
Your waitress, your professor - nvader
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/19/opinion/your-waitress-your-professor.html
======
rayiner
The other day my wife and I were at a baby clothing store. We were chatting
with the young woman at the counter, and she was complaining about her student
loans. I asked her what her major was, and she said it was physics. I said
"oh" with a degree of surprise that made me cringe. I mentioned my brother had
majored in physics. She asked me where he went to school, and I told her he
went to Yale. She said "oh, my parents went to Yale, but I went to MIT."

I felt bad about the encounter, and I couldn't figure out why. Statistically,
you're safe in assuming that any random person working at a clothing store
isn't an MIT grad making pocket money while working on her PhD. I realized
later that I felt bad that it mattered to me. That when she revealed she was
smart and educated, in my head I moved her from one class of people into
another.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I have a hard time reconciling the idea that we need more STEM graduates with
the difficulty that actual STEM graduates have finding work in their fields.

Even if it's part time work while pursuing a PhD, if there was anything
resembling a real shortage, these things wouldn't happen. And it's not a rare
story.

~~~
morgante
The problem is one of miscommunication between tech and media/government.

There is definitely a shortage of developers, a shortage which tech companies
have regularly been complaining about.

Unfortunately, politicians and journalists just hear "we need more nerds" so
assume there is a STEM shortage (in their non-technical minds, nerds are all
equivalent). Thus the broad and pointless push for STEM graduates when what's
really needed is a specific subsection of Technology.

~~~
bicknergseng
I wouldn't even say we have a shortage of "good developers." Like commenters
pointed out a few days ago on the "how to make it in the tech mecca" post,
there is a shortage of "ideal" developers willing to work for less and a
strong employer willingness to pass on 100 or 1000 "ok" or "good" candidates
that they could train in favor of that "ideal" candidate.

So I would argue that it's a problem with an asymmetrical job marketplace and
poor long term decision making on the part of employers.

~~~
philwelch
Training doesn't always turn an "ok" or "good" candidate into a great one. The
requirement is for developers. Either junior developers or senior developers.
Hiring a trainee actually costs you developer time in the short run, for no
guaranteed output in the long run as many of the trainees will just wash out.

Besides, all you need is some books and open source software and you can train
yourself, at least to the level that you're hirable. OK, some things you have
to learn from experience in ways that are hard to accomplish outside of
working for a big company (large scale distributed systems) but most of the
companies that _have_ large scale distributed systems are willing to hire
straight out of college and, effectively, train them!

So, the rational thing to do is to let the "ok" developers develop their own
skills and then hire the ones that end up being good. But then, I don't think
the standard is unreasonably high in the first place.

~~~
logfromblammo
You're correct in that most "good" developers can self-train on whatever stack
the employer uses. The problem is that many employers are not even willing to
buy one book and wait two weeks. If the candidate cannot be instantly
profitable from day 0, they are deemed to be "not qualified" for the position.

There are too many tech fads and trends for a developer to self-train on
everything a potential employer could possibly want _before_ knowing exactly
what that is.

In my opinion, tech employers should stop being so specific with their
requirements and simply allocate some time for the new people to adjust to
their in-house way of doing things. As many of us know well, every development
team has its own slightly different way of doing things, which has to be
learned in order to work more effectively. Nobody "hits the ground running",
because the tech skills are hardly ever the limiting factor in hitting full
productivity.

And I assure you that any company that wants to hire people to "hit the ground
running" will forget to mention their new hires will be doing that running as
a steeplechase over mismanagement hurdles.

Training doesn't improve the quality of a candidate. It assures the candidates
you can find at the price level you have chosen are familiar with the specific
technologies and processes that your company uses.

~~~
philwelch
Then there's a pretty big disconnect that I've seen. The bigger companies that
try to hire all the best programmers--Google, Amazon, Microsoft--don't
actually care much about tech stacks unless they're hiring for a senior
specialist in some specific technology, and even then it'll have more to do
with a problem domain than a programming language. The employers who care
about tech stacks tend to be either mediocre large companies (who by
definition aren't very clueful) or small companies and startups (who really do
need you to hit the ground running because they really do have limited
resources).

~~~
logfromblammo
I think it comes down to whether the person directing the hiring process knows
anything about programming or not. At large, development-heavy companies, the
person hiring may actually have been a 100% software developer at some point,
before taking on management responsibilities. Then there is a big doughnut
hole, where the company is large enough to need developers, but too small to
want to promote any of them, and that is a wide wasteland of frustration
before you get down to small companies and start-ups whose business is so
strongly focused on tech that they can afford to have a full time developer,
but not so much that they can afford a bad one. Those tend to be split between
companies that hire for competence and those that want to hire someone that
they can use up fast and burn out. If the latter have fewer numbers, they need
to hire more people, so their influence in the hiring market is larger.

The mix is very heavily influenced by geographical locale. Around me, the
market is mostly the large-but-not-huge companies that hire a lot of software
developers but never promote them. So there's my bias. Google, Amazon,
Microsoft, et al. do not have a presence here, so they cannot improve the
behavior of other companies with their competitive pressure.

------
jetskindo
We go to school because it is a tradition. Parents wants to see their kid in
the funny hat. You are almost shunned when you drop out.

Not to say that school is useless, I loved learning. But I knew that the
computer science degree I was working towards wouldn't make much a difference
in the field I was hoping to work in.

Going to school should be an investment. It is too bad that most of us are too
young to understand the risk we take when taking loans or choosing an
education path.

~~~
meowface
I wish there were more options for technical "trade schools" in the US. At my
university I knew I wanted a career in information security and development,
and I had a choice between Computer Science and Information Systems. Computer
Science was mostly theory with not that much hands-on programming, while
Information Systems had some more hands-on real-world programming but was
heavily business/management oriented and essentially assumed only the most
rudimentary programming and technical skills even in the highest level
classes. I ended up going with Information Systems, which I'm still not sure
if I regret or not.

I was fortunate enough to be a pretty self-motivated learner and become
skilled at the things I was interested in through the Internet and self-
teaching, and landed a pretty good job straight out of college, but I can't
help but feel I wasted 4 years of time and money.

I would've loved to go to a university with practical Information
Security/Assurance and Software Engineering programs at the undergraduate
level, but sadly 1) none were anywhere near my area and 2) they're
considerably more expensive, and college is expensive enough already in the
US.

~~~
marincounty
It's too bad that schools don't prepare graduates for real world jobs.
Especially, for what they are charging. Personally, I don't know if most 10
yeared professors could keep up with the pace of change in the real world. I
think what a lot of people leave out, when they are espousing their college
degree, is the amount of self-learning, or who they know after graduation in
order to keep/get their job? We still have a lot of naive Sheep who will judge
you whether you finished that degree; so you will probally be glad you stuck
it out and graduated? As to the dude above me who automatically put that Sales
Person in a different "class" once he found she was a graduate of MIT--I'll
give you a break, but repeat a quote I will never forget; "Chubby--you need to
stop judging people on they way they look?" by Louis Medlock(Deliverance).

When I was in college I knew it was 90% B.S., but society expected me to
finish the degree. Would I go today, I'm not sure. You need to be exposed to a
few facts in life, so you don't end up believing in things that gave no
scientific validity. On the other hand my sister is a multimillionaire, and
believes in Psychics? She is also once very attractive, and thinks nothing of
taking advantage of people for what they can offer her--she used to call it ,
"They would make a good contact!" Now--they call it Networking. Personally, I
couldn't stomach it, but my sister doing great financially. Now if she could
get her family to like, or trust her, or a partner who actually liked her for
personality; she would have it all. Happy Holidays!

~~~
ryanmonroe
Just fyi, the word you're looking for is " _tenured_ professors could keep
up..."

------
vitno
The logic here seems... hypocritical, or at least inconsistent.

At the beginning: "In class I emphasize the value of a degree as a means to
avoid the sort of jobs that I myself go to when those hours in the classroom
are over."

At the end: "My perhaps naïve hope is that when I tell students I’m not only
an academic, but a “survival” jobholder, I’ll make a dent in the artificial,
inaccurate division society places between blue-collar work and “intelligent”
work. (also, that diaresis...)

It feels to me like the first statement says "I lie to my students and present
them with unrealistic expectations of the world" and the second says "If I say
something, I'll let them know that they are deriving little value from their
education... and thus put my career further behind."

~~~
pcunite
That may be the intent of the article. To lead you into the thinking that the
author wrestles with each day.

------
Mz
I dropped out of college when I was 21, in part because I knew two different
people with bachelor's degrees who had jobs like delivering newspapers or
selling shoes at a department store. Everyone around me seemed to think I
needed a degree in order to have a career and that a degree automagically
would give me a career. The lives of these two personal acquaintances
suggested otherwise.

I am currently personally acquainted with two other people who completed
college and they thus are saddled with huge student loans. Neither one is
making enough money to deal with those loans, much less justify them. One owes
$100k the other owes $250k. Even if you successfully declare bankruptcy, you
cannot write off student loans. These two people may never manage to get their
loans paid off. I cannot imagine how awful that must be and I used to have
more than $50k in personal debt, which I have been slowly resolving in recent
years. (Part of mine is also student debt, but not all of it. It is one of the
reasons that although I have considered declaring bankruptcy, I have never
pursued it in earnest. Part of what I owe has to be paid regardless.)

There is something very wrong with the system here in the U.S. A college
degree should not be a path to permanent poverty because you cannot really
afford the student loans you wracked up getting it.

~~~
jrs235
Contrary to popular belief, while it is difficult, it is possible in certain
situations to have student loans forgiven, canceled, or discharged.

[https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-
cancellati...](https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellation)

Edit:[https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-
cancellati...](https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-
cancellation#discharge-in)

~~~
Mz
Thank you.

------
noelwelsh
Anyone running an online business will tell you that words are valuable. Text
is the primary way we communicate with our customers. Carefully chosen words
can have a massive impact on revenue. The author possesses a valuable skill
but is not fairly compensated for it. What's going on?

Inequality is increasing in the US
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States))
and many other countries. Technology is giving capital an increasing advantage
over labour. A job as, say, a doctor, lawyer, or University professor, which
used to guarantee you a position at the top of the social hierarchy, no longer
does. Inequality is generally regarded as a bad thing, both socially and
economically (see, e.g.,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality))
Addressing inequality at a macro scale is beyond my knowledge, but I do know
how to address it at the micro scale: own your work.

Technology contributes to inequality by allowing successful businesses to
scale further with fewer employees. However, you can use the same
infrastructure to scale out your microbusiness. Within our community, patio11,
Amy Hoy, Brennan Dunn, Nathan Barry, and others have show how to do this. It
is noticeable that many of the above have made a substantial chunk of change
from publishing a book. (E.g.
[http://nathanbarry.com/2014-review/](http://nathanbarry.com/2014-review/)
~$260K from book sales.) The OP is in a great position to replicate this --
they have all the skills, namely command over the written word, to produce
great content and great copy to sell it.

On a wider scale, I think we can use technology to redress some of the growth
in inequality. Presently it mostly allows relatively few businesses to
concentrate wealth. If more people retake ownership over their work, which
technology in many cases enables, then perhaps we can do something to address
inequality. It's not the whole solution but it might be part of it.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Somewhat off topic, but to your question about why we don't value certain
kinds of work...

Culture provides a kind of distributed wage-fixing. The free market fallacy
gives people the idea that wages are optimized and reflect true economic
value. But in reality employers pay as little as they can get away with.

Imagine two societies. In the first, its generally accepted that people in any
position, including nurses and receptionists and customer support people, can
create immense business value if they accel at their jobs. A customer service
agent who makes big impacts on retention could expect to make a six figure
salary. Others who are less useful might make minimum wage.

Now imagine another world where the general social consensus is that your job
title implies a ceiling on how much value you can bring to an organization. In
this world a programmer can make millions but a customer service rep is capped
at $25 or so per hour. General belief is that if you want to make more you
can't just create more value, you have to get a different job title.

In the first world, corporations have to compete for every employee, and
overall compensation costs are higher. In the later world, only the top slice
of jobs are subject to market forces, and costs go down. It also has social
side effects that appeal to the ruling class, but that's another story.

I would argue that businesses who think this way are actually leaving money on
the table, and that by removing title-based compensation caps, you have a more
accurate picture of the economics of your business and can harvest more value,
but most people don't seem to think that way.

~~~
philwelch
> In the first, its generally accepted that people in any position, including
> nurses and receptionists and customer support people, can create immense
> business value if they accel at their jobs. A customer service agent who
> makes big impacts on retention could expect to make a six figure salary.
> Others who are less useful might make minimum wage.

Sorry, but as a matter of real-world fact, individual receptionists and
customer service representatives _can 't_ create immense business value. Or
rather, the individuals in those roles might be able to, but only if they are
moved to different, higher-leverage roles. (If you can retain hundreds of
thousands to millions of dollars worth of business by talking to individual
customers, "customer service" is not your job title. Maybe "sales" is.)

The market has two parts: supply and demand. If you do a job that just about
anybody could do, you don't get paid much because there are a lot of people
who can do a job just about anybody could do.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
That's largely because of the deliberate deskilling and commoditization of
labor by capital. If you structure your business so that most labor roles have
low requirements and low productivity, you shouldn't be surprised when you
have low productivity.

Of course, this model fails to account for all the low-paid but high-skilled
employees in technical, high-productivity roles, who are being quite simply
exploited.

~~~
philwelch
> That's largely because of the deliberate deskilling and commoditization of
> labor by capital. If you structure your business so that most labor roles
> have low requirements and low productivity, you shouldn't be surprised when
> you have low productivity.

Is anyone surprised by this? Is anyone expecting receptionists to deliver
millions of dollars of value to their business? There are just some roles that
have to be done where the value delivered per worker is very low. Labor
intensive work. And, in fact, some of it _is_ paid proportional to the value
delivered. Fruit pickers are paid proportional to the amount of fruit they
pick, for instance.

> Of course, this model fails to account for all the low-paid but high-skilled
> employees in technical, high-productivity roles, who are being quite simply
> exploited.

Who might these be?

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>Who might these be?

The geneticists, molecular biologists, and chemists in your average
biotechnology company.

------
palimpsests
I find it fairly surprising how certain the author seems to feel that getting
a doctorate would somehow equate to higher income and job stability -- English
Ph.Ds aren't exactly a credential in high demand. In fact, reality indicates
the opposite is true.

~~~
philwelch
People get stuck in bubbles. In the academia bubble, the only people making a
living are professors and to become a professor you need a Ph.D. So they are
the example people follow. They don't realize that becoming, say, an
accountant might be a better move because there aren't any accountants in the
academia bubble.

~~~
Dewie
People who get into PhD programs should have the general intelligence to
realize that every PhD candidate can not become a professor. It doesn't add up
in any hierarchical organization like that.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
If you understood how people _actually_ think, in a cognitive-science sense,
you would understand why "X should have the general intelligence to realize Y"
is a complete load in almost all cases.

~~~
Dewie
I'm sorry. Clearly some of the self-appointed smart people of HN were offended
by my naive remark, uninformed by any research in cognitive science or other
relevant discipline.

------
jrells
I like this article, but I wish it would do more to point out that high-
education low-wage workers, like adjunct university teachers, are usually in
their low-wage jobs by choice, and their education gives them a lot more
opportunities even if they don't take them. They are in a way very financially
secure, since they could easily give up on academics and move into high-wage
industry jobs (at least in the applicable fields). There are a lot of people
who really want academic jobs anyway, so schools are happy to pay low.

Note: I'm an academic and I have a second job to supplement my income. I have
often considered moving into industry where I would make 5-10x my teaching
income.

~~~
jpindar
But, but, there is no industry left in the US!

(Or so the internet tells me. Meanwhile I drive past half a dozen bustling
factories every day on my way to work at an electronics manufacturer.)

------
bsder
The real problem is that _neither_ of her jobs affords her a career.

Why should her teaching position be just above the poverty line? People should
regard that as horrific.

Why should her service job not be a career? People should regard the fact that
service jobs are so unstable as horrific.

------
imaginenore
I just don't get all the complaints.

Since when did we become entitled to a well-paid job?

If, let's say, tomorrow they invent an AI that can write great code, putting
me out of business - I will say, well, time to switch to something that pays.
And there are still TONs of jobs that pay - electricians, plumbers,
carpenters, construction equipment operators, elevator repairmen,
illustrators, real estate brokers - they all make good money. For now at
least.

Why would I even waste my time as a waiter? That time can be spent learning a
skill that's in demand, not something literally anybody can do.

~~~
anigbrowl
Because neither your landlord nor your supermarket proprietor is going to wait
around while you learn the skills to become employable in some other field.
You don't just decide to take up plumbing and bootstrap yourself from fixing
leaky buckets to running your own plumbing company. As well as the skills, you
need a pile of equipment, a vehicle, you probably need to be licensed in some
fashion, you need to be bonded or insured before people will do business with
you, and you need to spend a good bit of time networking.

You can of course bootstrap yourself into a lot of jobs, I've done it in more
than one field. but it can take quite a while to break even, and it's not like
there isn't competition. I was perticularly perplexed by your mention of
illustrators - for sure some illustrators can make a lot of money, but I'm
pretty sure that like every other branch of the arts, the average illustrator
starting out is beset with requrests to work for free or on spec on the
grounds that 'this will be great for your portfolio!'

~~~
imaginenore
I have savings and my credit history is nearly perfect. I'm pretty sure I can
take out a loan and start one of the above businesses.

It's important to have other skills in life as a backup plan. That, and
because it's interesting :)

I did wedding photography for fun, so I can tell you for certain - nobody who
does it professionally bills less than $2K per wedding (which is 6-8 hours of
shooting plus around 20 hours of photo editing). It's mostly $3-6K. If they
want a professional looking album, it's another 5-10 hours of laying it out
and ordering, and you can bill them another $500+ on top of the album cost. Of
course, you need a portfolio, and you need skills, but I billed for my second
wedding shoot - the first one was free for a friend.

How long will it take me to start a full blown wedding business? I'd say I
will land my first one within two-three weeks. I will probably not have many
clients at the beginning. In 6 months I will have more than I can handle. It's
true of every single good wedding photographer - they are booked months in
advance.

------
transfire
Not to worry in 10 to 20 more years robots will take your survival job away
too. Then you can teach college and be one of the homeless at the same time!

------
zxcvvcxz
>English instructor

The most important piece of information was at the end of the article! The
whole read I kept thinking "what type of professor is being economically
valued at a third that of a cocktail hostess?"

While this is ridiculous and seems like an example of the free market gone
wrong, I think it's very particular to Vegas. Serioisly, I know friends doing
the equivalent of 50/hour thanks to tips. However if this were true, in say,
Seattle, then I'd be much more worried.

------
lolwhat
Not surprised when 1% of the country holds 40% of the wealth.

------
morgante
I find it hard to sympathize with these articles.

She was aware that the academic job market is bleak, especially in English,
yet chose to pursue it nonetheless. Thus, her plight is squarely on her
shoulders. It also doesn't mean her students will fair worse: some of them
might be making rational choices to get degrees in useful, lucrative fields.
Especially at a third-rate university, nobody really has the luxury to major
in English.

Nothing in our economic system entitles you to making a living at something
just because you like it and practice it. I could train for decades to be the
world's foremost expert on modern cave painting, but that doesn't entitle me
to a cent of wages unless the market deems that skill is useful.

~~~
wfo
Any halfway decent programmer I've ever met or heard of loves programming.
They'd do it even if it didn't happen to be hyper-lucrative. We just got
lucky; we're passionate about something that the owning class happens to
currently consider fashionable. Enjoy it while it lasts and try not to pretend
it makes you better than anyone else.

~~~
meowface
>We just got lucky; we're passionate about something that the owning class
happens to currently consider fashionable. Enjoy it while it lasts

I imagine programming and related fields (networking, system administration
and integration, other IT operations) will still be very lucrative in 100 and
200 years from now. It might be slightly less lucrative (or it could be more
lucrative, who knows), but programmers will likely be very important to
organizations for at least a few centuries, if not millennia.

~~~
Chinjut
A few centuries is a long-ass time; far too long for such cocky predictions to
be taken seriously. (And millenia? Jesus...)

~~~
meowface
Unless you think computers are suddenly going to vanish forever or will
achieve absolute sentience and hyperintelligence in under a few centuries, I'm
not quite sure how I could be wrong.

~~~
altcognito
> I'm not quite sure how I could be wrong

Supply eventually will greatly exceed demand. The bar for entry will be
lowered.

Being able to write well is a good skill, probably comparable to computer
programming as being able to communicate with other humans is yknow,
important. But it seems to be that humanities majors and other degrees for
which writing and understanding writing is a critical skill aren't exactly in
high demand.

~~~
jimmaswell
>Supply eventually will greatly exceed demand.

This could only come true if there was a shift in programming technology that
made it a lot easier for someone without aptitude for programming as we know
it, or the average person started to end up with more programming aptitude
(maybe due to a revolution in early education or parenting methods).
Programming as we know it is very highly dependent on aptitude. Read this:
[http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-
fr...](http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-
programming-goats/)

------
jgwest
Okay, Brittney Bronson, it is what it is... You teach the young grown-ups /
old kids at the college, and then you shuck it in your part-time service
job... It is what it is...

