keys. We will probably go all Luddite and smash the tools before this happens.
      - arjunnarayan 15y ago
        Speak for yourself. I have no intention of preventing the robot revolution.
        bwarp 15y ago
        Until you are replaced with a very small shell script...
        bwarp 15y ago
        Until you are replaced with a very small shell script...
  - a_a_r_o_n 15y ago
    Until the robots make the robots.
    - angersock 15y ago
      You ever tried to use cmake without it shitting the bed in some way? We're a ways off.
      - a_a_r_o_n 15y ago
        We're there now. How many people lay out CPU circuits at Intel any more? Computer (using a CPU) does that. How many people physically make chips at a foundry? "Robots" do that. There are a lot of tasks in designing and building computers that can only be done with computers these days. Sure, someone runs them, and someone does some significant level of design, but the final designs and products are no longer possible without the very products that those efforts produce. Lather, rinse, accelerate.
        angersock 15y ago
        I agree with both of your examples, but the post being responded to involved the replacement of programmers. Until we can come up with a conveniently numeric way of specifying, analyzing, and solving computational problems in the general case, I don't think I need to fear being replaced. Now, a lot of modern webdev, on the other hand... nextBigThing = WebBizFactory.createNewSite(ecommerceSingelton.getInstance().createNewMerchantAccount(), socialMediaFlywheel.getInstance().createSocialAdaptor(SocialAdapter.TWITTER), AWS.getInstance().getKVStoreFlavorOfWeek());

sskates 15y ago

"The Oscars make clear that there is only so much room at the top." I hate when people make this fallacy. It may be true to some extent for entertainment but there doesn't seem to be any limit to the number of businesses that can be created. As long as people want stuff then there is opportunity.

_delirium 15y ago
Since wealth is at least in part relative, there's some limit for how many people can be at the very top in tech as well. If millions of people had as much money as Sergey Brin has, then having $15b dollars wouldn't mean as much, or buy him as much. One way of thinking of it is how many people you could hire to work for you, which depends on the ratio between your wealth and their salaries.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  What limits the number of spots at the top is the total amount of resources allocated there. If the über-rich got less über, there would be more free spots there. Plus, if the gap between the very rich and the very poor is smaller, with a fairly large middle class in between, a lot of social tensions disappear.
- Drbble 15y ago
  But don't confuse money (which can be inflated an has no inherent unit of conversion to the material world or labor) with material wealth. If everyone had, say, a Star Trek 3-D printer and power/atom supply, we'd all be pretty well off.
  - kaybe 15y ago
    If I compare what we have to what a typical Roman had, I'd say we're pretty well off already.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    I agree they're different, but I think something like labor-wealth is what a lot of people aspire to when they say they want to be wealthy. They don't just want to have a lot of stuff, but want to not have to work anymore to have it (i.e. own 100% of their own time), and they often want to be able to hire significant amounts of services from others (hire a personal chef, stay at fancy full-staff resorts, have a personal trainer, etc.). At least for now; perhaps as high-level robotics advances the wealthy will no longer be as interested in hiring human services. I think it'll remain true at the higher levels of wealth, though, because if you have a lot of wealth, what it really translates into isn't just material goods (there's diminishing returns on how many of those you really need past a few hundred million $s), but the power to significantly change what a non-trivial number of people work on. You can start a company and hire 5,000 people to work on a project you think should be worked on; you can take a different route by initiating a prize like the X-Prize to encourage people to work on it that way; you can start a foundation or grant program; you can singlehandedly decree that [movie genre] is going to be a significant new segment, by promising to plow $1 billion into it; etc. The main thing huge sums of money buy you, imo, is this relative power in the economy, to push people to work on what you think should be worked on--- which necessarily requires that your wealth has to be large in relative terms, as a fraction of the economy.

tpatke 15y ago

There is another aspect to this which the OP fails to mention - moving the needle. If you think about how much money you need to retire (f u money if you are under 30) then figure out how much money you need to save in order to achieve that...well, chances are you are not going to retire anytime soon. Now, say you were given a 20% raise. How would that affect our retirement prospects? Well, chances are you are not going to retire anytime soon. Even a large raise on an “employees” salary will not make a big difference on a, say, $2m retirement target. If you are working a 9-5 you are fighting for a 5% raise that just will not have any effect on your life. The "lottery jobs" offer a way out. Of course, it is not a perfect system so if you have any better ideas...

kahawe 15y ago
Though once I got a 300% raise instead of a 5% one, would I really want to retire at the living standard I had before or after the 5% raise? So, chances are you are STILL not going to retire anytime soon...
- coopdog 15y ago
  I've had something similar happen to me (maybe not 300%) and I'm aware of the higher money but mentally I keep myself on my lower rate and standard of living, because I don't want to do this job forever. The sooner I can get to passive income funding an 'acceptable' life the better. Not everything that's worth doing takes money, just time, which you just don't have in a 9-5
shin_lao 15y ago
You make it sound like the purpose of life is retiring. I find that a little sad.
- tatsuke95 15y ago
  You're both right, I think. The OP describes what I view as the reality for most people. But then I read your comment, and agree: that is pretty sad. Funny thing is, that seems to be an artifact of my parent's generation, the halcyon days of years past when America was a manufacturing powerhouse that we seem to want to get back to. Work sucks, so put in your time, then get out and start enjoying life. At 60 (if you're lucky) or 65 years old. But who wants to be touring around the world when you're old? Find something you love to do, and you'll be able to do it successfully until you drop dead. It's not all about wealth.

csomar 15y ago

The author forgets market demand. If the society needs 1 Oscar winner, then there will be 1 Oscar. After all, it's the viewer who finance Hollywood. There is a need for talent in the Tech (and other related industries) industry. Youth bootstrap startups so they get paid the right price for their talent. If you have the right talents and skills (programming, some design, marketing, market analysis, costumer support, networking...) there is little reasons that you fail your business. There is always some demand in the market, in some field. You have to figure it out and solve the problem. It's the problem here in Tunisia. We don't have a decent infrastructure (roads, schools, houses...) and we have a huge number of art, language, IT... graduates who can't find a job. They complain about the poor infrastructure, but solving it is actually finding a job, and a new business. There is a demand for workers in that field, and there are people with lots of money despite the country being a poor one.

dasil003 15y ago

I don't like the playing the lottery analogy. I get that your odds of joining the ranks of a mega-corp and climbing the ladder to one day become CEO are infinitesimal, but it's not dumb luck either. Unlike the lottery, many things are under your control, and if you have the proper drive and dedication you will quickly pull ahead of all the people who are there for an easy paycheck. When applied to startups, the assertion is downright offensive. At a startup the point is you take equity and you play a key role in the success of the company. There is luck involved as with anything in life, but chances are if you are en early employee, many parts of your success or failure can be traced back to specific actions that you personally decided and acted on. It's not easy and it's not always fair, but it's as close to a meritocracy as humanity has achieved so far.

ht_th 15y ago
Yes, but there are also a lot of things not under your control. You might be able to pull ahead quickly of the easy paycheck people, but then you're surrounded by other people with proper drive and dedication. To get ahead of them you need luck to have been given the right opportunity (in hindsight) that payed out, or to be liked more by those who promote you than your colleague, or to be the right sex (which is often irrelevant for the job), or be more beautiful (which often is irrelevant for the job), or being promoted just before the economic down turn and getting another turn when the economy comes up again, or having a family with some problems (like a sick child or spouse), and so on. A lot of these things will have unconscious effects on yourself, your colleagues, and the people that can promote you. It isn't a clear cut choice to perform well anymore to get ahead.
- paulhauggis 15y ago
  Maybe so, but a person that truly wants to succeed will continue on and find other opportunities and act on them when one passes them by or they fail.
  - bartonfink 15y ago
    If that's not a one true scotsman, I don't know what is. Life happens. No matter how hard you try to roll with the punches, sometimes you get hit, and it's foolish to say that you really didn't want to dodge the punch that knocked you out.

robyates 15y ago

"many graphic designers have been replaced by Photoshop" ... I'm not sure that's how it works.

gaius 15y ago
Bad analogy, but the others work.
JEVLON 15y ago
"not-especially-creative professions" ...So Graphic Design is not creative. Apart from the excess use of Helvetica, calling Graphic Design uncreative is a sort of oxymoron.
jackalope 15y ago
Like his example of TurboTax, it's a DIY alternative to hiring a professional. For example, my 80's band hired a graphic designer and professional print shop to produce a poster with a blank spot to hand write information for our latest gig. Today, I could easily create a unique poster for every gig and print it out myself. I'm confident the quality of the design would be better (the printing itself would probably be inferior, but good enough).
- dfxm12 15y ago
  I think the point OP is trying to make is that just because you have Photoshop, that does not mean you have graphic design skill (and artistic skill it is not as simple as following directions on a tax form).
  - a_a_r_o_n 15y ago
    There's another point in there: just because you have a need for graphics doesn't mean you have a need for a graphics professional. Without Photoshop you needed a graphics professional for anything beyond a cardboard sign. Now you can do very well on your own, well beyond some definition of "good enough," before you need to pay a graphics professional.
deleted 15y ago

retube 15y ago

> Wall Street, however, is a special case. It offers extremely high entry salaries and enormous potential earnings. Ha ha. No wall street in fact fits this analogy perfectly. 1) The number of "producer" roles vs suport/finance/tech/legal/admin etc is small. 90% of employees are toiling long hours in the hope of making the jump across. 2) And even in "producer" roles you're still playing the lottery system. While grad/starting salaries may seem high - say $120k, do you know how many hours you'll work? Double a regular 9 - 5, and often on the weekends. On an hourly basis it's really not high. And you'll need to put in many years of this to get to a position where you're "winning the lottery". I dare say the few that make it that far feel they deserve it.

lix2333 15y ago
I was going to say the same thing. It's very much the same. Making 120k sounds like a lot, but when people realize how much we're giving up, you can see that its not worth the money. But people (like me) do it anyway to get great experience and get ahead of the game. If it was only for the money, I'd be out in a heartbeat. The people that do want to do it for life are gambling that by the time they're 30-40, they'll be an actual investment banker with relationship and closing deals. Chances of that are slim these days.

timcederman 15y ago

This article is representative of why I dislike Planet Money so much - anecdotes and conjecture presented as data.

rmc 15y ago

Of course there are people now who have a much better chance of getting to the top now than they did in the Good Old Days™. Women, black people, asian people, etc.

kahawe 15y ago

> In their book "Freakonomics" Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt explain, among other things, the odd economic behavior that guides many drug dealers. In one gang they described, the typical street-corner guy made less than minimum wage but still worked extremely hard in hopes of some day becoming one of the few wildly rich kingpins. This behavior isn’t isolated to illegal activity. There are a number of professions in which workers are paid, in part, with a figurative lottery ticket. The worker accepts a lower-paying job in exchange for a slim but real chance of a large, future payday. This example is indeed listed in "Freakonomics" and was contributed to the book by a sociologist called Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. What this paragraph fails to say, however, is that the chapter in the book makes it clear the "soldiers" slinging on the corners either had the option of taking a minimum wage job working 9-5 plus overtime or taking the minimum wage "job" slinging and have a chance at making it big time PLUS the gang provided certain social services and security to their members and their families - something the minimum wage 9-5 job also did not have to offer. So while they were clearly in a tight spot, they took the more economic of the two options. And the guy leading the gang was described as very capable, social, if I remember correctly he even had finished school or was working on a degree and was capable of handling all financial matters of the gang. So his skills, qualifications and killings got him the job but ultimately his performance kept him there - otherwise he would have been replaced long ago. Clearly he had something more to offer over his soldiers. A point this chapter was making was that these jobs take practically zero skill, have no entry-level barriers and there is an abundance of people willing to do them who don't have other options - that's why they the pay was so absolutely terrible while the job of being injured or killed on the job was ten-folds more likely than the most dangerous, "regular" job in the States.

kahawe 15y ago
I am sorry, the last part was of course meant to say "that's why the pay was so absolutely terrible while the chance of being injured or killed on the job was ten-folds more likely than the most dangerous, "regular" job in the States."
jeffcoat 15y ago
I picked up Venkatesh's book _Gang Leader for a Day_ on the strength of the work cited here ... and ended up throwing it out. He's not an economist: he has a very clear idea of which jobs are useful in a society and which jobs aren't, and no interest at all in what the market has to say. I'm sure he has useful data, but everything he writes goes through that filter, and there's no way to trust what he says about people dealing drugs, because he makes it so clear that everyone doing anything outside the law is Evil, and so everything they do is tainted.

jdc 15y ago

Fluff piece with a catchy title. The author conveyed as much by saying "we have a 'winner takes all economy' which might not be a good thing if employees realize this and lose their interest in working hard."

zaidrahman 15y ago

The title was catchy. Misleading in the end. No Harvard grad works in the mailroom, sir! Even if they do, it is for a very brief period of their lives.

cperciva 15y ago

He's right about the "Plan B" at least where I'm concerned: I wouldn't have started Tarsnap if I hadn't received a job offer from Google to prove to me that I had a safe fallback plan.

Drbble 15y ago
Are you sure that job offer would be open in a year or few down the road? Why not bank the Plan B security money first before launching a startup?
- gwern 15y ago
  I don't think Colin means he takes the offer as a guarantee of a position at Google in a few years if he so chooses - although I doubt his Tarsnap and other work have hurt his chances - but rather that it's proof that he can get 'a high paid tech job somewhere'.
  - cperciva 15y ago
    Yes, that's quite right.

Drbble 15y ago

I worked in the mailroom as a Harvard undergrad. It paid overtime for 7am shift and paid a 3 hour shift even if we finished work in 90 minutes. Best workstudy gig ever, if you don't mind crossing the bridge over the Charles River at 6:45am. I apologize for sending Chauncy mail to Quincy, I didn't know Chauncy was real.

wavephorm 15y ago

You'd think an article about top tier graduates working in mailrooms might have an interview with one such person, or some rough numbers to back up this claim. Then they go on to state this will create a situation where people no longer need to be innovative or creative... which these jobs didn't require in the first place. This article is fluff and full of fallacies.

jessriedel 15y ago
I'd definitely take the numbers, but I'll pass on the interview. A few soundbites from a college student who fits the mold imagined by the author is the only thing I can think of that would be less useful than the fluff and conjecture filling the rest of the article.

yabai 15y ago

Does this article point to a failure in capitalism?

jonnathanson 15y ago

I worked in the mailroom at a major Hollywood talent agency after graduating from a top school. Granted, the literal "mailroom" phase of my employment lasted all of a month or two, after which I was promoted to assistant. As an assistant, you're basically a secretary to one of the agents in the firm. Eventually, you prove your competence and rise to the ranks of the training program, in which case you're still doing secretarial work -- but you're doing it for one of the firm's partners. And you're steadily accruing other responsibilities, such as script evaluation, client scouting, studio networking, and so forth. Depending on the agency, your workday is usually a minimum of 10 hours (mine were typically 14 to 15 hour days, and the occasional 20 hour day was not unheard of). The pay was in the $20-30k range. There were plenty of Ivy League grads in my mailroom class. Even a few MBAs, and a Harvard JD. Landing the mailroom gig at this particular agency was extremely difficult, and the folks playing the "lottery" all could have taken six-figure (or close to it) entry-level jobs elsewhere. Why did we do it? For no better reason than the fact that "it's always been this way," and "this is the way it is." (Or the more economically rationalized supply/demand explanation: there are 500 bazillion gajillion people lining up at the door to get these jobs, so demand always exceeds supply, and thus wages are low and the work brutal). For those who really love the entertainment business, and who are ambitious enough to "pay their dues" in the toughest epicenter of it -- the agency world -- it's the best way to get a foot in the door. If you survive the agency meatgrinder, you are highly sought-after among other Hollywood firms: be they studios, networks, production companies, or what have you. It's not unheard of to hit the mailroom at 22, make junior agent by 25 or 26, and be making a very respectable living somewhere by 30. And for those truly ambitious, ruthless souls who go on to be big-time producers or studio heads, you can be making obscene amounts of money in your late-30s to 40s. It's definitely a "lottery ticket" model, with some echoes of the ancient apprenticeship model thrown in for good measure (all the bigshots in Hollywood were, themselves, in the mailroom back in the day). The model burns out probably greater than 90% of the hopefuls who leap into it. And that seems a pretty inefficient way to find a small handful of Katezenbergs, Geffens, Dillers or Eisners in the haystack. More important, the model burns through a lot of would-be superstars who simply don't have the tolerance for the indignity, BS, and luck-dependency[1] that comes along with the dues-paying years. These are people who may leave the business and go on to do some pretty amazing things in other industries (tech, for instance). Seems to me that you could still find your Dillers and Katzenbergs in a more tech-style model -- i.e., putting people to work actually making product, rather than answering telephones -- while probably finding a lot more of them in the process. The problem with the Hollywood hiring model, as it currently exists, is that it selects solely for the most ruthlessly ambitious candidates -- the ones who can survive years of toil in pursuit of a big paycheck. If they are also great thinkers, or innovators, or creative geniuses, that's sort of a secondary consideration. The model gets what it selects for, and often nothing more than that. [1]Ultimately, what burns out most people isn't the indignity of the work, but the dependency on dumb luck: the fact that there is no guarantee of work in / reward out. You may kick serious ass in your apprenticeship, only to find out that there are simply no spots open at the next level up. (It's understandable that someone who's just spent 4 of the best years of her life as an indentured servant, only to be told that she needs to put in another 4, would opt out altogether.)

fasteddie31003 15y ago

I believe industries where workers need to "Pay Dues" to get to the higher echelons are ripe for disruption. It is a sign that the big players they "Think" they have monopolistic power in their economies and run their businesses such. However, this is a sign that they are complacent and could be disrupted.

mirsadm 15y ago

Right now I earn $200 a month but it is doing something I love. Not long ago I was earning more than twice that a day. I wish there was a nicer balance between the working for someone else with a nice salary and working for yourself. It seems to me the start up scene is loaded with people looking to strike it rich. What about ones that would be happy with an average salary but working for themselves? What could you do to achieve that balance?

sritch 15y ago

I think that people these days are being taught or encouraged to only do what you love, and the thing is, we all can't. You have to take the crappy job at one point or another or you'll end up unemployed if you're too picky. However, in the case of this article, it's funny that the crappy job is the one that is most sought after.