That sounds...terrible. People should do what they find fulfilling. (yes, this is a wide-eyed, naive viewpoint.) Anyway, as a grade-schooler I always thought girls were naturally smarter than...
The authors don’t put it quite so bluntly but another approach is to stop telling people to do what they are good at and instead tell them to do what pays!
That sounds...terrible. People should do what they find fulfilling. (yes, this is a wide-eyed, naive viewpoint.)
Anyway, as a grade-schooler I always thought girls were naturally smarter than boys. Maybe because us boys were more interested in throwing balls at each other and jumping off high objects and I assumed the girls were more consumed with intellectual pursuits. Either way, I carried that assumption with me up until college where I realized nobody is interested in intellectual pursuits.
It's also a myopic take. If you were studying geography or cartography or library science in the 1990s NONE of that stuff was going to pay. Nowadays ALL of that stuff is worth a shitload of money...
The authors don’t put it quite so bluntly but another approach is to stop telling people to do what they are good at and instead tell them to do what pays!
That sounds...terrible. People should do what they find fulfilling.
It's also a myopic take. If you were studying geography or cartography or library science in the 1990s NONE of that stuff was going to pay. Nowadays ALL of that stuff is worth a shitload of money in the job market because of how technology has evolved. Technology is constantly changing our definition of whether something pays or not. Asking 18 year olds with scarcely any understanding of what they actually want out of life to be able to augur the future is nonsense.
And what's more, those jobs that don't pay STILL NEED TO GET DONE. Asserting that the people who do them don't deserve compensation is acknowledging that those people are crucial for the continuance of society, but that the people doing them must remain poor because. . . who even knows. This is just a mentality that is meant to serve advocates for winner-take-all economies, not people who actually care about a healthy, resilient, or innovative society.
There is that old computer programming adage about how premature optimization is the root of all evil, but this is basically the economist's (and finance) ethos, to optimize as aggressively as you can towards the exact selective pressures of the environment we're in now. The fact that you're killing all your avenues for future innovations doesn't enter the picture.
But if you don't have a stable of people with those degrees to do the education, then you don't get future experts. So it still seems a little myopic to insist those people keeping the flame alive...
But if you don't have a stable of people with those degrees to do the education, then you don't get future experts. So it still seems a little myopic to insist those people keeping the flame alive deserve to be poor.
Undergraduate level educations aren’t so hyperspecific that the skills they’re learning aren’t transferable to a broad variety of professional contexts. The problem is employment markets being too...
Undergraduate level educations aren’t so hyperspecific that the skills they’re learning aren’t transferable to a broad variety of professional contexts. The problem is employment markets being too lazy to actually do professional training for new hires to the point where they require 3-5 years of experience in their very specific title and role and particular software stacks before they’ll even consider people for entry level positions.
An Egyptologists is functionally learning how to do historical research with a focus on Egypt. The market has plenty of need for people who understand how to collect, synthesize, and review information. But the ”education is only good for pre-professional training” crowd seems to think that unless you’re specifically a “business” major (whatever the hell that means) then you can’t possibly work in any sort of business. It’s painfully narrow-minded and fails to understand how innovation actually works.
Well you don't necessarily change the latter without talking through the former. There's a broad consensus among employers that there is a "skills gap" in the economy, but they're all in a...
Well you don't necessarily change the latter without talking through the former. There's a broad consensus among employers that there is a "skills gap" in the economy, but they're all in a prisoner's dilemma about how to address it. None of them wants to go through the expense of training people for fear they will leave, take the training with them, and benefit a competitor. But without the training, they can never resolve the "skills gap" they're complaining about.
If they are able to fill an entry level position with those skills, why is this their fault?
The problem is employment markets being too lazy to actually do professional training for new hires to the point where they require 3-5 years of experience in their very specific title and role and particular software stacks before they’ll even consider people for entry level positions.
If they are able to fill an entry level position with those skills, why is this their fault?
More often than not, they can't. They end up requiring people to do unpaid internships for years before they can even get a foot in the door, which basically further constrains their own labor...
More often than not, they can't. They end up requiring people to do unpaid internships for years before they can even get a foot in the door, which basically further constrains their own labor supply.
And in spite of all that, they still refuse to raise wages. Large employers can get away with it, but this kind of irrationality in the labor market has basically been killing small businesses.
What industry and location are we talking about? My experience and research don't jive with your claim. I work in "high tech" in the Great Lakes/rustbelt region of the US. The job postings in my...
What industry and location are we talking about? My experience and research don't jive with your claim. I work in "high tech" in the Great Lakes/rustbelt region of the US. The job postings in my industry that I see are being filled, and students in this industry in my region are only doing paid internships.
The "skills gap" reports I've seen in my region are focused primarily on low-wage manual labor positions. My take on the "skills gap" is that it is simply an excuse for bad businesses with low wage and low skill positions. As it continues, it is a proper market force and these businesses will be eliminated along with the jobs they're trying to fill because they simply aren't needed or valued in our current economy. This sounds incredibly harsh, but it is also real. No one can live a good life as a laborer in my region making $29/hr at the top end (90th percentile wages, not entry-level wages), and we shouldn't want to educate them to these types of jobs.
Tech is one of the fields where this isn't happening because of the amount of cheap money floating around. The rapidity of evolution in technology also makes it so business processes never get...
What industry and location are we talking about? My experience and research don't jive with your claim. I work in "high tech" in the Great Lakes/rustbelt region of the US. The job postings in my industry that I see are being filled, and students in this industry in my region are only doing paid internships.
Tech is one of the fields where this isn't happening because of the amount of cheap money floating around. The rapidity of evolution in technology also makes it so business processes never get nailed down and there is always a "new shiny thing" to go chasing after that privileges people just getting out of school. It also helps that "quality" in programming is much more quantitatively measurable than in many other fields.
Basically any other field especially non-profits, but also journalism, education, marketing, and so on are seriously incapable of getting a decent pipeline of entry level talent and the good ones they do get end up job hopping constantly because the processes to take good talent and develop it have atrophied into nothing.
Even tech isn't really immune either, because specific subfields like security have a much greater demand for trained people than can feasibly be trained, so there's a glut of absolute numbskulls running around pretending to be security experts.
The skill gap goes beyond just bad businesses. Even good businesses suffer in hiring from high churn because it becomes harder and harder to guess at which potential hires actually have the skills you value. The best they do is weird certification programs, which take all of a year or two before they start getting gamed, or apprenticeship programs which are woefully undercompensated and tend towards generating abusive work environments by locking in entry to mid level talent to bad employers (just talk to any beginning architect to get a sense for how bullshit this is).
Yes, you're right that future careers are hard to predict. Exploring a variety of interests is good. That said, saying "learning more math is probably good" isn't all that specialized? Also, from...
Yes, you're right that future careers are hard to predict. Exploring a variety of interests is good. That said, saying "learning more math is probably good" isn't all that specialized?
Also, from an economics perspective, jobs that don't pay have too many people who want to do them (or are able to them), and jobs that do pay well don't have enough. Encouraging people to move towards the areas where there are shortages seems likely to balance things out, and if successful, maybe that would reduce inequality somewhat.
That's not a field, though, so much as a skill. I'm actually down with teaching people the practical skills they need to succeed, but I don't think the formal college/accreditation route is the...
That said, saying "learning more math is probably good" isn't all that specialized?
That's not a field, though, so much as a skill. I'm actually down with teaching people the practical skills they need to succeed, but I don't think the formal college/accreditation route is the best way to do that. Ideally, you should have most of the math you need to perform at a basic level out of high school and the fact that people come out without it is a problem.
I actually think too many employers are too fixated on specific educational pathways or certification type programs to get talent and it's been bad for people and bad for companies both. It fosters group-think and creates an environment where tons of energy and money is going into gaming the system to signal competence rather than actually cultivating skill. It also prioritizes specific types of technical skills at the expense of, arguably more important, getting-things-done skills like communication, openness to feedback, time management, and working as part of a team.
Historically companies put a lot more energy into on-the-job or internal training programs for entry level staff and managers alike. This was how people could work their way up from the mail room to the C-suite without ever having to take time off to get an MBA. That's all gone now, commitments to staff development have evaporated and companies not only get more churn as a result, but they lose the crucial opportunity to actually define company values and culture. Everyone just ends up regressing to the same values and culture that get promulgated at the handful of elite business schools, and then the management tier at companies end up being completely removed from the experiences and background of the people who actually do the work at many of these companies.
I agree with most of that! With math, though, there may be something to be said for doing more advanced work than you might practically need? It's my general impression that there are not that...
I agree with most of that! With math, though, there may be something to be said for doing more advanced work than you might practically need? It's my general impression that there are not that many jobs in physics, but physics majors tend to find it easy to move into other STEM areas or finance, because they've had a lot of practice with applying some fairly advanced math.
Finance and physics are both really heavy on complex math and theoretical modeling though, so if you're in either field you're in some pretty rarified heights of math ability. It's not necessarily...
Finance and physics are both really heavy on complex math and theoretical modeling though, so if you're in either field you're in some pretty rarified heights of math ability. It's not necessarily applicable to everyone. Someone who went in to study physics will certainly have gone in there knowing they liked doing applied math that goes well beyond what a typical person would be expected to be comfortable with.
Yeah, maybe not the best example. But what I mean is, there's a difference between learning enough to get by (the stuff everyone should know) and taking a real interest in a subject and trying to...
Yeah, maybe not the best example. But what I mean is, there's a difference between learning enough to get by (the stuff everyone should know) and taking a real interest in a subject and trying to excel at it.
Just as more reading is going to happen when you get kids actually interested in books (no matter whether the subject is practical), more math is going to happen if you promote it not just as practical (though it is sometimes that) but more as an interesting hobby for exploration, with connections to many other things.
True. I think we agree there. I've always been bad at math and never really enjoyed it, but my parents forced me to learn it anyway and I ended up in a career as a data scientist. It turns out...
Just as more reading is going to happen when you get kids actually interested in books (no matter whether the subject is practical), more math is going to happen if you promote it not just as practical (though it is sometimes that) but more as an interesting hobby for exploration, with connections to many other things.
True. I think we agree there. I've always been bad at math and never really enjoyed it, but my parents forced me to learn it anyway and I ended up in a career as a data scientist. It turns out that once you get into certain types of real world application, the computers do all the boring parts now and I can just focus on interpreting the results of the math, which is way more up my alley.
If they had just thought it to me as a puzzle to solve I totally would have been into it, but they teach it as rote exercises where you need to solve for a known answer rather than trying to figure out a way to do something which took all the fun out of it for me.
But based on the engineering personality types I often encounter, they're frequently uncomfortable with the lack of known or provable answers and that reassurance that numbers provide appeals to them. On some level, I think this is why I've been so good as a data scientist, the ability to both do the math AND be uncomfortable with uncertainty works well when you're trying to model complicated things, like human behavior, or just deal with unknown probabilistic issues.
In general though, I'm not a huge fan of pitching alternative highly renumerative jobs as an incentive to learn a field you're interested in. They do this for philosophy majors by trying to tell them philosophers end up making great lawyers because of their training in rhetoric and formal logic. What they don't tell you is that having the actual value system one needs to cultivate to be a good philosopher, a general love of truth, will end up making you absolutely miserable if you go into law. Part of me wonders is this filtering effect is responsible for the rise of postmodern philosophy. It's certainly responsible for how many lawyers I know who are chronically miserable.
This comment would have said exactly the same thing without the completely unnecessary first sentence that framed it as an attack on the person you're replying to. Please don't do that, that will...
This comment would have said exactly the same thing without the completely unnecessary first sentence that framed it as an attack on the person you're replying to. Please don't do that, that will just make it into a fight instead of a discussion.
Edit: the post has been edited now, but originally, the first sentence was "It's also a moronic viewpoint."
Maybe just confusing or strange phrasing then. The way I read it, @krg was saying that their own viewpoint was naive and wide-eyed. You quoted that and called it moronic.
Maybe just confusing or strange phrasing then. The way I read it, @krg was saying that their own viewpoint was naive and wide-eyed. You quoted that and called it moronic.
I've got a story for you: a story of twins. They both went to college, but one majored in a foreign language because it was what was spoken where their grandfather came from and they wanted to be...
I've got a story for you: a story of twins. They both went to college, but one majored in a foreign language because it was what was spoken where their grandfather came from and they wanted to be more connected to their ancestry, and the other majored in computer science because it was what their father had done, and he'd done very well for himself. The twin that majored in a foreign language now has a job unrelated to their major, and makes about half of what the CS major does. The poor twin struggles with debt and a harsh job market, and the well-off twin buys expensive outfits and the nicest gear for their hobbies. All because one of them wanted to follow their dreams and one wanted to get a practical job that would pay the bills for life.
This isn't everyone's story, but it's mine. You might argue that one of them is happier than the other, but which one? The one who followed their passion to the point where they found that no one wanted to pay them to follow it further? Or the one who chose a job that wasn't their passion but has a comfortable life where they can do what they want outside of work?
You're not wrong that sometimes you have to make the more practical choice, but I don't think we should tell everyone to just do what's most lucrative. It drives more people into that field which...
You're not wrong that sometimes you have to make the more practical choice, but I don't think we should tell everyone to just do what's most lucrative. It drives more people into that field which pushes down wages, plus there aren't enough CS/trades/etc jobs for everyone. It doesn't solve the problem that the way things are set up right now doesn't work and will always leave some people behind. That and there are plenty of CS majors with debt and/or in jobs in other fields.
Yeah, I'm not telling anyone what to do, only providing the experience of two people with near identical opportunity and widely divergent results based on their choices.
Yeah, I'm not telling anyone what to do, only providing the experience of two people with near identical opportunity and widely divergent results based on their choices.
Did I reach a conclusion? I described a situation that happened and asked some questions. If you've reached conclusions based on my story I'm happy to hear them, but I'm very clearly not saying...
Did I reach a conclusion? I described a situation that happened and asked some questions. If you've reached conclusions based on my story I'm happy to hear them, but I'm very clearly not saying that this is the Truth, only that it happened.
Everyone will have different career priorities and that may change depending on what stage of life someone is in. A lot of my friends are teachers. Teaching is their passion and they would be...
Everyone will have different career priorities and that may change depending on what stage of life someone is in. A lot of my friends are teachers. Teaching is their passion and they would be unhappy with any other career. I hope that one day I can find a job that I love as much as they love teaching because when I talk to them it's obvious they picked the perfect job.
However, where I live teachers need a masters degree so many of them have lots of debt and pay wise they're making $50kish (and spend out of pocket to buy supplies for their classrooms). They do okay, but have roommates and skimp to make everything work financially.
On the other hand, I got an undergrad degree and found a job that pays 80k/year right after graduating. I will never go on and on about how much I love my job. My job is not my passion. My job does allow me a certain sense of security that my friends do not have though. I can take spontaneous vacations whenever; if I want I can go to a fancy new restaurant that opens up. I'm happy with the experiences I can afford because of the career I chose. At this point in my life, that is what I want out of a job.
My friends would be miserable if they spent 40 hours a week in a job they weren't passionate about even if it meant they had more financial freedom. Personally, I don't even know what my career passion is yet and want the financial security while I figure out what I do next.
I think that if you enter college with a good idea of what you want to do, and you are passionate and commit your time in college to working on it, then I agree with you. I think the internet...
I think that if you enter college with a good idea of what you want to do, and you are passionate and commit your time in college to working on it, then I agree with you. I think the internet feelgooders and guidance counselors overestimate the number of people that are passionate about something though. This is only my own experience of course.
I think the real downside to this approach is it lets people rationalize their own self-doubt about their ability to learn more in-demand skills. I am a mediocre programmer making burlap sacks full of money, and I'm always jarred at how many people think that all programmers are some kinds of beastly systems architects. It's so simple to make good money in tech right now (and it might not last forever, and for some people it's harder than others to get good at, and it simply might not interest people). But for the people that get herded into "easier" majors because some of those classes sound cool (not "passion", more like a whiff of interest), I think it would benefit them to forego humanities degree and get the money.
I myself have a degree in the humanities and it took me a couple of years to shift into a technical job. And I also heavily value critical thinking, creative writing, literature, and all that jazz. I regret not studying that stuff more in college. But when I was focused on getting a degree in a major that I wasn't actually passionate about, I ended up slacking in the classes and not challenging myself. Perhaps if I had done the slacking in a CS curriculum instead, I could have taken more electives and actually valued my time there.
I agree completely. Everyone says to go into tech as if it's so easy to do, or as if it's what everyone wants to do. Life shouldn't be about the pursuit of money, and if you're happy doing what...
That sounds...terrible. People should do what they find fulfilling. (yes, this is a wide-eyed, naive viewpoint.)
I agree completely. Everyone says to go into tech as if it's so easy to do, or as if it's what everyone wants to do. Life shouldn't be about the pursuit of money, and if you're happy doing what you're doing then that's all you need. We shouldn't kill ourselves to make capitalists richer.
It's an abrupt, exaggerated statement, but I think there is a more subtle and less black-and-white version. We don't start out knowing what we will be interested in. We can choose to explore a lot...
It's an abrupt, exaggerated statement, but I think there is a more subtle and less black-and-white version. We don't start out knowing what we will be interested in. We can choose to explore a lot of different interests, and people usually do. Having an idea what pays well might mean looking a little harder at some things than others to find something you like, not settling for something you hate.
That said, this is thinking very far in advance, and the future is not predictable. The best-paying careers can change, so it's something of a crapshoot. When I was reading about different careers in high school, computer programming was described as a steady job, but not particularly lucrative. Sort of like accounting. Most of the jobs I've had were doing things that didn't exist at the time.
Also, people do sometimes decide a career is not for them after graduating. (Like becoming a lawyer and quitting after a few months.) So, not only knowing what pays well, but what jobs are actually about day-to-day, and whether you like that or not is also really important.
(Yeah, I was somewhat disillusioned by college too.)
I guess I should've rephrased my statement as a question: "Shouldn't people pursue what they find fulfilling?" Why? Seems like pursuing that which one finds unfulfilling would wear on one's ......
I guess I should've rephrased my statement as a question: "Shouldn't people pursue what they find fulfilling?"
Why? Seems like pursuing that which one finds unfulfilling would wear on one's ... soul.
I'm also aware work and passions can be different and coexist.* And that having a higher paying job could afford you more time for your passions. Hence, why I'm aware that advising people to have their passion be their work is wide-eyed and naive. Still, pushing people to do what pays feels bad.
I ask mainly because I wasn't 100% sure how precise you were being. There's a lot of evidence that at-least for happiness we have a set biological level and a lot of the things people think they...
I ask mainly because I wasn't 100% sure how precise you were being. There's a lot of evidence that at-least for happiness we have a set biological level and a lot of the things people think they need aren't actually that important. The question I'm now asking is if there's a significant difference between being happy and being fulfilled and I don't know the answer to that one.
Sure, it's been well established that for any individual they have a general set-point for their happiness. This is caused by their genetic makeup and accounts for approximately 40% of the...
Sure, it's been well established that for any individual they have a general set-point for their happiness. This is caused by their genetic makeup and accounts for approximately 40% of the variation between people. It turns out happiness is very heritable, if your parents were happy you will be too.
This is at odds for a lot of people who think that if they just change their circumstances they'll be happy. This might be true in the short-term but they will tend to return to their base level over time. This is called hedonic adaptation.
It can be a very depressing thing to learn but also very liberating. You don't necessarily need to meet your dreams to be happy. Instead you can look at evidence based behaviors to maximize...
It can be a very depressing thing to learn but also very liberating. You don't necessarily need to meet your dreams to be happy. Instead you can look at evidence based behaviors to maximize happiness/life fulfillment. Coursera has a fun course about this.
I wonder how long it will take before young boys start getting attention for their own gender-specific needs (and predisposition to certain educational impediments such as ADD etc.). Or, better...
I wonder how long it will take before young boys start getting attention for their own gender-specific needs (and predisposition to certain educational impediments such as ADD etc.). Or, better yet, having an educational system that allows for at least a slightly finer granularity in teaching/learning styles.
That sounds...terrible. People should do what they find fulfilling. (yes, this is a wide-eyed, naive viewpoint.)
Anyway, as a grade-schooler I always thought girls were naturally smarter than boys. Maybe because us boys were more interested in throwing balls at each other and jumping off high objects and I assumed the girls were more consumed with intellectual pursuits. Either way, I carried that assumption with me up until college where I realized nobody is interested in intellectual pursuits.
It's also a myopic take. If you were studying geography or cartography or library science in the 1990s NONE of that stuff was going to pay. Nowadays ALL of that stuff is worth a shitload of money in the job market because of how technology has evolved. Technology is constantly changing our definition of whether something pays or not. Asking 18 year olds with scarcely any understanding of what they actually want out of life to be able to augur the future is nonsense.
And what's more, those jobs that don't pay STILL NEED TO GET DONE. Asserting that the people who do them don't deserve compensation is acknowledging that those people are crucial for the continuance of society, but that the people doing them must remain poor because. . . who even knows. This is just a mentality that is meant to serve advocates for winner-take-all economies, not people who actually care about a healthy, resilient, or innovative society.
There is that old computer programming adage about how premature optimization is the root of all evil, but this is basically the economist's (and finance) ethos, to optimize as aggressively as you can towards the exact selective pressures of the environment we're in now. The fact that you're killing all your avenues for future innovations doesn't enter the picture.
*edited for clarity.
But if you don't have a stable of people with those degrees to do the education, then you don't get future experts. So it still seems a little myopic to insist those people keeping the flame alive deserve to be poor.
Undergraduate level educations aren’t so hyperspecific that the skills they’re learning aren’t transferable to a broad variety of professional contexts. The problem is employment markets being too lazy to actually do professional training for new hires to the point where they require 3-5 years of experience in their very specific title and role and particular software stacks before they’ll even consider people for entry level positions.
An Egyptologists is functionally learning how to do historical research with a focus on Egypt. The market has plenty of need for people who understand how to collect, synthesize, and review information. But the ”education is only good for pre-professional training” crowd seems to think that unless you’re specifically a “business” major (whatever the hell that means) then you can’t possibly work in any sort of business. It’s painfully narrow-minded and fails to understand how innovation actually works.
Well you don't necessarily change the latter without talking through the former. There's a broad consensus among employers that there is a "skills gap" in the economy, but they're all in a prisoner's dilemma about how to address it. None of them wants to go through the expense of training people for fear they will leave, take the training with them, and benefit a competitor. But without the training, they can never resolve the "skills gap" they're complaining about.
If they are able to fill an entry level position with those skills, why is this their fault?
More often than not, they can't. They end up requiring people to do unpaid internships for years before they can even get a foot in the door, which basically further constrains their own labor supply.
And in spite of all that, they still refuse to raise wages. Large employers can get away with it, but this kind of irrationality in the labor market has basically been killing small businesses.
What industry and location are we talking about? My experience and research don't jive with your claim. I work in "high tech" in the Great Lakes/rustbelt region of the US. The job postings in my industry that I see are being filled, and students in this industry in my region are only doing paid internships.
The "skills gap" reports I've seen in my region are focused primarily on low-wage manual labor positions. My take on the "skills gap" is that it is simply an excuse for bad businesses with low wage and low skill positions. As it continues, it is a proper market force and these businesses will be eliminated along with the jobs they're trying to fill because they simply aren't needed or valued in our current economy. This sounds incredibly harsh, but it is also real. No one can live a good life as a laborer in my region making $29/hr at the top end (90th percentile wages, not entry-level wages), and we shouldn't want to educate them to these types of jobs.
Tech is one of the fields where this isn't happening because of the amount of cheap money floating around. The rapidity of evolution in technology also makes it so business processes never get nailed down and there is always a "new shiny thing" to go chasing after that privileges people just getting out of school. It also helps that "quality" in programming is much more quantitatively measurable than in many other fields.
Basically any other field especially non-profits, but also journalism, education, marketing, and so on are seriously incapable of getting a decent pipeline of entry level talent and the good ones they do get end up job hopping constantly because the processes to take good talent and develop it have atrophied into nothing.
Even tech isn't really immune either, because specific subfields like security have a much greater demand for trained people than can feasibly be trained, so there's a glut of absolute numbskulls running around pretending to be security experts.
The skill gap goes beyond just bad businesses. Even good businesses suffer in hiring from high churn because it becomes harder and harder to guess at which potential hires actually have the skills you value. The best they do is weird certification programs, which take all of a year or two before they start getting gamed, or apprenticeship programs which are woefully undercompensated and tend towards generating abusive work environments by locking in entry to mid level talent to bad employers (just talk to any beginning architect to get a sense for how bullshit this is).
Yes, you're right that future careers are hard to predict. Exploring a variety of interests is good. That said, saying "learning more math is probably good" isn't all that specialized?
Also, from an economics perspective, jobs that don't pay have too many people who want to do them (or are able to them), and jobs that do pay well don't have enough. Encouraging people to move towards the areas where there are shortages seems likely to balance things out, and if successful, maybe that would reduce inequality somewhat.
That's not a field, though, so much as a skill. I'm actually down with teaching people the practical skills they need to succeed, but I don't think the formal college/accreditation route is the best way to do that. Ideally, you should have most of the math you need to perform at a basic level out of high school and the fact that people come out without it is a problem.
I actually think too many employers are too fixated on specific educational pathways or certification type programs to get talent and it's been bad for people and bad for companies both. It fosters group-think and creates an environment where tons of energy and money is going into gaming the system to signal competence rather than actually cultivating skill. It also prioritizes specific types of technical skills at the expense of, arguably more important, getting-things-done skills like communication, openness to feedback, time management, and working as part of a team.
Historically companies put a lot more energy into on-the-job or internal training programs for entry level staff and managers alike. This was how people could work their way up from the mail room to the C-suite without ever having to take time off to get an MBA. That's all gone now, commitments to staff development have evaporated and companies not only get more churn as a result, but they lose the crucial opportunity to actually define company values and culture. Everyone just ends up regressing to the same values and culture that get promulgated at the handful of elite business schools, and then the management tier at companies end up being completely removed from the experiences and background of the people who actually do the work at many of these companies.
I agree with most of that! With math, though, there may be something to be said for doing more advanced work than you might practically need? It's my general impression that there are not that many jobs in physics, but physics majors tend to find it easy to move into other STEM areas or finance, because they've had a lot of practice with applying some fairly advanced math.
Finance and physics are both really heavy on complex math and theoretical modeling though, so if you're in either field you're in some pretty rarified heights of math ability. It's not necessarily applicable to everyone. Someone who went in to study physics will certainly have gone in there knowing they liked doing applied math that goes well beyond what a typical person would be expected to be comfortable with.
Yeah, maybe not the best example. But what I mean is, there's a difference between learning enough to get by (the stuff everyone should know) and taking a real interest in a subject and trying to excel at it.
Just as more reading is going to happen when you get kids actually interested in books (no matter whether the subject is practical), more math is going to happen if you promote it not just as practical (though it is sometimes that) but more as an interesting hobby for exploration, with connections to many other things.
True. I think we agree there. I've always been bad at math and never really enjoyed it, but my parents forced me to learn it anyway and I ended up in a career as a data scientist. It turns out that once you get into certain types of real world application, the computers do all the boring parts now and I can just focus on interpreting the results of the math, which is way more up my alley.
If they had just thought it to me as a puzzle to solve I totally would have been into it, but they teach it as rote exercises where you need to solve for a known answer rather than trying to figure out a way to do something which took all the fun out of it for me.
But based on the engineering personality types I often encounter, they're frequently uncomfortable with the lack of known or provable answers and that reassurance that numbers provide appeals to them. On some level, I think this is why I've been so good as a data scientist, the ability to both do the math AND be uncomfortable with uncertainty works well when you're trying to model complicated things, like human behavior, or just deal with unknown probabilistic issues.
In general though, I'm not a huge fan of pitching alternative highly renumerative jobs as an incentive to learn a field you're interested in. They do this for philosophy majors by trying to tell them philosophers end up making great lawyers because of their training in rhetoric and formal logic. What they don't tell you is that having the actual value system one needs to cultivate to be a good philosopher, a general love of truth, will end up making you absolutely miserable if you go into law. Part of me wonders is this filtering effect is responsible for the rise of postmodern philosophy. It's certainly responsible for how many lawyers I know who are chronically miserable.
This comment would have said exactly the same thing without the completely unnecessary first sentence that framed it as an attack on the person you're replying to. Please don't do that, that will just make it into a fight instead of a discussion.
Edit: the post has been edited now, but originally, the first sentence was "It's also a moronic viewpoint."
I was agreeing with the person I was replying to. It was more of an attack on Alex Tabarrok, who wrote the article.
Maybe just confusing or strange phrasing then. The way I read it, @krg was saying that their own viewpoint was naive and wide-eyed. You quoted that and called it moronic.
Ah re-reading it I can see it comes across that way. I edited the comment to make it clearer.
Thanks! We can delete this whole chain of comments if you'd like, since it's all mostly just obsolete clutter now.
I don't mind it being here. Some occasional, visible chiding helps define the lines around how people should behave :-)
I've got a story for you: a story of twins. They both went to college, but one majored in a foreign language because it was what was spoken where their grandfather came from and they wanted to be more connected to their ancestry, and the other majored in computer science because it was what their father had done, and he'd done very well for himself. The twin that majored in a foreign language now has a job unrelated to their major, and makes about half of what the CS major does. The poor twin struggles with debt and a harsh job market, and the well-off twin buys expensive outfits and the nicest gear for their hobbies. All because one of them wanted to follow their dreams and one wanted to get a practical job that would pay the bills for life.
This isn't everyone's story, but it's mine. You might argue that one of them is happier than the other, but which one? The one who followed their passion to the point where they found that no one wanted to pay them to follow it further? Or the one who chose a job that wasn't their passion but has a comfortable life where they can do what they want outside of work?
You're not wrong that sometimes you have to make the more practical choice, but I don't think we should tell everyone to just do what's most lucrative. It drives more people into that field which pushes down wages, plus there aren't enough CS/trades/etc jobs for everyone. It doesn't solve the problem that the way things are set up right now doesn't work and will always leave some people behind. That and there are plenty of CS majors with debt and/or in jobs in other fields.
Yeah, I'm not telling anyone what to do, only providing the experience of two people with near identical opportunity and widely divergent results based on their choices.
Did I reach a conclusion? I described a situation that happened and asked some questions. If you've reached conclusions based on my story I'm happy to hear them, but I'm very clearly not saying that this is the Truth, only that it happened.
Everyone will have different career priorities and that may change depending on what stage of life someone is in. A lot of my friends are teachers. Teaching is their passion and they would be unhappy with any other career. I hope that one day I can find a job that I love as much as they love teaching because when I talk to them it's obvious they picked the perfect job.
However, where I live teachers need a masters degree so many of them have lots of debt and pay wise they're making $50kish (and spend out of pocket to buy supplies for their classrooms). They do okay, but have roommates and skimp to make everything work financially.
On the other hand, I got an undergrad degree and found a job that pays 80k/year right after graduating. I will never go on and on about how much I love my job. My job is not my passion. My job does allow me a certain sense of security that my friends do not have though. I can take spontaneous vacations whenever; if I want I can go to a fancy new restaurant that opens up. I'm happy with the experiences I can afford because of the career I chose. At this point in my life, that is what I want out of a job.
My friends would be miserable if they spent 40 hours a week in a job they weren't passionate about even if it meant they had more financial freedom. Personally, I don't even know what my career passion is yet and want the financial security while I figure out what I do next.
I think that if you enter college with a good idea of what you want to do, and you are passionate and commit your time in college to working on it, then I agree with you. I think the internet feelgooders and guidance counselors overestimate the number of people that are passionate about something though. This is only my own experience of course.
I think the real downside to this approach is it lets people rationalize their own self-doubt about their ability to learn more in-demand skills. I am a mediocre programmer making burlap sacks full of money, and I'm always jarred at how many people think that all programmers are some kinds of beastly systems architects. It's so simple to make good money in tech right now (and it might not last forever, and for some people it's harder than others to get good at, and it simply might not interest people). But for the people that get herded into "easier" majors because some of those classes sound cool (not "passion", more like a whiff of interest), I think it would benefit them to forego humanities degree and get the money.
I myself have a degree in the humanities and it took me a couple of years to shift into a technical job. And I also heavily value critical thinking, creative writing, literature, and all that jazz. I regret not studying that stuff more in college. But when I was focused on getting a degree in a major that I wasn't actually passionate about, I ended up slacking in the classes and not challenging myself. Perhaps if I had done the slacking in a CS curriculum instead, I could have taken more electives and actually valued my time there.
I agree completely. Everyone says to go into tech as if it's so easy to do, or as if it's what everyone wants to do. Life shouldn't be about the pursuit of money, and if you're happy doing what you're doing then that's all you need. We shouldn't kill ourselves to make capitalists richer.
It's an abrupt, exaggerated statement, but I think there is a more subtle and less black-and-white version. We don't start out knowing what we will be interested in. We can choose to explore a lot of different interests, and people usually do. Having an idea what pays well might mean looking a little harder at some things than others to find something you like, not settling for something you hate.
That said, this is thinking very far in advance, and the future is not predictable. The best-paying careers can change, so it's something of a crapshoot. When I was reading about different careers in high school, computer programming was described as a steady job, but not particularly lucrative. Sort of like accounting. Most of the jobs I've had were doing things that didn't exist at the time.
Also, people do sometimes decide a career is not for them after graduating. (Like becoming a lawyer and quitting after a few months.) So, not only knowing what pays well, but what jobs are actually about day-to-day, and whether you like that or not is also really important.
(Yeah, I was somewhat disillusioned by college too.)
Why should someone pursue what they think is fulfilling?
I guess I should've rephrased my statement as a question: "Shouldn't people pursue what they find fulfilling?"
Why? Seems like pursuing that which one finds unfulfilling would wear on one's ... soul.
I'm also aware work and passions can be different and coexist.* And that having a higher paying job could afford you more time for your passions. Hence, why I'm aware that advising people to have their passion be their work is wide-eyed and naive. Still, pushing people to do what pays feels bad.
*e.g., Artists and their day jobs.
I ask mainly because I wasn't 100% sure how precise you were being. There's a lot of evidence that at-least for happiness we have a set biological level and a lot of the things people think they need aren't actually that important. The question I'm now asking is if there's a significant difference between being happy and being fulfilled and I don't know the answer to that one.
Sure, it's been well established that for any individual they have a general set-point for their happiness. This is caused by their genetic makeup and accounts for approximately 40% of the variation between people. It turns out happiness is very heritable, if your parents were happy you will be too.
This is at odds for a lot of people who think that if they just change their circumstances they'll be happy. This might be true in the short-term but they will tend to return to their base level over time. This is called hedonic adaptation.
It can be a very depressing thing to learn but also very liberating. You don't necessarily need to meet your dreams to be happy. Instead you can look at evidence based behaviors to maximize happiness/life fulfillment. Coursera has a fun course about this.
I wonder how long it will take before young boys start getting attention for their own gender-specific needs (and predisposition to certain educational impediments such as ADD etc.). Or, better yet, having an educational system that allows for at least a slightly finer granularity in teaching/learning styles.