A Master's Degree Isn't the Job Guarantee It Used to Be | Hacker News Reader

A Master's Degree Isn't the Job Guarantee It Used to Be

wsj.com

As always, it's kind of silly to talk about masters degrees as a group. There are stark differences in marketability between degrees.

Yeah I would guess part of the reason for the increase in unemployment is that there are many silly masters degrees offered now. Would be interesting to see the unemployment rate for masters that have been around for a while.

It never was.

The lies we continue to keep telling the next generation.

For real. My dad got his MBA and proceeded to lose his job within 4 months and never got another one in the tech field again thereafter. Everyone said they couldn't afford him. He went on to do SAT test prep, blackjack dealing, and nowadays teaches bridge on cruise ships as his retirement job.

Most degrees are just advancing levels of verifying you can walk and chew bubble gum simultaneously, follow instructions, show up on time. Being able to attain a Master's is a side-effect of having that skillset but doesn't necessarily instill it, and employers generally don't care as long as you've demonstrated that capacity outside of school.

My learning about attaining corporate software employment, and I know there are numerous exceptions, is:

* Make yourself as replaceable as possible.

* Plan B, enter management and be good at managing people.

> Make yourself as replaceable as possible.

On the list of top-100 things SWEs need focus on to have the most prosperous career this one is 1 through 95

Can you expand on that? Seems very counterintuitive

A couple of things:

* Employers do not heavily invest in training. They over invest in hiring/firing. If you want to shine at candidate selection time you need to look like that perfect guy who they can fire with minimal risk and replace you with a 22 year old.

* Employees that over prioritize in retaining their current employment, such becoming that irreplaceable center of attention that keeps all the lights on, are high risk. Nobody likes high risk.

* Software developers tend to prioritize all the wrong things. They tend to prioritize things that make their own lives easier at cost of everything else. You can label that immaturity, autism, sociopathic, or whatever. The result is the same. Employers have real product decisions to make and if you aren't on that same line they will consider you as a potential redundancy for elimination, because you consume more resources as an employee than you deliver as a developer.

Personally I'm not even sure if training works from the employers perspective. There are people who are willing to go the extra mile for whatever reason, and there are who are content just getting by, with some people not even that.

Not to complain, its just an observation. There are people you can point at a problem, and they come back with a great solution a couple days later. I've had a story of a coworker who during her internship was mistaken for someone else working on a totally different speciality and they tasked her with doing something, and after the initial bafflement and fuming, she did it and it was so well done, that the boss came to congratulate her, but was puzzled about why she was on the different side of the org chart.

My career in a nutshell:

- I picked a company that was less than 100 people and in business for at least 2 decades, and profitable these were my core parameters

- I worked like a dog first few years, specifically focusing on picking up everything no one else wanted. And in every shop there will be plenty of this

- I f'ed with the code that says DO NOT TOUCH THIS, NO ONE KNOWS, EVERYTHING WILL BREAK

- I intertwined myself with every part of the product (multi-million lines of code product)

Then:

- At 5th year anniversary I asked for 60% bump and yearly 15% raise moving forward, the owner did not think for more than a minute and agreed

- At 10th year I quit, started my own LLC and offered my services to the company at the same rate they were charging their customers for senior engineer rates (which was roughly 2x what my salary was - no problems)

I made more money that I can spend in 4 lifetimes just following these simple principles. I became virtually irreplaceable and henceforth could demand just about anything I wanted (within reason of course but that 'reason' is very high...)

I always find myself thinking why are so many people trying to get jobs at FAANG/Big Tech where there is a much simpler (and attainable) path that being one of the thousands and practically just a number.

But GP wrote about being replaceable being good for your career - which doesn't make sense - and the opposite what you did, which does make sense.

About your career path - kudos to you, but my experience has been that willing to do the work nobody wanted/could resulted in receiving more of said work, but when it came to taking credit, people always came out of the woordwork, on the other hand I have had many negative interactions, like the guy who knew I was an expert at some sort of thing asked me to take on a bit of extra for his sake, and when I told him I already was doing the workload of 2 people. He then told me if that meant that I couldn't do it today, it would be fine as long as I did it tomorrow.

It makes sense. The subject here is not about career progression. Its about employment attainment.

both are related though… a lot of folk think that career progression as SWE must follow a path of “work something couple of years, then go elsewhere to get a much bigger salary bump than you would have gotten if stayed.” but you can also just stay and have a job for life pretty much if you become more valuable to the company than they are too you. this should be taught at Unis, it is the most important thing every SWE should strive for

> both are related though

When you see that phrase just think: cognitive conservatism. Then you can stop reading what follows.

It does not matter how far they are or are not subjectively related. One is the subject and the other is not.

SiliconValley Founders drank a lot of alcohol and talked about this exact thing, except that they wanted to kill every Oak Tree seedling in sight, whereas you grew your Oak Tree over a decade. Zero chance of this approach working near SiliconValley for the last 27 years IMHO

If you cannot be replaced, you are un-promotable. Your entire career becomes tied to a single point of failure. Then, when they replace that piece of software with a new product you have no experience elsewhere.

So maybe "interchangeable" is a better goal. They can replace you, but keep you, just somewhere else.

Implied is that you work in a company that is growing, that will promote you.

If you work for a company in stasis or worse, shrinking, then being replaceable means little.

I see masters in technological related fields as a way to get a job in USA for many non us candidates. It’s a good thing that this gamification of the system is meeting its demise. I for one have not found many masters students talented than the undergrads at software tasks. PhDs are another matter though.

This has been my experience as well

I mean you can't really blame them, you guys have salaries that are 2-3x higher than even what we have here in Western Europe let alone India etc.

So the best thing you can do for your career by far is simply to find some way, any way, to be able to work in the US.

The article gets cut off with some bizarre ad that takes over the rest of the screen, but from what is visible it states that the unemployment rate for the given cohort has rarely been higher, indicating that it has been higher, which doesn't suggest any fundamental shift, just the usual business cycle.

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