Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

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> but I have a hard time being sympathetic to intelligent well educated people who chose to pursue careers that obviously don't pay well.

The problem is that those people went through their schooling being told that they were awesome and should be a professor (by people who successfully became tenured professors, and who didn't experience failure).

Then they finished school, tried to actually become a tenured professor, and found out being awesome isn't good enough. You actually have to be spectacular. So they failed, unlike their old professors who encouraged them the whole way.

So there they are. Ph.D in hand after a decade of hard work, but no tenure in sight. What would you do in their position? Find and adjunct job that's at least someone related to what you've spent your life doing? Or roll the dice again and spend thousands of dollars you don't have to go to some javascript bootcamp or something (that you'll probably fail, since you're no technical whiz kid, because you spent the last decade focusing on medieval literature)?

If you do not know that your chances of getting a tenure track job in your field are very, very low before you are finished your first semester you are deluding yourself. Even more so for marginal graduate programmes with negligible placements.

Adjuncting is not on the academic track. If you are adjuncting you have already lost. If you choose to keep making the same mistake over and over again you don’t generally get much sympathy if it’s gambling or sticking with a partner who beats you. Why does chasing a dream you’ve failed at get so much more sympathy?

Teaching high school is very much not what most people want to do but it’s at least better than adjuncting. Lots of people do things they don’t want do for money, if adjuncts would prefer to do something they want to fit very little money, great. Their choice, the consequences are theirs too.

Lambda School is free until you get paid so if they want to do a boot camp that’s the way to go, not borrowing money.

Being an academic has a certain amount in common with founding a startup. Everyone knows it's hard to get tenure but everyone thinks they're special and their hard work and talent will let them succeed when most people fail.

But while second place for failing to start a startup is you go make high six figures at a FAANG, second place in academia is you're fucked.

This is like saying that skydiving has something in common with Russian Roulette. It's true, both are dangerous, but one is clearly a much better choice for exactly the difference you articulate.

> The problem is that those people went through their schooling being told that they were awesome and should be a professor (by people who successfully became tenured professors, and who didn't experience failure).

IMO it's still on them if they didn't do the research on what their outcome might look like. I absolutely loved physics in high school and chose to study computer science because I knew it would pay my bills. 8 years later I am not regretting my decision at all.

> IMO it's still on them if they didn't do the research on what their outcome might look like. I absolutely loved physics in high school and chose to study computer science because I knew it would pay my bills. 8 years later I am not regretting my decision at all.

This is that corrosive individualist idea that the community has zero responsibility for its members, so we get to wash our hands of each individual's failure. It's wrong. Often the individual can't "do the research" to accurately estimate their outcome, such as when they're so disadvantaged they don't know where to start, or when they've been lied to.

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