I'm a Data Scientist and It's Not My Passion
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The humanities and social sciences have fallen off a cliff, heath care and STEM has soared. I'm skeptical that this is a good thing.
And recently, I feel a lot of them tried to force change, leaving their role of scientist and becoming backseat politicians. They don't run for office but still try to make the rules.
If you want to look at it in another lense, it hurts our whole economy because many younger people in this group aren't able to help our economy grow through buying stuff like previous generations did. When I went to college long long ago it was really cheap, like $1000 a semester. The states stopped subsidizing it so much. I was a beneficiary of this.
It will also be cancelled after 20 years of payments.
I would vastly prefer more direct subsidies though.
I get that "bills aren't important" is a thing if you don't have trouble paying them, but that's not the situation for everybody. "Hey, lighten up, have some fun, you don't need to work that hard" is cool if you're wealthy. It's an insult to somebody living paycheck to paycheck. They do have to work that hard.
I sometimes complain about being burnt out and needing a vacation after working for about 3 years, 9-5 max, 5 days a week that includes one day a week working from home.
I seriously doubt that a reduction in number of degrees granted in arts-focused majors actually equates to a populace that is less appreciative or knowledgeable regarding the arts.
It’s not about actual arts & culture (which any given person learns through many walks of life)... it’s about these expensive arts-only degrees simply not conferring economically meaningful labor market skills.
Don't conflate culture with those who study it. The vast majority of non-STEM graduates generate no activity of either cultural or economic significance. All such degree programmes could be dropped tomorrow with no detriment to society.
That is such an outrageous and untestable claim that it is basically meaningless.
It's not "bullshit" if you're independently wealthy and can pay to "study" for "fun", or as a second major to something that's in demand. But for everybody else I'd consider more in-demand professions, even though they're usually much harder.
For an example, take a gander at this list: https://www.washington.edu/students/gencat/degree_programsTO.... All the bullshit majors are very easily identifiable. Most, but not all of them have "studies" in their name.
By that metric, one of my undergrad majors (physics) is a bullshit major as very few of us went into that field. But it prepared us very well for many other fields, so I'd say that metric is not meaningful.
That being said, there are some crappy degrees out there. Some disciplines are mostly just watered down philosophy and I'd go for philosophy instead anytime.
>> it merely means that
>> studying the respective field is less likely
>> to be very economically rewarding
Your examples are bad too, because back in the day all those painters, writers, etc, were either independently wealthy already, or did other jobs before they became famous. H.P. Lovecraft, for instance, worked as a traveling salesman. Van Gogh both comes from a wealthy family _and_ had a job at an art dealer. And there are very few of such people anyway, it's not a viable route for most people, it's more like a lottery.
If you don't mind being broke and living on welfare, by all means, get that liberal arts degree.
IMO most talented/flexible degree per year studied is electrical engineering.
Best degree is no degree though. One Vitalek or Bram Cohen is worth 10000 Harvard computer science graduates.
For the unicorns that can pull that off, sure. For the other 99.9999999999999% of the population of the planet it's really bad advice.
"Higher education" is mostly make-work for pedants and busy work for students; the result is pretty similar to what high school was 100 years ago. It's also a form of dysgenic population control, and a way of growing debt peonage among the more intelligent half the of the population, which is probably useful for social control.
I've considered trying to raise a bunch of little Vitaleks myself, just to see if it can be done. Cathedral scholar style. While his and, say, Bram's output is exceptional: I think one of the big reasons it was is they never went to college. Greatest individual systematic trader I know: same story -he never want to college either.
Also your sigdifs are way off. I bet you learned that in collitch. ;-)
We don't really need (economically speaking) lots of philosophy majors. And maybe that's okay if people are doing philosophy majors for the knowledge, but I don't think that's the case. And if they want a good job, I think we should discourage these majors.
That doesn't mean we don't need philosophy. It's really important. But it doesn't make much difference if the people who have a degree on that work on unrelated things.
We can even look at my Fine Arts degree the same way. My whole career people have said it is odd for a Fine Arts major to be a coder, until I explain what that degree really taught me - to look at the existing body of work in a field, learn the techniques, and look for new and innovative ways to change those techniques. Then to create a vision of something you want to deliver, start from scratch, and build up to a final product that takes the field a step or two forward, while also effectively communicating with, and engaging, your audience.
You could draw similar parallels with any humanities degree. That process of deconstructing an entire body of work, learning the ins and out of its components, and reconstructing it into something completely new is common to all liberal arts educations. And that is why people with liberal arts degrees are often not the slightest bit concerned whether their degree and their career are a 'match'.
I am willing to bet that given a population of philosophy majors and a population of engineering majors, if you gave them an equivalent year of quality mentorship in programming, the philosophy majors would perform better. Because philosophy heavily emphasizes critical and abstract thinking. Better yet they might be able to really think about the consequences of the systems they build, whereas the tech industry mostly seems to have no problem and no concerns about building a global surveillance apparatus. Engineers learn how to do now the stuff that is relevant now. As a software engineer I am constantly battling with abstraction, and I constantly feel held back by my limited understanding of math, science, and philosophy.
The cost of college is an issue of its own and it's irrelevant to choice of major. School is the one place where we have an institutionalized system to study and progress the liberal arts as a whole, which teach us how we got here, what we value, and how we ought to live. One episode of The Wire should be sufficient demonstration of the need for our understanding of sociology to improve, among other things. Discouraging any of the liberal arts due to the overwhelming cost of college exacerbates our problems and risks turning universities into trade schools, directionless and with all the volatility of economic cycle.
I've taken a few classes in philosophy (it was my major for a while), and I can't tell if this is super different in the US vs Europe or you're just making stuff up, but this is just not what I saw. Yes, logic is part of philosophy, and everybody needs to take that class, but it's not heavily emphasized for the majority of students. Being able to write summaries and essays is, and learning the lingo, and reading (and hopefully understanding, or being able to pretend so well enough) the classics.
> Better yet they might be able to really think about the consequences of the systems they build, whereas the tech industry mostly seems to have no problem and no concerns about building a global surveillance apparatus.
Please don't. Studying in the humanities doesn't make you a better person, and it doesn't make you consider ethics in everything you do either.
> School is the one place where we have an institutionalized system to study and progress the liberal arts as a whole
Except not everybody agrees that is what life is all about, what's best for society, the country, humanity or whatever you choose. Somebody has to do the actual work, you know? Sure, we can all become philosophers and then starve to death, or we can make sure that we have enough people that know how to grow food. When it comes down to it, yeah, with all of my ethics training, I very much prefer people that know how to grow food over people that will explain that the ethical thing to do is to feed them first, because only they can lead progress and advance the liberal arts. But then again, I always had a thing for utilitarianism and was highly suspicious of the bourgeois elitism in intellectual circles.
I don't understand your last paragraph at all. Not everybody agrees, so therefore liberal arts education is invalid? Or not everybody agrees, so let's give up? These are defeatist attitudes to take in either case. Implicit in your argument, as a response to this whole thread, is that not "somebody has to do the work", which I have never argued against; you're saying "nobody should do anything but the work". Meaning STEM, or whatever BigCo is hiring for right now. We continue to have huge problems globally that either have nothing to do with technology or are directly caused by technology, that need to be solved with entirely different skillsets. People perform better when they are motivated, and money is a poor motivator after a certain point. You make a very poor assumption that someone studies one of these subjects and their skills and experiences just go into this void, and/or that I'm advocating that people major in something and strictly do that for the rest of their lives. If you want to do the hands-on work and major in Hands-On Working, then do it. But don't discourage others from doing what they want and are good at during the narrow window of their lives when society supports them to do it.
You're making claims about philosophy, I'm not making claims about STEM - I don't know what you're trying to accomplish.
> Not everybody agrees, so therefore liberal arts education is invalid?
No. Not everybody agrees, thereforce "liberal arts advances humanity" isn't agreed upon and shouldn't guide us. Let's agree upon it first.
> you're saying "nobody should do anything but the work"
No. I'm saying "please contribute". And by "contribute" I mean "do something that all/most/many consider to be of value". If we start defining "contributing" to mean something that the individual believes to be valuable, then it's just random. Build houses, grow roses, torture people, whatever, as long as you feel like it's a good idea, you're contributing.
> But don't discourage others from doing what they want
I'd never dream of doing that. I'm just saying: if you want to do what you want, please pay for it yourself. Don't make me give you part of my money to indulge in your personal pleasures.
No, I wasn't. You made claims about philosophy and I uttered my doubts because they didn't match my personal experience at all. You then decided to tell me how bad STEM was, which I hadn't even mention.
> you have a severe misconception that none of these “bullshit majors” are useful
That's not what I said. They might very well be useful, my point is that we should let the market decide whether they are. Vague statements about some loss of culture or a descent into dystopian nightmares if we don't finance them just isn't that - it's fear mongering to push something through without giving those a vote that are supposed to pay for it.
> “torture people” is bringing your argument to absurity
You should've taken a few philosophy classes, especially logic. Using extremes and hypothetical situations is what you do to test an argument/claim. If you present a claim and I present to you an example that makes your claim fall short, there's no "well, exceptions prove the rule", that's not how logic works.
> You’re basically arguing that individuality is a bad thing now.
Somewhat, sure. I don't like the kind of individuality that wants all the freedom but puts the responsibility (that is: footing the bill) on other people. Either say "I want to be free, and I will suffer the consequences of my decisions" or enjoy the protection of the collective at the cost of having to also submit to the collective's rules & needs, and limit your freedom. If you want the collective to pay for what you study & work in, choose something that the collective needs and it will gladly pay for it.
Same applies to coordinated protest activities.
One of the big differences at the time was the use of "repeaters" by the North. Having a gun that can shoot again quickly when the other side cannot is a huge advantage.
With the North winning the Civil War, they put both Reconstruction and the 15th Amendment in place, causing Blacks to have the right to vote (of course many people tried to thwart that law for almost a century).
[0] - https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/civil-war-...
> if the tech bubble bursts, computer science may even be riskier than a humanities degree, which gives graduates a broader set of knowledge.
How do humanities degrees provide "broader knowledge" than CS degrees? Different, sure, but broader?
Good CS degrees are not coding bootcamps. CS students take a lot of mathematics and logic-heavy courses and can easily pivot from programming to jobs in insurance, finance, accounting, education, project management, and even law.
Good CS degrees also require a lot of technical writing, which opens up all of the stuff that's usually associated with humanities degrees.
Bad CS degrees exist. But then, so do bad English departments.
This also ignores the fact that a lot of CS students are taking courses in English/poli sci/History/etc, but very few humanities students are taking CS courses. E.g., I didn't have a major or minor in any of the above fields, but I took upper-division courses in the English, Relgiion, poli sci, and history departments. However, I only ever encountered one non-STEM major in CS courses beyond CS 101.
I don't really understand why people act like humanities majors are "well rounded" compared to science or engineering majors - it seems like the absolute opposite. To confirm this, just pick a respectable college and read the degree requirements for students in different majors (I don't mean elite colleges, there are hundreds of colleges that meet this standard).
I do agree that non-STEM degrees should have stronger math requirements. But K-12 math education in the US is such a disaster that the universities wouldn't stand a chance if they wanted to do it.
This depends on the type of institution. Liberal arts and most honors colleges at large universities have small class sizes with high-quality instruction for their gen-ed humanities.
> You are extremely likely to be put on the spot and made to defend a subjective position you've taken.
This is also true in (good) mathematics and computer science programs, where you'll need to learn how to communicate well to technical audiences and defend all manner of subjective positions.
Also, something similar is true for the transferability of humanities skills! The writing skills you develop in humanities courses do not directly transfer to technical writing. Learning to write well for any audience will teach you a lot about good writing, but your random English major will probably be completely useless when it comes to writing proofs, design/requirements documents, technical documentation, or especially useful comments in their code. And if I had a dollar for ever business person with a humanities background who made an ass out of themselves in a technical meeting because they have no idea how to communicate with a technical audience about a technical subject... ;-)
> In math, and to some extent engineering or science, you can often reason your way through if you get stuck, or else there are simple procedures you can rote memorize.
I disagree. Your observation about lower vs. upper division courses is as true for STEM as it is for humanities courses. There's a lot of subjectivity/taste involved in upper-division courses, especially any proof-based or project-based course!
> But K-12 math education in the US is such a disaster that the universities wouldn't stand a chance if they wanted to do it.
That's a big problem. It's also a chicken-and-egg problem. Our elementary and middle school teachers are often innumerate, which makes it hard to prepare students for HS (where the quality is often still bad despite subject-area qualifications), which in turn creates problems for gen ed STEM at universities.
I'm a CS/Engineering grad that had some of those, and my colleagues in other STEM degrees had requirements that weren't dissimilar from what you describe. We were required to take classes in philosophy (with emphasis on ethics), history, as well as required to take some electives that could be in all sorts of areas, some in other scientific areas, others in arts, theatre, music. Effectively, it was required of us to at least be cognizant of the goings-on in other fields, even if just the conversational basics.
As for colleagues of mine in humanities degrees, most of them didn't see a single STEM class, and if they did, they were very superficial one-semester courses on Excel spreadsheeting, LaTeX, or very basic physics/probability mathematics, which were effectively a rehashing of high school, but with easier exams.
I echo your sentiment, maybe at some point in the distant past, STEM degrees were isolated in their own bubble and only had very theoretical classes, but I don't know anyone who experienced that, and that's most certainly not been a reality for the past couple of decades.
It's very different in Europe, there may be some mocking, and we also don't create unlimited jobs for every graduate, but they'll most likely not end up doing minimum wage jobs, and most of them easily transition into working in the media, for the government, large corporations or foundations.
E.g., CS PhD have plentiful $200K+ job opportunities after graduation and a relatively labor-friendly faculty market. Meanwhile, many mathematics PhDs postdoc into their 40s.
The third category isn't as fortunate in the job market, like say a biology major. How about Dev OE, OS. Doeos? Wow, that almost works. But it kind of reminds me of nxivm though :-)
These things aren't binary (more humanities bad! more humanities good!), and it's a disservice to the topic to treat them as such.
The real question is that $125k as a Senior Data Analyst in NYC seems low.
> I have this creative side, which comes in handy when thinking through challenging problems, but there is only so much creativity that I can use when in data analysis.
This I disagree with; in data analysis/science, there's more than way to highlight/analyze a problem, and more than one way to solve it. In my experience, the best solutions are often the craziest.
I think a lot of people on here (and Blind) constantly say everyone is underpaid. It might be trying to help educate people they can be paid more. But it's usually framed in a way most people find insulting.
Only 5% of laborers in cities like LA and NYC make over $200k a year. That number is a bit higher in The Bay. Only about 12-15% of people make over $125k.
Again, it's nice to know that you can do better. But it's also nice to give yourself a pat on the back sometimes. $125k is decidedly NOT bad by any standards.
- they earn a $200k salary
- their living expenses match those of a person living with a $60k salary and presumably spending everything they earn after tax (in response to “what kind of life they can live with $60-80k”)
Does that make sense?
Yes, there are likely outlier employees at outlier companies making huge comp but those have to be at least 2 to 3 standard deviations right of the average.
So you don't have a counter argument is what you're saying? The truth is those site are insanely flawed and if that's what you're using to form your basis for negotiation then you're at a disadvantage period.
Compensation is often base + bonus + equity. For sufficiently senior positions, the equity component can be almost as much as the base salary. If the equity is liquid, then why is that not relevant?
FYI new grads at any of the big tech companies are bringing in close to ~$200k in total compensation their first year. It's not just someone's sister's cousin. It's a majority of engineering new grads who work at any of the BigCos which employ A LOT of people and are constantly hiring.
Even in the Bay Area the 50th percentile base salary for a relatively junior hire is closer to $100k than $150k. Add in bonus and equity and some might top out around $140k-$150k total compensation. That's in the Bay Area specifically. Most other places TC is going to top out just above $100k--high salaries are uncommon outside of tech hubs and the Bay Area itself is on the high end even in that group.
Technologists systemically undervalue themselves. Partly because the barrier to entry to software/analysts is so low, and most people are pretty bad. It's also because interviewing is such a time-consuming task that most people only look at 1-3 offers when getting a new job.
If you look in comment history you'll see a few references to me paying engineers/data scientists/data analysts $400 to spend an afternoon with me solving a real world problem. If I felt like you were someone I would work with, I personally introduce you to the head of a team at a companies that I know pays great money and has a great team, and you're fast tracked to the final interview (mostly culture and talking tech. No bullshit).
I always knew what the position paid, and the candidates would always sell themselves 10-20% of what they could get (I obviously helped them get the most they could).
Just because the market is skewed with a lot of bad candidates and poor negotiators doesn't mean the market price is accurate. We can all do better.
When I see Data Science in industry, it means an analyst. When I see Data Science in academia, I see Michael Jordan and Alex Smola. I think this is the core disconnect.
This would explain the salary
"My current company couldn't give me more in signing bonus but gave me more in equity."
Even if you saw the Cap Table, there is still a lot of uncertainty, tons of illiquidity, and a long horizon.
Options are nice, but they are not cash and do not belong in the same conversation as salary.
Stocks are shares in a company. Imagine you have a box with money in it. And I tell you you get 4500 parts of this box. But I dont tell you how many parts there are total -- you see the numerator but not the denominator. In that situation it is impossible to discern the value of your 4500 parts since you dont know how many ways the money gets split.
It gets trickier, because cap tables also have liquidity preferences. So you can have 4500 parts of the box. And another person can have 4500 parts, but their 4500 might be worth a whole lot more than your 4500 because there are different classes of stocks. It isn't uncommon to have one class paid first, in whole or 1.x greater than whole before the next class gets paid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidation_preference
Oh, then there is the actual business -- there is tons of business risk. Even if the business does well, it may be in the red and the future of the company (and worth of your shares) are dependent on successive rounds of funding and their implied valuation. You get a down-round and you might be wiped out. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/downround.asp
Even if everything gets well, depending on the classes of shares of decision-makers, you can end up in a situation where the founders/board might have an incentive to sell at just an amount where they make out well but employees get wiped out. Case: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/technology/when-a-unicorn...
Or Levandowski's side startup where the company got sold for just enough for Levandowski to make out golden https://www.wired.com/story/god-is-a-bot-and-anthony-levando...
The Net-Net of all this is: stock options are not worthless, their worth is based on a formula with a dozen+ variables, almost none of which you know the values/ranges/distributions for -- and a formula where many combinations of theoretical inputs result in zero value.
Every single time I've accepted a job at a startup that offered ISO stock options, I knew # of shares outstanding (the denominator), terms of all funding rounds, strike price, exit strategy, total amount of money raised, who the major investors are on the cap table, etc.
The jobs were at startups funded by the best investors in the world and high caliber founders who valued transparency. One went on to become a unicorn, and the other is an extremely early seed stage company where I work now.
If a startup isn't willing to give you information beyond # of options granted, then that is a red flag in my book. Not all startups are like that.
Also, options are usually tied to continued employment. If you leave the company, you will need to exercise your options within a certain amount of time (often, 3 months). This can easily be an outlay of (tens of) thousands of dollars. It depends on the number of options and the exercise price, which is set at time of the option grant based on the then-current 409b valuation of company shares.
So at that point you are left with a choice: spend a lot of money to exercise your options and buy a bunch of illiquid common stock, which may or may not be worth something someday. Or, just walk away from the options then and there.
Sounds like mostly dashboarding, data viz, and simple analysis, so I actually thought it was kinda high. Perfect for senior maybe.
I strongly disagree. I have hired, mentored, and/or managed 20+ data scientists and analysts over my career; in my experience the ones who come up with "crazy"/creative solutions are often the least effective in the long run. This is especially true on the product analytics side, where there are 5 ways to shoot yourself in the foot in non-obvious and subtle ways. The best analysts I've worked with follow fairly regimented best practices around the way they analyze problems and present solutions. By its very nature, non-standard solutions are more error-prone and harder to explain, which breaks institutional trust in the analyst.
That said, there is plenty of room for analysts to grow into more creative fields like machine learning or product management, but I don't think the person being interviewed falls in one of these categories.
> "Slow down and enjoy the moment. It's not worth stressing about how to become a partner in ten years or make money as quickly as possible. Set an attainable goal (something you can achieve in six months or a year) and work towards that."
> Are you a woman under 35 with a six-figure salary ($100,000+) and want to tell your story? Submit it here.
Personally I got into it by accident - and couldn’t believe that I get paid to basically continuing playing games that I was into as teenager and solving various puzzles all day long.... I was doing it for free before, and frankly would still be if not for all the money bull shit all around us.
Bah!
All borrowed titles that try to make what we do sound more important to those who really do those things.
Coder. Programmer. You're either encoding logic or data into something a computer program can use. Even if all you do is draw fancy diagrams.
Off-topic whining. Downvote to oblivion.
There is however something which I believe software engineers need: an innate desire to understand how things work, and a tenacity to debug them when they don't. If you don't have this internal drive, then you'll never get over the hump of the vast background knowledge you need to be a productive programmer in any interesting job.
Do your passion when you actually have a passion. Until then, work to live, and save save save. (But don't forget to travel)
The risk is that before you know it you find yourself with a "fully-funded" retirement account, a stable career, and your vitality gone with your life now behind you. The trick is hard to pull off.
I turned down a job at $180,000 and took a job at $52,000.
(previous to that I was making $228,000 - as a consultant)
Because I have literally no passion for what I used to do, the ageism, cut-throat bullshit in silicon valley has quite a toll. Housing is retarded. Transportation in the bay area is horrific, and the quality of life-work-balance is terrible.
I know that I am going to make a heck-ton of a lot more money soon.. but I am pretty much done trying to work in startups in SF/SV.
Thats a job for 20-somethings.
EDIT: Since people asked.
I joined as director of tech for a cannabis startup that has a lot of licenses and has a valuation in hundreds of millions.
It is all bootstrapped from the founders, and has zero debt nor investors (thus the low pay)
And I am building out MRP/ERP/OPs/Sales-ops/data for them.
Further, We are building something amazing on the vape-pen production market.
(the valuation is based on investors who have been trying to buy into the company... and keep getting turned down)
While it's a great stepping stone for gaining skills and credentials, there's really nothing "high status" about being an employee for someone else, giving your work away to your employer. It's anti-innovation thinking otherwise, and wish the status driven careerists in this town would reflect on this.
I want to know this as well.
I need a mobile blood-pressure monitor.
I've gotta charge mine sometime and at night seems like the best time to do it...
I have figured out how to use it to track my sleep: charge Apple Watch less. I charge Apple Watch twice a day, once in the morning, once at night, for about 15min each time.
My Apple Watch has enough energy for me to use all day and track my sleep using the Sleep++ app.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleep/id1038440371?mt=8
I _sometimes_ have to charge it at work, but in general, this charging method has worked for me.