throwawayjava

For example, at least one statistic is based on earnings 5 years out of school.

5 years out of school I was making less than 30k as a research assistant. A few months later I was making easily 100k+ more than most senior SDEs, and doing exactly what I would be doing if I had a trust fund to pay the bills.

Many of my classmates who became doctors were in similar situations -- working through residencies at T+5 years but setting themselves up for mid 6-low 7 salaries in the near future.

So earnings over even a medium-term time horizon can be extremely misleading. You really need that 35-45 year career to get the full picture. Any college grad salary number with less than a 6 or evne 10 year time horizon is going to be a poor representation of what's really going on.

I went to a "pleb-tier" [1] school for undergrad and then to a top-tier university for grad school.

It's just not true. There is a huge difference in the quality of education, especially in STEM fields. And most especially in Math. "pleb-tier" schools will get through everything in Harvard's Math 55 if they're lucky. Not even exaggerating -- the first year at Harvard covers what you'll get in four years of honors track at a "pleb-tier" place.

And then there's the recruitment pipeline. Coming out of top-tier school I had multiple 300k-500k offers without even applying for any jobs. Out of pleb-tier school, I wasn't getting anything over 80k and that was with lots of networking. CS and Math are two of the rare fields where phd school has, IME, a positive expected value, as long as you're substantially trading up credentials.

IMO the optimal route is as follows (at least in STEM):

* Is your state flagship within a 1 hour drive and top-10 in your field? If so, that option is a complete no-brainer.

* 3/4+-ride to a top 10 place outside of commuting distance, or a 1/2 ride to a top 10 place within commuting distance? Again, no brainer.

* Otherwise, the calculus becomes harder. Your best bet is probably to aim for a PhD at a tippy top school (top 5 or so), but getting into tippy top phd program from a "pleb-tier" is not nearly as easy and you're making it out to be... especially in older/more saturated fields like Math.

--

[1] FWIW I don't like this terminology but... whatever.

I.e., our institutions of higher education should be forced to bail out our banks when the banks issue risky loans that don't pan out. This is definitely good idea because divorcing banks from the downsides of their risky loans has worked out so well this century /s

The view that free markets are some sort of magical panacea for education or especially healthcare strikes me as an extraordinarily anti-empirical -- if admittedly hyper-rationalist -- position.

The USA has 4,000+ colleges, most of which do compete aggressively for students. Huge marketing departments with regional and national reach. Radio ads. Television ads. Print ads. Marketing networks with college counselors. Salespeople who spend many months attending college fairs. Fancy dorms and other amenities. Carefully crafted discount rates applied in a way that tickles the applicant's ego in just the right way. Beautifully crafted websites. Massive landscaping budgets, the bulk of which is spent during recruiting season. Expensive logos and mottos crafted by marketing firms that spend a lot of time with study groups. And so on. Higher ed marketing is a big industry in the USA.

Competition alone does not drive prices down.

> What happens when the government tries to provide for us... they gaurantee your student loan: Skyrocketing cost of school

Well, maybe the government should actually provide education instead of providing financial products...

On that note, both European higher ed and US K12 would like to have a word...

IMO the problem in health and education is that we can't stomach the massive inequalities that show up in free markets (healthcare: let people die; education: only the rich and a few lower-risk borrowers get higher ed), but also can't commit to just socializing the whole damned enterprise. We need to abandon our morality or abandon our aversion to socialism; until we choose one, we'll be stuck with these extremely suboptimal public/private "solutions".

This is the huge elephant in the room.

The USA needs a large jobs program and a massive amount of education funding, especially for rural youth who do not either study a trade or go to college immediately after high school.

Providing these things directly with no strings -- or even as compensation for civilian service -- is wildly unpopular. The military is an absolutely massive back-door social program.

> You don't need a "strong professional network" to have your family help you find work

No, but it certainly helps. Especially software development work.

Regarding the rest, your original comment singles out "really intelligent kids". I was largely replying to that description.

In general, advising people who fit that model to prematurely optimize so early in life is doing them a huge disservice.

A "really intelligent kid" can get college mostly paid for through scholarships and have the world at their feet after graduating.

The urge to take that dev job after high school is strong (been there), but it's generally a huge net loss for someone who is actually "really intelligent".

> Most people can't afford to worry about what's "boring"

I'm very concerned by your attitude that folks from modest means aren't capable of boredom, aren't capable of burnout.

I'm also saddened by the fact that you seem to take offense toward encouraging "really intelligent kids" to actually use that raw intellect just because they happen to come from a modest background.

Heh. Indeed. Only an idiot would be born into a family without a strong professional network ;-)

Less sardonically, I did have this option after high school (although not through a family network). Fortunately, I took full advantage before finishing school and did a ton of freelancing plus an internship. I noticed, before it was too late, that the sort of software engineering work available without a degree was not going to keep me happy for 30+ years.

This is the advice I give bright young students (as opposed to those who merely have family connections): make certain that you're not going to become unbelievably bored by your late 20s.

If you can get a job doing web dev out of high school, you can land a job doing something super fun like self-driving after college and you can write your own job description with a phd.

Your advice is good for kinda dumb kids from well-networked families, but IMO terrible advice for actually really intelligent kids. They will become super bored with the sort of software development that's available without spending a few years getting a good university-level grounding in mathematics and natural sciences. You can do that without going to college but it's still a four-year full time job...

> I'd love to see data on Google employee's education levels over time.

I think you'd be disappointed; Google hires a ton of Ph.Ds and recruits heavily from tippy-top universities.

This consulting firm advertisement is a very useful mental model, and I think MOOCs are probably on their way up and out of the trough of disappointment into the plateau of productivity: https://blogs.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/files/2017/08/E...

> They won't be replaced by a disruptor, they will just no longer be able to crank out mediocre educational product to people who now realize that a Bachelor of Something Or Other from Podunk U isn't actually a ticket to the middle class.

This seems likely. My model for predicting college bankruptcy has exactly one input, which is this dataset: https://ifap.ed.gov/DefaultManagement/DefaultManagement.html

I'm not in education atm but have a lot of experience working with students.

This is a real psychological effect even if it's maybe hard for tech types to understand. I think it has to do with the fact that social pressure is avoidable online (you don't have to show up and face the teacher whose work you didn't do). That perception has a strong effect on students; they feel shame for not doing their work even when teachers don't really give a damn about whether they did their homework/project.

Maybe not impossible to overcome, but a real problem. Education disruptors ignore these sorts of strong psychological effects around education at their own peril...

Suppose you are a CS professor at the sort of no-name university that this article is talking about.

Odds are, you're more than qualified for a lot of industry roles (and have former students who would hire you on without blinking). Also, those industry roles have much higher salaries than your teaching gig. However, you stay at No-Name U. because it's a pleasant life and you enjoy teaching.

Then admin comes along and chops half your tenured colleagues. Suddenly, No Name U. is a hellish place to work. Time to leave.

Now multiply that across all of the faculties that have private sector options.

Now notice that those are exactly the majors that are difficult to recruit faculty for in the first place [1] and, moreover, are exactly majors that students are interested in these days.

That's the risk. At universities, cutting back means firing people. And firing people means low morale. And low morale means losing exactly the people who were going to power your turn-around story.

[1] https://cra.org/articles-addressing-shortage-of-cs-professor...

To some this may sound like a dystopian invasion of privacy, and I probably would not opt-in to such a system. But the alternative for young men is massively subsidizing other young men's stupid choices... which IMO is even more dystopian.

Just like there's a glut of wordpress plugin authors and a shortage of ML experts, different fields of academia have different levels of supply/demand.

Also, USPS really is not a prototypical example of free labor market: those salaries/pensions/benefits will be a lot smaller if/when usps privatizes...

Second, a postdoc is still a training position. Medical residents are also not paid much better than mail carriers either.

Third, postdocs select for two types of people: those who want R1 professorships and those who need a position to stay in the country. Both of those groups drive down wages. I.e., it's sort of meaningless to compare a group of people who are working for the money to a group of people who are working for a shot at a seat in the upper tier of a tournament-style profession.

Fourth, both annual and lifetime earnings of PhD holders (at least in STEM) continue to outperform high school graduates (including mail carriers).

There's an oversupply of people interested in R1 faculty positions, but that doesn't mean there's a oversupply of phds per se. The labor market seems to absorb these people quite readily and at apparently high salaries as soon as they decide to quit academia.

1.77% of the 25+ population has a doctorate degree. Even among those, a huge amount are not PhDs and are not really research-focused. E.g., go read the CV of the typical University of Phoenix doctorate holder.

Furthermore, it's worth noting that the world got a lot more complex since the mid-20th century. The entire field of Computer Science happened, for example.

A natural experiment in this already exists: there are interdisciplinary journals and conferences with heterogeneous editorial boards. From the outside looking in, I suspect mostly what happens is that either people stick to reviewing the subset of papers from their own community or else do a poor job of reviewing papers from outside their own community.

> But if nobody outside a field cares about a line of research, or trusts a line of research, then maybe that's a bad line of research.

I'm skeptical; a lot of research is useless until it's groundbreaking, and the phase shift is rather late in the development.

And if so, are we there yet, technologically speaking? I.e., not just peacetime autonomy but actually dealing with a combat situation -- possibly with friendlies in the skies -- completely autonomously? My impression the last time I talked with a uniform about this was that the answer is still no.

This is the important point.

> freelancers without any deep connection to any one company or city. This is happening... but very, very slowly since most workers are terrified of such an idea.

That's because outsourcing and freelancing are mostly a mechanism for fleecing labor. Workers SHOULD be terrified of this.

It's a good bullshit detector. Instead of wasting time dealing with my board member's asinine suggestions, I can study interview questions and get a job at an employer that doesn't suck.

An employer who suggests coupon books in lieu of CoL adjusted salaries is probably out-of-touch or manipulative in a lot of other ways. Call me irrational, but I don't want to spend my days working for a super manipulative employer...

> Surely if you could genuinely acheive your goals by leveraging coupon books, wouldn't that be worth considering?

Sure. But in lieu of raises that keep up with CoL? Hell No.

> you'll have an understanding of why it won't work beyond "well it offended me".

Again, I suggested common sense!

Until I start seeing 2 for 1 mortgages, 1/2 off gasoline, BOGO surgeries, and 25% off tuition in coupon books? Well, it doesn't even take a spreadsheet for me to know that the things moving my CoL up aren't stocked in the Target or grocery stores...

Again, hyper-rationalism that distracts you from using common sense is silly.

> However it's a communication problem because the problem isn't "keep up with inflation", it's "maintain a consistent quality of life despite inflation".

CoL is a quantitative measure of QoL. I'm having a really hard time imagining situations where inflation in the face of stagnant wages doesn't translate into lower QoL. Especially for folks who work for a living.

> and I would never take the time to do this kind of thinking if I rejected ideas that "should offend me" without consideration.

So you would really response neutrally to your employer handing out coupon books instead of annual raises?

Then you're being had.

Aside: if a board member tells you that you don't need a raise because you can use fucking coupon books, and you don't immediately get extremely offended, then maybe you're under-rating common sense and over-rating "rationalism"...

My "little languages" always have atomic programs/expressions whose meaning is given by an implementation in the base language.

Sometimes, e.g., when my little language has an optimizing compiler or some fancy semantics, the atomic programs/expressions need a tighter interface than "does something". In those cases, I write down the full semantics of the language and figure out what lemmas I need to prove about atomic programs/expressions in order to prove whatever property I want about the overall language. I then enforce those lemmas at runtime using asserts (or, in the case of termination, wrapper code that enforces a timeout).

This pretty much only goes wrong when "everything" is factored out into the atomic programs/expressions. I avoid these situations by only using "little languages" when I can do something useful and difficult using the semantics of the little language. Most common examples include: automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, and automatic verification/static analysis.

But even when it does go wrong in this way, it's no the end of the world: if everything is implemented in the atomics, then you just refactor the implementations of the atomic programs/expressions into a library, delete the interpreter/compiler, and write some wrapper code.

Inheritance is fragile for a lot of reasons (see e.g., fragile base class). But the most common failure modes all have the same thing in common: the error happens because a developer fails to realize that there's an implicit interface between two things in the object heirarchy.

Also, pay attention to what the bill/referendum is for. Any competent district will have a website explaining to the public what the funds are going to be used for.

In particular, be careful about voting against bond issues that are placed on the ballot within one or two years of the maturation date for a similarly sized bond. Because those are basically a continuation of the status quo, and voting them down can mean costly deferred maintenance and/or dumb financial trade-offs.

Real example: firing a whole bunch of people this year to pay for asbestos removal in cash money (because the bond issue wasn't passed and this NEEDS to be done in order to use the building), and then re-hiring a bunch of people the next year. Because the bond issue failed and the bond issue is literally the only legal way to amortize the cost of the asbestos removal. So, I guess no amortization, we pay upfront and fire a bunch folks for a year in order to afford it. (BTW, we all know from the software industry what happens when you lay off a bunch of people -- you lose your best folks and it becomes difficult to recruit good people).

Think of it like this: school districts in many states literally can't amortize their capital costs without coming to you with a ballot initiative. By voting "no" carte blanc, you're basically saying "I carte blanc disapprove of my local school district using amortization". Which is pretty unreasonable.

Most universities only distinguish between "academic" positions and "staff" positions.

At most universities, "Academic" positions are something rather specific: usually only the faculty proper, Ph.D.-holding researchers, and maybe a few other student-facing roles (e.g., librarians).

Here is my quick two-part litmus test that's probably pretty accurate for most universities. Assuming you don't know for certain that you are in the "academic" or "staff" bucket, consider these two questions:

0. Are you a Ph.D. student with some funny title like "research assistant"? You are a student. You are not "staff". You are not "academic". You are a student.

1. Do you hold a Ph.D. AND listed as a co-PI on grants? If yes, you're most likely in an "academic" role. If not, you're most likely in a "staff" role (unless you're working with someone who has a shitload of clout).

What happens often in reporting is that "academic" and "staff" numbers are reported, and we assume "staff = administrative".

See the Stanford numbers, for example. Notice how there's no category for "non-administrative non-academic staff". You're either a member of the "academic" group or you're an "other", and the "other" group is not broken out into "administrative" and "not administrative".

Hopefully, this helps. It's all rather confusing and political and, in many cases, institution-specific :)

* a large enough headcount that you need an HR department,

* a large enough overall budget that you need a CFO and accountants,

* a large enough physical plant that you need (sizable) facilities and transportation departments (with storage space),

* a large enough IT plant that you need dedicated staff,

* a large enough student body that you need a legal/compliance group (open records requests, mandatory state/fed data collection and reporting, etc.),

* a large enough teaching staff that you need nodes whose primary function is coordinating significant curriculum changes across grade levels and schools,

* a large enough community that a full-time community relations person is cheaper than bringing in a PR firm whenever necessary (every dollar that schools spend or borrow comes from a democratic process that schools have to engage with seriously in all but the most affluent communities),

* and several other functions.

For a place with 4k people, that's dozens and dozens of admins. There are basically two options: build a wing onto a school, or build a stand-alone building. Most districts go the stand-alone route because 1) districts can often get cheap/free land anyways, and 2) it's a good idea to leave that physical space for schools to grow in case population increases.

FWIW I did the "look up all my past employer's [X type of admin] to engineer/sales/marketing ratios and compare to the school district" thing. I couldn't find anything out a whack. But the resulting raw numbers definitely mean the district needs dedicated space for admin folks.

1. the construction of interstates and airports that routed around old railroad/highway towns.

2. The green revolution. Agriculture became much more efficient, productive, centralized, and automated. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Stat...

3. Resource extraction running its course.

4. Efficiency improvements in manufacturing and resource extraction.

The amount of rural blight caused by the favority political demon of late (outsourcing of manufacturing) is relatively minor compared to the above items. Especially 1 and 2! (Seriously, if you come across a run-down main street away from any interstate, odds are better than even it used to be a railroad station.)

IF we follow your advice in a way that's meaningful to most rural communities, we'd have to roll back the green revolution, bring back passenger rail, and magically refill coal veins/oil wells.

Other favorite policy quick-fixes as of late (in particular, on-shoring manufacturing) might help a handful of communities but are a teeny, tiny fragment of the story for blighted rural america in general. The ~80% of small towns that never had a factory to begin with can't reasonably blame outsourcing for their woes.

> It should be even easier now, given that a little remote office can be easily connected to the rest of the world.

1. Have you lived in rural America? Especially outside of "technically rural" locations such as university/college towns, good internet connections are sometimes available but usually not. And if not, convincing an ISP to dig is anything but "easy".

2. Most execs have no interest in building a big office in a remote location, both for personal reasons and for legitimate business reasons (proximity to a major airport is important in a lot of businesses).

3. Chicken-and-egg: People very reasonably won't move to most small towns due to lack of quality services (schools, hospitals, and entertainment). But those services can't be established without a critical mass of people moving into town.

Part of the problem is that a lot of wage growth is concentrated in areas that are experiencing a housing crunch.

Different business models are different, and things tend to get ugly when you find a way to print money.

I'll take the "restrictive licensing/patents" model over the Google/Facebook "private sector surveillance" model any day of the week...

> At the risk of sounding sarcastic, I have a very hard time putting SAP and innovation in the same sentence. They're basically the Oracle of Germany.

I think IBM might be a better comparison. Certainly the scale of the past century, both SAP and IBM did plenty of innovation.

Guided repetition is a common educational tool.

I guess you can call that a "meme" if you want, but that doesn't make it "not education".

> By contrast, arithmetic is intentionally and exhaustively taught, yet most adults cannot perform it.

In countries where arithmetic is taught, adults are certainly capable of performing basic arithmetic.

I have yet to meet a literate adult who couldn't compute some arbitrary sum or solve a multiplication problem. In fact, the only counter-examples I've discovered are that a lot of people have problems remembering order of operations. But that's more about language/notation than arithmetic -- if you put the parens in, they'll give you the correct answer.

> It has been speculated that if we tried to educate children how to walk and how to talk then they wouldn't succeed at either!

I was taught to talk. Some of the other children in my class were deaf, and even they eventually learned how to talk (albeit not as well as you or me). I assure you, they weren't "meme'ing". There was a lot of rather complex guiding that looks a lot like what I imagine you call "education".

>> But you cannot reset a human being.

> See Tom Scott's face around 3:30

That's... pretty weak evidence. And also a weird definition of "reset". Presumably, he still knows his name is Tom, his mother's phone number, and can write an essay or add numbers together...