Why people still go to grad school
fredrikdeboer.com
fredrikdeboer.com
> But capitalism needs to keep everyone working at a manic pace, boosting productivity endlessly and recouping none of it in real wage growth, and that requires the concept of the loser.
I am no great cheerleader of capitalism, I could go on and on about the way people worship at the alter of "free markets" as if a market is inherently virtuous, but this is utter hogwash. Capitalism does not require the concept of a loser. It's the base human instinct of comparison to ones neighbor that requires the concept of a loser. Making everyone happy and prosperous beyond ones immediate tribe is just not an instinctive goal in large-scale humanity.
I would say that both benefit from the concept of a loser. In fact capitalism and this instinct go hand in hand. Capitalism is a frame work which works with this instinct.
Having said that it is also true that children have a natural instinct to play with their own faeces. Both this preoccupation with poo and the desire to elevate self at the expense of other should be discouraged.
Capitalism sucks, for the reasons eloquently outlined in this article.
Anything else I feel is sick capitalism, Banks repackaging unsustainable mortgages, hiding their inherent risks is not capitalism, it is lying, obfuscating and misleading. It is crime.
Capitalism is someone creating value and others willingly giving up their time and money (their create value) to get that value. Capitalism a beautiful system but it is ill and wrongly labeled in the current world.
Capitalism is a system where the companies hold all the power and labor holds none- because if labor doesn't take the deal, labor will die. You can't negotiate a fair deal under those circumstances.
Which is why you need the government- social safety nets give power back to labor. So do unions. But both have been severely cut back in the past few decades.
A friend of mine got an MBA at MIT and started a company. He had to spend the first 6 months without any income, living off his savings. On top of the capital he needed to start it.
I get what you're trying to say, but you're proposing an individual solution (that cannot scale) to a systematic problem.
There's very little on that list before the Industrial Revolution
Culturally, mimetic envy of one's neighbor was explicitly proscribed against in Western systems of though - "thou shalt not covet" - until fairly recently. So what changed? Probably TV advertising.
As a student of history I find it amusing when people pick some golden period when things were better or when we look at written records uncritically. From what I can tell, human nature doesn't really change and follows the types of algorithms evolution has inserted into other animals like following game theory-like tactics.
And TV advertising is just a hobby horse. The first practitioners were "retired" OSS officers, principally propagandists. This certainly fits my desire to avoid it for aesthetic reasons. I'd just note that Prosperity Gospel really is a thing, caused (and carried) by Cable TV.
Still worth the read, especially in the context of tech industry, where personally I see it at a crossroads of cubicle-farm vs artistic-expression. Maybe just ignore the last paragraph.
Everyone I know who went to grad school had a "meh, I dont have anything else to do and being a student beats working" attitude as opposed to some cutthroat "fuck you losers" attitude the writer is suggesting. This is a bizarre essay unless you're to the far left and casually blaming everything on capitalism is the only card in your intellectual deck (which is often the case on the internet I'm afraid).
Any small microcosm will ultimately generate heated, competitive spirit -- even when the reward is minuscule and virtually meaningless.
In other words: people love to compete over stupid shit.
The physical reality is one and only.
As far as the sheen wearing off, I'm not sure I'd agree with that. In extant communities that have no rewards outside of their status hierarchy, people continue to participate, often with great gusto: gaming, stamp collecting, meme creation, drawing, etc. People do them for both intrinsic rewards, and for status rewards only within that hierarchy or in "nearby" hierarchies.
Even Trotsky thought "the powerful force of competition which, in bourgeois society, has the character of market competition, will not disappear in a socialist society, but, to use the language of psychoanalysis, will be sublimated, that is, will assume a higher and more fertile form" "individual competition will have the widest scope." In the cases where the sheen does wear off, people can always switch, as they do now, to other areas (get bored of WoW, start playing Dark Souls, or go to a completely different hierarchy [games -> painting].)
A perfect example is that game dev crunch article that was going around a few days ago: if you're complaining about 80 hour work weeks you don't really love what you're doing!
I understand the rest of your point, but the underlying assumption is very wrong.
I personally realized half-way through undergrad that programming would help me achieve that goal - or even contributing to open source vs writing papers and trying to get published.
However, couldn't you say this about about a plethora of things?
I got kids/built a commerical building/wrote a book/made a youtube clip/participated in official sport (records lasts forever whohoo!). All of these things will keep existing to some capacity when you die.
Seems pretty trivial for it's own sake.
Honest request: Could you elaborate this idea a bit ? I find it very intriguing; investing so much time of your limited time on earth so that random people will be able to find your name and read your work.
I have restricted the impact I want to leave to my very close circle (especially my kids), and not in tangible things, but in how they behave, think and act.
Great pointer. thanks.
Having kids fulfills the same, but does not "scale" very well (for lack of a better word), since you can only have so many, parenting is hard and you might screw it up irreversibly. Creating something novel and useful (even if only marginally so) has the potential to touch countless lives, even after yours is over.
It could be art, or software, or an algorithm, or a formula...
Unless you are Geghis Khan. ;)
I got the job I'm in because of the work I did, but mostly because the people I work for now are even less technical than my academic adviser was, and were impressed by the people he knew and how long his list of publications was.
Apply this 10x for the patents my name is on.
For clarification, I quit two years into a PhD program and have been working in the industry for the last four years.
It's also expected (all but explicitly required) to have a master's degree or higher to expect any kind of management role here. May seem weird to you, but higher education plays by its own rules.
> This is why we’ve created all these bullshit “arty” corporate jobs in marketing and related fields, why software engineering is discussed in terms of people really making things rather than in terms of sitting at a computer, staring bleary-eyed at your code
What...? I love my job, and it does involve making things while I sit at my desk -- incredibly cool things. Not only that, but my manager is awesome and discourages anything of the "up late bleary-eyed" variety.
Sure, there's a lot of crap jobs out there, but also a lot of amazing jobs where we do make incredible things that change the world. That's the "capitalist american dream" this article loves to call totalitarian propaganda (read the article if you don't believe he said something so absurd).
I don't know what can be done. As jobs continue to get automated away, the emphasis on education will only become more extreme. To listen to some Presidential candidates talk everyone should have a PhD in underwater basket weaving, paid for by the government. It's insane.
Why is that insane? What else should people be doing instead of learning -- especially when they don't need to work?
Everybody has different goals. If your goal is simply to maximize your income, you will have a different decision making process than someone who is pursuing their interests, which will also be different than someone who is pursuing a job to pay bills, while keeping time for other interests outside of work.
Any articles written that make presumptions about your goals are going to miss the mark.
This can not be repeated enough. It is absolutely true, if you use the words 'socialism' or 'capitalism' no one will have a clue what you are talking about.
Here's one example of socialism in western culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care
It's not all-or-nothing.
But if you look closely at the second source, you'll see that the U.S. actually has a REALLY low MEDIAN wealth per adult. This indicates a large inequality.
The problem in the U.S. isn't that there isn't enough wealth to go around, it's that it's not going around.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
Your anti-socialism bias is far more overt and absurd than the article's vague anti-capitalism bias. You got so bent out of shape at the mere mention of socialism in a positive light that you made up an argument that the article didn't put forth just so you could accuse the author of a fallacy. I don't know what to call this. It's not even a strawman. It's intellectually dishonest.
I'm also left to assume from your comments that you think socialism and communism are the same thing. The defenders of socialism rarely say that no one's done it correctly. They instead point to the myriad of socialist programs in other countries that they consider successful (e.g. Canadian healthcare, German education, even US food stamps).
I also feel like there's just no relevance here anyway. Greece is part of NATO and bankrupt. Norway is part of NATO and thriving. NATO membership is clearly not the major determining factor for the health of a socialist nation.
I'm having trouble deciding if I'm being trolled or if your political views are just willfully one-sided.
The trick is to go to grad school in a field where you can get funding. Then, you can get paid to learn and write papers. Then it's like a day job -- no losing necessary.
I haven't seen any of the "Who goes to grad school?" thinkpieces the author mentions, but if I were a betting man, I'd bet the authors of such thinkpieces probably haven't been to grad school either...
The "sickness" the article speaks of -- fear of being a loser -- isn't a sickness at all, in my mind.
It's a boon to the world. Fear of letting down your customers, fear of letting down your employees, your cofounders, your investors -- that's a GOOD THING. That encourages people to try and make their new businesses work: to figure out what's wrong with them, to figure out how to make them better. And the point of that business is to provide customers with something valuable. And when you have lots of humans doing that across the whole world, you get a better world -- a world that turns typewriters into laptops, unused cars and houses into shared rides and shared vacations, long lost acquaintances into Facebook friends, etc etc etc.
However I can also see it as a sickness in the sense that we fetishize this extreme success. Imagine a hypothetical person that has to make a choice between doing some risky start-up that will consume his/her life or getting a solid job that allows them to work 40 hours per week and then enjoy their personal lives. Nobody would explicitly blame the person who chooses the latter option but we celebrate (especially on HN) the people who choose the former option. We celebrate it to the point that there are many people who choose the harder option simply because they feel they are a loser for not going after it and throwing everything they have at it. I don't see that being a good thing that everyone who is on the fence decides to go for the risky/hard path simply because of some societal zeitgeist.
Then again, as you point out, those individual choices lead to our collective advancement, so it's a really hard balance.
Why would people ever choose to instead go write code for some corporation that will always be closed source, has to be be whatever your supervisor tells you, won't even be owned by you, and may never see the light of day for the first 4-5 years out of college? Grad school seems more fulfilling, interesting, better for portfolio development, and you just happen to get a PhD out of it than most entry level coding positions.
why? because I have a BS in engineering and I make 6 figures. My wife spent 5 years after college getting her phd in a hard science and she now makes less than half of what I do and has to work way harder.
Jeff Schmidt goes into great detail on this in his book, Disciplined Minds. I'd recommend everyone check it out.
Firstly, you seem to be really lucky because a lot of grad students basically spend their masters working on what their advisors want them to and being lab monkeys. Things change once you get to PhD sure but you have to grind out two years to get there.
Secondly, not all corporations are closed source. Many companies, especially tech-focused companies, have tons of open source initiatives. A lot of amazing tools come from industry. And it's not like all grad programs are havens of FOSS - there's an endless supply of papers and projects whose code is either a) non-existent or in the form of snippets or b) blocked by a paywall (to get to the article to see the snippets if they exist).
Additionally, you can choose what company you work for. If you want more autonomy or ownership, you can filter for that. I joined a company fresh out of undergrad and I was pushing product-changing code in a few weeks.
Most of all, the reason why everyone doesn't go to grad school is because not everyone can get into grad school. You are going to a top tier program at a well-regarded (and well-funded) university. That's probably why you are having such a positive experience. These positions are, by their definition, exclusive and available only to a very small percentage of coders. People rag on industry about gatekeeping (throwing resumes in the trash if they are from the wrong school) but it happens even moreso in academia. I've coded plenty of projects in my spare time, have created and implemented novel solutions, can talk intelligently about a wide range of topics and have spoken at conferences...but if my GRE / GPA scores are too low, then you're SOL for the most institutions. They'll still keep the $100 application fee of course.
Heck, even my software engineer colleagues who are trying to pick up French are glad there's another engineer who can help them with what they're learning or accompany them to a French conversation meetup.
Academia in the US is not capitalism.
Grad schools help produce them.