High prestige, low satisfaction jobs | Hacker News Reader

High prestige, low satisfaction jobs

lemire.me

70 pointsfogus26 comments

I can't help but find this entire article flawed because he's basing his analysis on a man who went from Harvard to Google...they're both incredibly prestigious, so really the article is about going from a low satisfaction to a high satisfaction job, which is kind of a no-brainer.

If he went to a software engineer position at Google, I would not say that's as prestigious as a Harvard professor.

To the general public probably, but within the CS subfield of systems in particular I don't think there's actually a big prestige difference, and it might even go the other way. You get a prestige boost for your research by being able to say that it was "implemented at Google" in your papers; if anything, his talks at conferences will probably be better-attended than previously.

Sorry to say, Harvard's reputation in CS circles is pretty abysmal.

I'm sure there are some fine folks there, but compared to the status of the school....meh.

In hiring circles folks with CS degrees from Harvard are generally frowned upon, "couldn't they have just gone to a better school for CS/Engineering at a cheaper cost? Musta gone for the brand name recognition...we'll pass"

From http://www.seas.harvard.edu/faculty-research/people:

"Harvard ranked # 1 in Mechanical Engineering; # 1 in Biotechnology & Applied Microbiology; # 5 in Mathematics; # 3 in AI, Robotics, and Auto Control (Science Watch, most recent data)

Harvard ranked # 7 in Theoretical Computer Science

In terms of citation impact, Harvard ranked second nationally in the category of Engineering and Computer Science in a 2002 analysis by ISI (for 1998-2002 data; most recent)"

#1 in Mechanical Engineering. Really?

That specific ranking seems a little fishy to me. Also, I'm having a fair amount of trouble finding any corroboration online that Science Watch ever put Harvard up there in any ranking. If anyone could find a link to a Science Watch article with their methodology, I'd really like to see just what it was about Harvard that made them rank it over say, MIT (the current US News top) mechanical engineering.

I can probably find rankings that put Harvard at wildly different rankings in all of those categories too. The fact of the matter is, outside of Law and Business (okay okay, Math too), Harvard does not exactly float to the top of anybody's personal list as a source of any kind of great engineering. That's okay, that's not what the school focuses on.

We actually had this exact discussion recently at a client site and brainstormed top schools we could look to recruit from for C.S. and Mechanical Engineering types and Harvard was not on anybody's list for either of those. Not top-10 and not in the discussion at all.

Most people are wildly surprised to find out that folks like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg studied at Harvard, almost verbatim the response is "Harvard has a C.S. department?" Most people assume Stanford or MIT.

I highly doubt he was hired as a "Software Engineer", more likely as a Chief Scientist, System Architect or something like that given the scope of his work and expertise, he will probably lecture for Google internationally on his work and have a large team working underneath him. His new position is no doubt worthy of such a move, though I dont know the details.

He stated in his first post about working for Google that he is exactly that:

my job title is simply "software engineer." (http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/06/working-for-google.ht...)

"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it!

It's rather like getting tenure."

http://www.langston.com/Fun_People/1992/1992AAC.html

While we wait for his server to recover, there's this analysis:

http://tjic.com/?p=18531

Site is down, my little project got it though:

http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://lemire.me/blog/archiv...

"The abstract thinkers may not be so reliable after all! The millions of college graduates who are underemployed in wealthy countries all around the globe have unanswered questions. Weren’t these high-level abstract college degrees supposed to pay for themselves?"

Actually, I would view Google's existence as proof that abstract, high-level thinkers actually can do something. Did it not start out as a research project by abstract, high-level thinkers?

I think the author has a point, but the populist, anti-intellectual bent really distracts from that. The point as I see it is that prestige is a benefit for certain jobs, just like money or vacation or insurance. These things are good, but can they make up for a job that you don't see as rewarding?

Sure, abstract high level thinkers _can_ actually do something. But Google is a one in a billion. The majority of abstract, high level thinkers are, and always will be, underemployed: there's only room for a handful of Googles, but there's plenty of room for those that don't make it.

True, but it's a big one in a billion.

There are few Googles, but there are also few abstract thinkers. I don't pretend to believe that the world would be better with more of them. But everyone has their place. It's no better for you to say that abstract thinkers are useless than it is for them to say you're a short-sighted idiot.

"In effect, a job doing research in Computer Science is more prestigious than an industry job building real system"

That's actually no longer true. Hence why a Prof leaves to take a job at Google

It is still true. Google is an exception, it's certainly not the rule.

And I think it's partly because they do do a lot of research, so they get some of the research prestige. With the number of full-time researchers and publication output they have, the research side of Google would rank as one of the larger institutes if it were standalone. See e.g.: http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html

I think the same is true prestige-wise of other research-heavy companies. Bell Labs was prestigious; being at Microsoft Research is prestigious; etc.

I don't see why doing privately funded research would be any less prestigious. Microsoft Research is arguably the most important operating system research group in existence, like Bell Labs before them. Honestly I would expect these kinds of misconceptions from the general public, but do most people in our field not understand the state of computer science research today?

It seems that some or all of this post is based on a seriously flawed notion of what lends prestige to a job. For example,

     > The electrician who comes and wires your house has a less
     > prestigious job than the electrical engineer who manages vague 
     > projects within a large organization.

So, in other words, the electrical engineer's job is more prestigious because... it's less useful? Ignoring completely the assumption that "vague projects within a large organization" are less useful than an electrician's work, it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that the barrier to entry is far higher for an electrical engineer than for an electrician, or that the former nominally pushes the forefront of new technology while the latter, while certainly performing a useful task, does little more than repetitively apply procedures dictated by various building codes?

I guess a doctor is only more prestigious than an EMT because the former is probably a better golfer than the latter on account of his/her massive excess of free time?

I'll admit that I haven't read The Theory of the Leisure Class; perhaps someone who has can confirm/disconfirm the OP's interpretation of same?

It seems to me that, for example, a possibly better interpretation has to do with the public's level of understanding of one's job: the EE's "mysterious projects" are more prestigious because they somehow seem magical. Of course, this isn't really consistent with the example of the scientist who works in a lab (seems pretty mysterious to me!) versus the one who writes grant proposals all day (ugh), so I think I still don't get it.

>These core values were explored by Veblen in his unconventional book The Theory of the Leisure Class.

Funny he should mention this; Veblen wrote another book after this, The Theory of Business Enterprise. In it Veblen gives a strong critique of the advertising industry (at least the part of it that is zero sum).

A large part of Google is advertising. A lot of that advertising is not zero sum--I believe it provides a lot of value--but over time they have moved more and more heavily into the zero-sum space (e.g. the purchase of DoubleClick, the general character of youtube ads). By that I mean things like brand-building ads that just associate an emotion or status/prestige with a product or company.

Plumbers make more than software developers?

I know some blue collars, plumbers included that are doing really well in the grand scheme of things, but I don't know any that make more than I do, and I'm 20 years younger than them.

Plumbers' riches is an urban myth. When I started out in web development, my billing rate was $325/hour, which a journalist could easily calculate into a $600,000+ year job. In reality, I made around $70k. I suspect the plumbers meme is based on similarly ill-informed calculations. The reality is more humble: $20/hour for hired hands, lots of expenses and unbilled downtime for independents, etc. The average for highest-earning states (NY/CA) is around $60k.

>When I started out in web development, my billing rate was $325/hour,

???

When was that? What technology? That's easily the highest rate I've ever heard of.

I was working for Arthur Andersen and later KPMG in New York. The technology stack was varied (Vignette/TCL is one odd example) and largely irrelevant to my rate, as was my value as a programmer (I wasn't very good back then). $325 was one of my more sedate rates actually, they've billed me out as high as $400.

People tend to think the crazy numbers were a byproduct of the internet bubble but the biggest factor was due diligence: certain big clients had to choose a Big 5 firm for their projects based on requirements such as, minimum number of employees, minimum years in business, minimum assets, etc. The whole racket was absurd, if you ask me.

$60k sounds about right, although I know a couple blue collars (not plumbers, but no white-collar track professional development) that get closer than that to what I make.

But on the other hand, my rent is $500/mo, and they have mortgages and families.

Media overestimates how good the blue-collar middle class are doing sometimes (and other groups, when/if they're employed) thanks to wonky calculus like you've mentioned.

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