4 ms·

Bertelsmann (the owner of Random House) is a for-profit corporation just like Palantir (a defense contractor), but the employees of Random House don’t need to b

by tptacek 7mo ago

Bertelsmann (the owner of Random House) is a for-profit corporation just like Palantir (a defense contractor), but the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good No? The employees of Random House don't need to be paid as much because the supply of qualified candidates for those roles greatly exceeds the demand. There are lots of causes of that imbalance and most of them have nothing to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. It's also hard to get a job in the abusive video game development industry!

dxdm 7mo ago
Where does the supply come from? You could still argue that people choose this as a career when they have the choice of better-paid ones, increasing the supply of people with the smarts and training needed by the publishers. I don't know if that's what's happening, but it might work towards TFA's point.
- chromacity 7mo ago
  It probably has to do with the fact that we condition children and adolescents to consider white-collar jobs as more noble than blue-collar jobs, then we tell them that to get a good white-collar job, they need a degree... and then we make STEM degrees hard by subjecting students to more math than most people realistically need. So we have a lot of frontend developers who know calculus and an oversupply of people with humanities degrees. With that degree, you're generally pushed toward jobs in journalism, publishing, graphic design, teaching, administrative functions, and so on. Most of these pay relatively little.
  - tptacek 7mo ago
    Publishing : standard English major career track :: Gaming : standard CS major career track. It's not much more complicated than that.
  - x3n0ph3n3 7mo ago
    It's a shame that calculus isn't required by every college degree. Just because I'm not integrating functions during my normal work, doesn't mean I don't benefit from understanding the fundamental principles.
    - chromacity 7mo ago
      Yes, totally. I was about to undero surgery but found out the doctor didn't even know about Laplace transforms. He small-mindedly spent his formative years learning anatomy, never benefitting from the knowledge of frequency-domain derivatives. I dodged that bullet by storming out.
      - com2kid 7mo ago
        You joke, but if you talked to a doctor of radiology odds are they at least took a class covering Fourier Transforms.
    - robocat 7mo ago
      Would you say the same about learning Christianity: maybe not directly useful for your job, however it is rather foundational to much of English society.
      - x3n0ph3n3 7mo ago
        Yeah! I've found that learning the foundations of religions is a great way to inoculate people from worst aspects of those ideas.
  - com2kid 7mo ago
    Calculus is required for English degrees in other countries. Heck a lot of countries require some amount of calculus just to graduate high school. Same goes for the basics of statistics. A basic understanding of statistics is a requirement for any college degree in many countries, and for good reasons. Stats comes up all the damn time. From proper A/B testing, to marketing, to understanding public health emergencies, to making informed medical decisions.
    - aworks 7mo ago
      I understand the value of statistics. But calculus? I say this, as someone who took 6 semesters of calculus in college.
      - com2kid 7mo ago
        6 semesters seems like... a lot? IIRC getting a math undergrad at my Uni didn't require that many classes of calc. I think calc 1 and 2 are extremely valuable. The concept of rate of change is fundamental to so many things in life, and understanding "area under the curve" is essential to understanding how many ideas are communicated, including lots of graphs in physics, chemistry, and economics. Beyond that I feel calculus starts getting into specific applications and is less generally applicable to the populace at large.
        aworks 7mo ago
        6 quarters, not 6 semesters! Decades later, I wish I had more linear algebra.
  - bpt3 7mo ago
    The number of people with humanities degrees who also could successfully obtain a rigorous CS or engineering degree is not very large. I suggest you revisit your hypothesis with a little less bias.
    - eszed 7mo ago
      The reverse is also true. My current hypothesis is that as AI forces software development down less and less deterministic pathways, I suspect that the value of a basic CS degree will diminish relative to humanities training. Comfort with ambiguity, an ability to construct a workable "theory of mind", and to construct unambiguous natural-language prompts will become more relevant than grokking standard algorithms.
      - bpt3 7mo ago
        The reverse most certainly is not true, and even if it were it wouldn't matter. Humanities advocates have been hoping for the demise of valuable STEM degrees for at least the last 30 years. It's not happening for many reasons, of them being: All the skills you listed are also taught in an engineering and rigorous CS curriculum, plus those degrees provide validation that the individual is intelligent and determined enough to complete coursework that most people cannot.
        eszed 7mo ago
        I dunno, man. The difficulty (and resentment of having to even take them) most STEM majors had in my college-level writing classes causes me to doubt that, as does the general reaction on this board to any kind of problem / domain with irreducible ambiguity. But look, I'm not talking about the top ~10%, or whatever: the really smart kids can adapt to whatever gets thrown at them[0]. I'm doubtful that a 50th-percentile or below CS degree / student will retain the value that they've recently had - and given what I read on here about the present job market for new grads on here, that's maybe already happening. Anyway, I had to pick one, my money'd be on philosophy degrees rising in value: they're already sought out by financial firms. Have you seen the sort of analytical / symbolic reasoning they do? [0] In fact, in case you didn't know, rigorous humanities programs and research involve an awful lot of statistics and coding, even though the dinosaurs that run the MLA and most English departments aren't able to handle it.
  - rcxdude 7mo ago
    I don't think it's a matter of more 'noble', simply a more comfortable option if it's available to you. It has historically paid better and taken a lower toll on your body. The former is now less true, but the latter is still a big issue.
- bpt3 7mo ago
  Most people don't have the "choice" of being an engineer or software developer currently. To be blunt, it's much easier for the majority of the population to get an English degree or some other generic liberal arts degree and therefore be qualified for an entry level job in the publishing industry. I'm sure someone somewhere is giving up a highly lucrative job to roll the dice on the next great American novel, but it's not a meaningful number.
jfengel 7mo ago
Some of it has to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. A lot of those jobs involve holding people's hands, "emotional labor", like nursing and teaching. These jobs are seen as something people (women, mostly) should do because they like being carers, rather than for the money. These jobs end up being paid less than they are really worth, especially since they often involve many hours without compensation. That's hardly the only factor here. In the end it's really about the fact that we appear to have an infinite appetite for blowing people up. ($1.5 trillion, next year, a full 50% increase at a time when we're supposedly needing to cut back.) But don't discount the thumb on the scale against jobs like these. It's a persistent problem in many industries -- so pervasive that it just looks natural.
- tptacek 7mo ago
  Nursing and teaching are surprisingly well-compensated fields with lots of job security and relatively straightforward entrance requirements. It's also true that both fields are valorized, but plumbing isn't and has the same dynamics. These arguments are all overdetermined.
  - beedeebeedee 7mo ago
    That may be true elsewhere, but not in the US
    - tptacek 7mo ago
      Could you be more specific? I don't know what you're referring to.
      - mold_aid 7mo ago
        Almost certain OP is referring to the fact that nurses and teachers are not well-paid or respected in the US, which I'd like to note as well. Despite this, Public Health as a pseudo-STEM major nearly ranks with STEM fields in general for majors seen as "workplace-ready." Maybe there are too many English majors (I honestly think the supply of careers is too low). But I think the "supply is greater than the demand" is possibly now more an explanatory argument for unemployment rates for Engineering and PT and other such quiescent majors. Certainly there are plenty of Ed majors for a field whose workers fled at pace earlier this decade. Let's assume I'm teaching 25 or so Engl majors right now in a class with publishing as its central focus (hypothetically) at a state school. The students would neither be able to define "small press" nor name the big 5 - even the ones who just came back from AWP. The linked piece, I think, correctly names the romanticized vision of publishing that is divorced from understandings of the cost of living in NYC. I don't also think that college majors are actually all that itchy to get into editorial, whether or not they're all and every single one applying for the same pool of jobs.
abetusk 7mo ago
The specific analogy doesn't hold but the sentiment does. Instead of using Palantir, working at the FSF, the Linux Foundation, etc. It's not that they don't make good money, it's that it's often a fraction of what could be made at a comparable for profit company. I think the video game industry is an apt comparison. The pay is often not very good with the motivation being, for many people, prestige based, in some form or another. I suspect there are analogies in the game industry and publishing 50-100 years ago.
claw-el 7mo ago
Wouldn’t the supply of labor for a role or company increase if what the company do, books or video games, is associated to what most people see as good, therefore, they are more willing to build their long term skill sets in? That perceived associated goodness is what caused the increase in qualified candidates in the first place?
- Nasrudith 7mo ago
  Technically yes, but it isn't just goodness. There are plenty of dirty jobs that do good and thus few people want it. The logical extreme is being a martyr - no pay and death but regarded as ultimate good.
  - Ekaros 7mo ago
    Being a farmhand is arguably one of the most goodness jobs. You are feeding everyone else with your labour... Somehow it is not very well paid or very popular job.

by tptacek 7mo ago

dxdm 7mo ago

Where does the supply come from? You could still argue that people choose this as a career when they have the choice of better-paid ones, increasing the supply of people with the smarts and training needed by the publishers. I don't know if that's what's happening, but it might work towards TFA's point.

chromacity 7mo ago
It probably has to do with the fact that we condition children and adolescents to consider white-collar jobs as more noble than blue-collar jobs, then we tell them that to get a good white-collar job, they need a degree... and then we make STEM degrees hard by subjecting students to more math than most people realistically need. So we have a lot of frontend developers who know calculus and an oversupply of people with humanities degrees. With that degree, you're generally pushed toward jobs in journalism, publishing, graphic design, teaching, administrative functions, and so on. Most of these pay relatively little.
- tptacek 7mo ago
  Publishing : standard English major career track :: Gaming : standard CS major career track. It's not much more complicated than that.
- x3n0ph3n3 7mo ago
  It's a shame that calculus isn't required by every college degree. Just because I'm not integrating functions during my normal work, doesn't mean I don't benefit from understanding the fundamental principles.
  - chromacity 7mo ago
    Yes, totally. I was about to undero surgery but found out the doctor didn't even know about Laplace transforms. He small-mindedly spent his formative years learning anatomy, never benefitting from the knowledge of frequency-domain derivatives. I dodged that bullet by storming out.
    - com2kid 7mo ago
      You joke, but if you talked to a doctor of radiology odds are they at least took a class covering Fourier Transforms.
  - robocat 7mo ago
    Would you say the same about learning Christianity: maybe not directly useful for your job, however it is rather foundational to much of English society.
    - x3n0ph3n3 7mo ago
      Yeah! I've found that learning the foundations of religions is a great way to inoculate people from worst aspects of those ideas.
- com2kid 7mo ago
  Calculus is required for English degrees in other countries. Heck a lot of countries require some amount of calculus just to graduate high school. Same goes for the basics of statistics. A basic understanding of statistics is a requirement for any college degree in many countries, and for good reasons. Stats comes up all the damn time. From proper A/B testing, to marketing, to understanding public health emergencies, to making informed medical decisions.
  - aworks 7mo ago
    I understand the value of statistics. But calculus? I say this, as someone who took 6 semesters of calculus in college.
    - com2kid 7mo ago
      6 semesters seems like... a lot? IIRC getting a math undergrad at my Uni didn't require that many classes of calc. I think calc 1 and 2 are extremely valuable. The concept of rate of change is fundamental to so many things in life, and understanding "area under the curve" is essential to understanding how many ideas are communicated, including lots of graphs in physics, chemistry, and economics. Beyond that I feel calculus starts getting into specific applications and is less generally applicable to the populace at large.
      - aworks 7mo ago
        6 quarters, not 6 semesters! Decades later, I wish I had more linear algebra.
- bpt3 7mo ago
  The number of people with humanities degrees who also could successfully obtain a rigorous CS or engineering degree is not very large. I suggest you revisit your hypothesis with a little less bias.
  - eszed 7mo ago
    The reverse is also true. My current hypothesis is that as AI forces software development down less and less deterministic pathways, I suspect that the value of a basic CS degree will diminish relative to humanities training. Comfort with ambiguity, an ability to construct a workable "theory of mind", and to construct unambiguous natural-language prompts will become more relevant than grokking standard algorithms.
    - bpt3 7mo ago
      The reverse most certainly is not true, and even if it were it wouldn't matter. Humanities advocates have been hoping for the demise of valuable STEM degrees for at least the last 30 years. It's not happening for many reasons, of them being: All the skills you listed are also taught in an engineering and rigorous CS curriculum, plus those degrees provide validation that the individual is intelligent and determined enough to complete coursework that most people cannot.
      - eszed 7mo ago
        I dunno, man. The difficulty (and resentment of having to even take them) most STEM majors had in my college-level writing classes causes me to doubt that, as does the general reaction on this board to any kind of problem / domain with irreducible ambiguity. But look, I'm not talking about the top ~10%, or whatever: the really smart kids can adapt to whatever gets thrown at them[0]. I'm doubtful that a 50th-percentile or below CS degree / student will retain the value that they've recently had - and given what I read on here about the present job market for new grads on here, that's maybe already happening. Anyway, I had to pick one, my money'd be on philosophy degrees rising in value: they're already sought out by financial firms. Have you seen the sort of analytical / symbolic reasoning they do? [0] In fact, in case you didn't know, rigorous humanities programs and research involve an awful lot of statistics and coding, even though the dinosaurs that run the MLA and most English departments aren't able to handle it.
- rcxdude 7mo ago
  I don't think it's a matter of more 'noble', simply a more comfortable option if it's available to you. It has historically paid better and taken a lower toll on your body. The former is now less true, but the latter is still a big issue.
bpt3 7mo ago
Most people don't have the "choice" of being an engineer or software developer currently. To be blunt, it's much easier for the majority of the population to get an English degree or some other generic liberal arts degree and therefore be qualified for an entry level job in the publishing industry. I'm sure someone somewhere is giving up a highly lucrative job to roll the dice on the next great American novel, but it's not a meaningful number.

jfengel 7mo ago

Some of it has to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. A lot of those jobs involve holding people's hands, "emotional labor", like nursing and teaching. These jobs are seen as something people (women, mostly) should do because they like being carers, rather than for the money. These jobs end up being paid less than they are really worth, especially since they often involve many hours without compensation. That's hardly the only factor here. In the end it's really about the fact that we appear to have an infinite appetite for blowing people up. ($1.5 trillion, next year, a full 50% increase at a time when we're supposedly needing to cut back.) But don't discount the thumb on the scale against jobs like these. It's a persistent problem in many industries -- so pervasive that it just looks natural.

tptacek 7mo ago
Nursing and teaching are surprisingly well-compensated fields with lots of job security and relatively straightforward entrance requirements. It's also true that both fields are valorized, but plumbing isn't and has the same dynamics. These arguments are all overdetermined.
- beedeebeedee 7mo ago
  That may be true elsewhere, but not in the US
  - tptacek 7mo ago
    Could you be more specific? I don't know what you're referring to.
    - mold_aid 7mo ago
      Almost certain OP is referring to the fact that nurses and teachers are not well-paid or respected in the US, which I'd like to note as well. Despite this, Public Health as a pseudo-STEM major nearly ranks with STEM fields in general for majors seen as "workplace-ready." Maybe there are too many English majors (I honestly think the supply of careers is too low). But I think the "supply is greater than the demand" is possibly now more an explanatory argument for unemployment rates for Engineering and PT and other such quiescent majors. Certainly there are plenty of Ed majors for a field whose workers fled at pace earlier this decade. Let's assume I'm teaching 25 or so Engl majors right now in a class with publishing as its central focus (hypothetically) at a state school. The students would neither be able to define "small press" nor name the big 5 - even the ones who just came back from AWP. The linked piece, I think, correctly names the romanticized vision of publishing that is divorced from understandings of the cost of living in NYC. I don't also think that college majors are actually all that itchy to get into editorial, whether or not they're all and every single one applying for the same pool of jobs.

abetusk 7mo ago

The specific analogy doesn't hold but the sentiment does. Instead of using Palantir, working at the FSF, the Linux Foundation, etc. It's not that they don't make good money, it's that it's often a fraction of what could be made at a comparable for profit company. I think the video game industry is an apt comparison. The pay is often not very good with the motivation being, for many people, prestige based, in some form or another. I suspect there are analogies in the game industry and publishing 50-100 years ago.

claw-el 7mo ago

Wouldn’t the supply of labor for a role or company increase if what the company do, books or video games, is associated to what most people see as good, therefore, they are more willing to build their long term skill sets in? That perceived associated goodness is what caused the increase in qualified candidates in the first place?

Nasrudith 7mo ago
Technically yes, but it isn't just goodness. There are plenty of dirty jobs that do good and thus few people want it. The logical extreme is being a martyr - no pay and death but regarded as ultimate good.
- Ekaros 7mo ago
  Being a farmhand is arguably one of the most goodness jobs. You are feeding everyone else with your labour... Somehow it is not very well paid or very popular job.