The most-disliked people in the publishing industry
woman-of-letters.com
woman-of-letters.com
No? The employees of Random House don't need to be paid as much because the supply of qualified candidates for those roles greatly exceeds the demand. There are lots of causes of that imbalance and most of them have nothing to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. It's also hard to get a job in the abusive video game development industry!
I don't know if that's what's happening, but it might work towards TFA's point.
With that degree, you're generally pushed toward jobs in journalism, publishing, graphic design, teaching, administrative functions, and so on. Most of these pay relatively little.
It's not much more complicated than that.
Same goes for the basics of statistics. A basic understanding of statistics is a requirement for any college degree in many countries, and for good reasons. Stats comes up all the damn time. From proper A/B testing, to marketing, to understanding public health emergencies, to making informed medical decisions.
I think calc 1 and 2 are extremely valuable. The concept of rate of change is fundamental to so many things in life, and understanding "area under the curve" is essential to understanding how many ideas are communicated, including lots of graphs in physics, chemistry, and economics.
Beyond that I feel calculus starts getting into specific applications and is less generally applicable to the populace at large.
Decades later, I wish I had more linear algebra.
I suggest you revisit your hypothesis with a little less bias.
My current hypothesis is that as AI forces software development down less and less deterministic pathways, I suspect that the value of a basic CS degree will diminish relative to humanities training. Comfort with ambiguity, an ability to construct a workable "theory of mind", and to construct unambiguous natural-language prompts will become more relevant than grokking standard algorithms.
Humanities advocates have been hoping for the demise of valuable STEM degrees for at least the last 30 years. It's not happening for many reasons, of them being: All the skills you listed are also taught in an engineering and rigorous CS curriculum, plus those degrees provide validation that the individual is intelligent and determined enough to complete coursework that most people cannot.
Anyway, I had to pick one, my money'd be on philosophy degrees rising in value: they're already sought out by financial firms. Have you seen the sort of analytical / symbolic reasoning they do?
[0] In fact, in case you didn't know, rigorous humanities programs and research involve an awful lot of statistics and coding, even though the dinosaurs that run the MLA and most English departments aren't able to handle it.
I don't think most STEM majors would be outstanding English Literature (or whatever humanities program you prefer) majors, but I do think they could manage to obtain a degree. Very, very few humanities majors could get an engineering degree.
And yes, the writing classes they force engineers to take are largely pointless and not enjoyable. Everyone with a degree got through them though, and I have to imagine the percentage of STEM students who washed out on that and not organic chemistry, compiler design, differential equations, etc. is extremely small (it was 0 out of the hundreds of people I knew at my school).
> But look, I'm not talking about the top ~10%, or whatever: the really smart kids can adapt to whatever gets thrown at them[0].
Sure. Very few of these kids are going into publishing, because they'll have more lucrative options and will pursue them.
> I'm doubtful that a 50th-percentile or below CS degree / student will retain the value that they've recently had - and given what I read on here about the present job market for new grads on here, that's maybe already happening.
That may be, but they're still in better shape than a 50% percentile humanities degree holder, who also is having the value of their skillset eroded by AI.
> Anyway, I had to pick one, my money'd be on philosophy degrees rising in value: they're already sought out by financial firms. Have you seen the sort of analytical / symbolic reasoning they do?
Lol, they are not "sought out" in any sense of the word. Philosophy majors at top tier schools are sought out because everyone at the school is sought out, not because they majored in philosophy.
And yes, I took a number of philosophy classes in college as an undergrad because they were easy (have you seen the analytical/symbolic reasoning required of EE or CS majors? It's a lot more difficult that what is required of philosophy majors).
That's the crux of it, and right now it appears to me that the ability to write unambiguous natural language prompts - in a variety of contexts, not specifically heavy-duty dev work - is going to be increasingly valuable. The 50th percentile english / philosophy grad is better at that than the 50th percentile CS major - while, at the same time, the bottom rungs of the developer ladder appear to have been kicked out.
I'm trying very hard not to make this into a "who's smarter?" question. That's a well-trodden and pointless argument, particularly if money is going to be the measuring stick. Besides, if that's where we're going, the finance bros and C-suite win, and do either of us think they're the geniuses in the room?
But, we'll see. We're living in Interesting Times.
We don't agree here. I see no evidence that the average humanities major is better at writing unambiguous natural language, nor that it will be a partcularly valuable skill. Most people are incapable of understanding and describing a complex series of steps, including their side effects and tradeoffs regardless of the language used to describe them.
> I'm trying very hard not to make this into a "who's smarter?" question. That's a well-trodden and pointless argument, particularly if money is going to be the measuring stick. Besides, if that's where we're going, the finance bros and C-suite win, and do either of us think they're the geniuses in the room?
That's my point, there's no avoiding this. Standardized test scores used as part of college admissions are intelligence tests and income is highly correlated with intelligence. We have all these proxies that are providing the answer to this question.
And the hedge fund managers and CEOs of large companies are very intelligent on average (I'm sure some aren't but they are the outliers, not the other way around). Just like there are some very intelligent social workers, artists, and unemployed people, but the averages are what they are for various fields for a reason.
If you'd marked enough undergrad papers you would have. :-)
> Most people are incapable of understanding and describing a complex series of steps, including their side effects and tradeoffs regardless of the language used to describe them.
That's true!
But... The AI promise is that users won't have to do all of that part. They'll describe an end-state, and the machine will work out the steps needed to get there, asking clarifying questions along the way. If that's true, then skills like writing and interface design and "taste" and all the other "non-engineering" parts of making things rise in importance relative to the engineering skills that have been handed over to the machines.
That's a big "if", of course, and the machines aren't there yet, but that's what's promised. If it comes to pass, then I like my prediction (for, at least, the 50th percentile of both groups). If not, not.
To be blunt, it's much easier for the majority of the population to get an English degree or some other generic liberal arts degree and therefore be qualified for an entry level job in the publishing industry.
I'm sure someone somewhere is giving up a highly lucrative job to roll the dice on the next great American novel, but it's not a meaningful number.
That's hardly the only factor here. In the end it's really about the fact that we appear to have an infinite appetite for blowing people up. ($1.5 trillion, next year, a full 50% increase at a time when we're supposedly needing to cut back.)
But don't discount the thumb on the scale against jobs like these. It's a persistent problem in many industries -- so pervasive that it just looks natural.
Maybe there are too many English majors (I honestly think the supply of careers is too low). But I think the "supply is greater than the demand" is possibly now more an explanatory argument for unemployment rates for Engineering and PT and other such quiescent majors. Certainly there are plenty of Ed majors for a field whose workers fled at pace earlier this decade.
Let's assume I'm teaching 25 or so Engl majors right now in a class with publishing as its central focus (hypothetically) at a state school. The students would neither be able to define "small press" nor name the big 5 - even the ones who just came back from AWP. The linked piece, I think, correctly names the romanticized vision of publishing that is divorced from understandings of the cost of living in NYC. I don't also think that college majors are actually all that itchy to get into editorial, whether or not they're all and every single one applying for the same pool of jobs.
There are school districts where teachers are poorly compensated, but they aren't the norm over the population as a whole. Teachers are generally well-compensated.
Nursing, I don't know where to start.
Some people may say that nurses and teachers ARE NOT well-paid because those workers deserve to be paid more than they are.
Some people may say that nurses and teachers ARE well-paid because they are generally paid more than median wage.
As for some dry facts, median wages:
Registered Nurse $93,600
Public School Teacher $64,000
Private School Teacher $57,600
All U.S. Occupations $49,500
A ton of details that medians aren't showing.
I was just mentioning why folks may be on different sides here. We should at least be talking about the same thing.
If it's a "they deserve" conversation, that's very different than others.
(My mom is a retired CPS teacher.)
Shrug clearly teachers are paid more than the median wage. There isn't much to argue there.
Modeling wage/salary is pretty straightforward for the majority of jobs (weighted by number of people working the job). There really aren't too many surprises.
Monopoly/Oligopoly union power, licensing, labor supply, regulatory/compliance restrictions/barriers, and product/service output value are pretty much most of it?
No teacher is going to tell you they're not altruistic, and that they're in it for the money. They see themselves as doing good, and I agree that they are. But that's not what drives entrance into those fields.
For someone with masters-level education and years of experience?
No, sorry, no, it is not "broadly false." K-12 salaries enter at average 40k often with a requirement to enter a graduate program within five years. I don't see that teachers in most states have received substantial increases in salary over any considerable period. They are underpaid.
Compensation rates are not "surprisingly good" (surprisingly?). Both groups merit much higher compensation. Your subjective consideration of "well-compensated" may differ from mine and fair enough, but I find generally one's position is more an index of their political beliefs (or sentiments towards unions in general) than any objective standard of what is "surprising" ("a retirement plan? In this economy?).
The smirking "a retirement plan" comment you made leaves out the important bit: it's a defined-benefit plan. The point isn't that teachers shouldn't have defined-benefit pensions. The point is that those pensions are extremely valuable, and not at all a market-rate perk in the broader economy.
It's easy to win an argument with a straw man saying "teachers are overcompensated". It'll be harder for you to contend with the argument I'm actually making.
>Nursing and teaching are surprisingly well-compensated fields
To which somebody else said:
Not in the US!
And no, they aren't. And they're not "valorized." If salaries are surprising ito you, and if you say that doesn't mean "teachers are overcompensated," ok!, but I'm not sure where the argument with this straw man occurred. I know what the median salaries and general entry salaries for teachers are for my city, because I work with them (though not a k-12 teacher myself), I understand the debt calculations they have to make to continue, and I do not think they are well-paid.
But I did take your advice to google it and now I would say that teachers' incomes are described as "comparatively low" or "lagging behind cost increases" or "not keeping up with the rate of inflation" because in the results I see phrases like that quite a bit. So I wouldn't say that "surprisingly well-compensated" is actually true, and that "poorly paid" is "broadly false." In one relavant case I read "the 'benefits advantage' is not sufficiently large to offset the growing wage penalty for teachers."
In a given metro, you can simply look up the median income, then look up the median teacher's income --- it'll be higher, and that's before benefits.
I think it's good we compensate teachers well. I think it's bad that people don't understand how valuable defined-benefit pensions are, because they are an enormous component of state income taxes and, especially, property taxes --- property taxes are regressive, and promote a cycle of housing exclusion in areas of opportunity. If you think a defined-benefit pension is akin to a 401K, or that a private sector employee could reasonably expect to get one, I'd suggest you maybe read up a bit.
There is a stereotype that teachers are low paid. Somewhat .... but there's a slight premium on doing meaningful work.
The whole premise that women are paid far less is kind of wrong anyway (or at best another outdated stereotype).
Childless men and women make about the same amount.
Women with children work fewer hours and share finances with men who work more hours, and apparently this is an injustice.
If you're comparing teachers to nurses, sure nurses tend to have more pay but more hours and harder work. But most jobs that you can do with a BA in English (or any other degree that isn't either extremely competitive like medicine, or in a really high demand field right now), teachers get (at least) similar pay, for a similar amount of work (albeit compressed into the school calender). Especially if you consider benefits, as you point out.
Yes: the kinds of people commenting on HN have it easier than just about anybody in the work force. That doesn't make us a reasonable bar for assessing the attractiveness of a job. Would you rather work as a teacher or a truck driver?
Nursing is also a hard job where the paycheck is nowhere near what doctors can earn.
Instead of using Palantir, working at the FSF, the Linux Foundation, etc. It's not that they don't make good money, it's that it's often a fraction of what could be made at a comparable for profit company.
I think the video game industry is an apt comparison. The pay is often not very good with the motivation being, for many people, prestige based, in some form or another. I suspect there are analogies in the game industry and publishing 50-100 years ago.
That perceived associated goodness is what caused the increase in qualified candidates in the first place?
Almost all of the fiction I read comes by personal recommendations. Including from social media like Hacker News. I haven't stood in a bookstore browsing shelves and reading blurbs in many years but I read more than ever.
A publisher provides marketing, editing and distribution. Literary marketing is becoming better in the peer-to-peer form than the old business-to-consumer form. Distribution has become unbundled via self-publishing. Editing is no less important than ever, but it would be so much better if the value from such an individual art can be captured by those talented individuals rather than by corporate.
Long live literature, but may Big Publishing fade away into obsolescence.
Sometimes a book gets picked up purely on its merits. (It helps to appeal to a wealthy target audience.) But on average you'd get richer by getting a minimum wage job and spending it all on lottery tickets.
They've basically figured out how to take half of their job and shove it off on the author while they still take their oversized cut. It's pretty egregious in my opinion.
I've seen this with all types of publishers, btw, from children's books to technical books. Heck, most technical publishers these days are mostly print on demand, so you're barely getting any unique product from the publisher at all.
Elmore Leonard was very familiar with movie producers by that point in his career, and clearly saw a a funny similarly between what a mob does and how Hollywood operates.
At the same time, the book is almost a tender mark of appreciation towards the role a producer plays. It's one of the few stories that spotlights what a producer actually does and shows it's importance in greasing the wheels enough to actually make a movie.
A small group of agents hold most of the power, and the system has confused power for taste. This has also, in my experience, led to the outlets that hold the most power using that power to push agendas instead of seeking out the best literature. I do not believe this can persist indefinitely.
An interesting take, particularly the assertion that "jobs at Random House are much harder to get than jobs at Palantir." I'd be absolutely 100% shocked if that were true.
Generally, the more a job pays, the harder it is to get hired. These are generally correlated with job-obtaining-difficulty:
* high pay
* required certifications / licenses (law, medical, etc.)
* (low) supply of workers with desirable experience
Given the above, it seems that Palantir jobs would be much more difficult to obtain.
That's not axiomatically true, like, at all.
The odds of being hired vary according to the supply of qualified applicants vs available positions. Tech companies with large profit margins will be able to offer higher wages than businesses with lower margins - and do so because they're competing with other tech companies, and (for the most part) not companies in other sectors - so assuming pay is a differentiator across domains can't be assumed. Over the long term, pay differential within a sector will motivate more people to become qualified for jobs within it, but at any particular moment cross-sector compensation isn't really relevant to the question.
This isn't to say the original assertion is true, as they don't offer any evidence, but it wouldn't be shocking to find out that a publishing company has more qualified applicants per job posting than any particular tech company.
They have to have a diverse catalog because they don't know in advance which books will be the big sellers.
Why must they have a diverse catalog?
The second reason is that your diverse catalog exists also as advertising for that subset of readers who will become your next authors, they might be dreaming for years about the day they can be published by Random House, just like their hero, obscure writer X from some years ago who did not earn out, but ended up inspiring the next generation's big thing.
Most published books either have a track record as self-published break outs, and/or they're trend chasers, and/or - as the article noted, but didn't say enough about - they have authors who fit a known demographic with known tastes and can be marketed on the strength of the author's story.
The real reason so many books are published is because it's a volume game. Most books are actually profitable - barely - so they need to keep churning them out to make adequate aggregate profits.
It's true that most of the money is made by a few tens of authors, but that doesn't mean no money is coming from the rest.
The tiny number of high prestige titles are cultural loss leaders which give publishers a cover story that they're really about Serious Literature and aren't just content mills.
This used to be a credible excuse when Serious Authors were still a thing, but it's looking more and more threadbare these days.
Serious Authors used to be household names, but hardly anyone can name a Recent Serious Author now. Critics still criticise, competitions still award prizes, and review editors still review, but most of the money and most of the interest is elsewhere.
well, relatively huge by the article's own admission.
on edit: changed but to by