I spent twenty years becoming good at the wrong game
savvynormie.com
savvynormie.com
I don't regret my wasted years. Sure, I would have likely earned more money, but it was fun, and made me who I am.
I do find it a bit of a shame that my current and previous employers couldn't give two hoots that I have a PhD etc, but oh well.
EDIT: I have a PhD and post-doc experience in Cell Biology, and now work as a software engineer at a fairly large hardware company.
I'm a software engineer and none of that training has ever been directly applicable (though some of the engineering and planning aspects generalised have).
Genetically if you don't have kids you are a dead end. You career will have some bearing on the life you give you kids (if you have any, I'm not trying to say you should!) but otherwise I believe it should stay out of your kids life.
Similar to the above, most people live with a married spouse (common law marriage: a legal marriage is not required for this discussion, though it may or may not matter for other purposes). While many people do meet their spouse through their career this is not required and the career itself has nothing to say about it. (historically kings and queens did marry for career reasons)
Note that both kids and a spouse implies you shouldn't allow your career to take up too much time even though many will try to.
Many people have hobbies. Even if you love the things you do at work, odds are your mind cannot handle doing it once you are done with work: your career cannot tell you anything about them. There are many people who pick a career because the things like love cannot support the life they otherwise want to live: their career can't tell them about the destination because it is purely something they do to get there.
All of this is to say that even if your career would offer you help on the destination, you should ignore it.
And when you contribute to a societey that overproduces resources, thrives scientifically and does not carry a load of parasites, then your career actions may push the cohort fitness.
This of course implies that the offspring of dedicated focus personal has desert flower traits- meaning every offspring will be dumb as a rock, and pro at procreation. Meaning clever people will have "Hippie" pregnant machine offspring and the "spiritual" birth-machines will have hyper-analytical "dead-enders". None of them happy with the state of the world.
Life as they say- finds a way- to make you despair with the result of the affair.
When I read your comments above I feel you have the desperate need to go hug a tree. Try it, it may work wonders.
(And I mean all that in the most positive way possible.)
In fact, beyond a certain level (which is not that high), income level and happiness are not correlated anymore. In other words, investing energy into increasing income does at that point rarely result in more happiness. So, why do it, especially if that energy could go more directly into activities that actually increase happiness?
"Identity, values, ideology, post-modernity; critical discourse analysis, rhetoric, persuasion, functional grammar, genre analysis, sociolinguistics, metapragmatics. At least in my hands, each new framework became another way to support a conclusion I had largely reached in advance"
They know the solution: Popperian falsification. "But it has one property much of my previous work lacked: reality gets a vote".
It ain't much, but falsifiable work is honest work. I hope they get to the (physical and metaphorical) place they need to live.
When I'm defending a political position and it's going so badly that I have to add epicycles, I know I'm on the wrong track. But if I go back to first principles and develop a simpler internally consistent argument, it is usually insanely extremist to modern sensibilities.
Turns out that human morality and logical consistency are usually strangers.
And that my friends is why people need to pay attention in school. Some time around 9th grade or so, the logarithm is taught and it's a mystery how anybody can go through modern life without knowing what it is.
A few years back I sat across a financial advisor who wanted to sell me a certain product and I asked him how long it would take for those proclaimed 3.8% yearly to double my money. He took a calculator, entered 1.038 x and then counted how often he had to press = for 2 to appear. I shook my head and walked out the door.
Of course not everything is about money. But exponentials play a role everywhere. Not having a basic understanding is failure of the school system ... or society that it is embedded in.
Sounds like there’s an interesting story in here - but just post the prompt you gave to Claude to write this instead of the model output. Imperfect writing is much preferred to AI’s generic decompressed version of your experience.
Doesn’t sound like you’re doing science, to me.
In fact, this is the crux of the whole reproducibility crisis in social sciences, is it not?
He was now closer to 30 to than to 20, was interviewing for the same job that a BS-grad can go after, and wasn't competitive compared to them.
I asked him why he had spent so much time in chemistry just to pivot and he just literally didn't know. It was hard to look at his graduate education as anything other than a wasted decade that actually has set him back career wise.
One interesting question is how does someone do that to themselves?
Another interesting question is - what is the value of a PhD when someone uninterested in the field and not-that-thought-out about it can get one? We think of PhD designating that someone has committed to the field and pushed a little edge of the frontier forward through sheer motivation and brillians and it was just hard to imagine this being true for this guy.
Because the system arounds you encourages it.
Maybe bit sad. Very common. And also a life.
It is not the learning but the action that is missing here.
Nothing wrong with it. However what is right about it? The world needs research, and that means researchers. However for every person in research the world needs a very large number of people in non research. The guy who works at the local sewer plant isn't doing research, but the world would fall apart if nobody did that job, while the world would still continue with nobody in research (I wouldn't want to live in either world, but the world of no more research is better than the world of no more sewer systems)
(I am genuinely sorry for whatever bad experience that's led to this bitterness, though.)
Edit: “research” in academia now revolves around grant writing and publishing. That is an anti-filter for individuals that do not want to play that game and would rather spend that time doing actual research.
Increasingly the arts are being defunded based on a similar argument, and humanity as a whole is worse off because of it.
Something could be valuable despite being "useless" but not in this case.
If you are getting education because you are interested in the topic but won't get a job in it: I fully support this. However you should not take a loan out to get this education: there are too many other things to do in life that you also will want to do. Worse the loan means you cannot change your mind later if you are wrong (or you can, but you will still have to pay for the mistake instead of whatever you are interested in today).
There is one other reason for education: to become a better citizen (don't fall for bad politics). However that should be to everybody and I haven't seen much evidence that higher education really helps much.
If a PhD cost $0, it still costs a craptonne of time.
All the smartest people I know left school when they were 15 (or earlier).
In some countries they do, in some they don't, in others every PhD student even gets a scholarship. Every person I know who did the PhD did it because they loved the topics they were studying. The author of the blogpost is from Russia, I bet he didn't have to pay for his PhD.
I don’t have any higher education. I was stupid and arrogant and thought it would be a waste of time and money. However even if I did attend at 17/18, I almost certainly would have squandered it. I wouldn’t have been mature or aware enough to understand how and where to focus my time and energy in such a setting.
By about my mid-late 20s I felt like I had a better idea of what I could or could not get out of such an experience, but by that point I had a life and bills to pay and a job to attend to allow for any of that. There’s barely any time or money for education now. I’ve thought about trying to go back for the last decade, but it just becomes less realistic every year.
For me personally, I had a ton of fun squandering my college years taking a wide variety of classes that could have become a passion but ended up not. I would not have been able to do that outside of a structured environment that gave each subject a pass/fail opportunity in my life that cost only a semester.
online school, commuting, and part time school are all valid options that result in a college degree.
Sure that’s all that’s required. And simple people such as yourself may be content with that and see it as the end-all
But anyone with an avoids room temp IQ understands that the real value of a university education isn’t the classes. It’s the people, the opportunities to do things become
> online school, commuting, and part time school are all valid options that result in a college degree.
Again the fact that you think that exclusive value of university is a degree it’s quite showing. I’d even argue online education strips some of the more valuable parts of an education away. I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone but those looking for a quick conic status booster like through Nursing. Indeed better to save your money otherwise. I’d put my money down that you’re some sort of CRUD monkey.
That isn't the right question. The right question is can you do it, and will it pay enough to provide "a good life" (whatever that means to you). If you love [whatever] more power, that is the best case. However don't lose track of the fact that in the end no matter what job you pick there will be times when you have to do something you hate (not something unethical where you should quit, just something you hate), but you need to do something to be a good citizen.
If your kids already have a good career picked out I encourage a secondary study in some hobby thing. Go ahead and sing in the choir even though as an engineer it is a waste of time - that is fun and that is good (there are thousands of other fun things). Just don't lose sight that the goal is a good life and this will include things you don't want to do but have to anyway.
Of course if he starts a successful business that can pay better than engineering. Does he want to - I don't have the personality to do well there but that shouldn't stop him.
Unfortunately, educational systems tend to be biased toward a utilitarian view of education rather than one centered on judgment, self-understanding, and the ability to make meaningful choices.
If he doesn't have a scholarship, same thing, but at a community college.
But the people telling him he'd be good at it see something. "I'd be good at it" is not the same as "I'd like it", but we often enjoy things we're good at more than things we're bad at. (Also, it's often easier to get jobs in things we're good at.)
in LLM terms low to no reasoning is better than ultra.
All I'm saying is, not everyone doing a PhD and then leaving academia was accidentally climbing up the wrong ladder. Some did it on purpose, just to admire the view.
Nobody is going to tell you the story of their grandmother with whom they shared a chemistry hobby and in whose memory they wanted to acquire deep knowledge of the field before getting a well-paying job in a different field if they are introvert and you give them the vibe of being judgemental of their life choices.
I would have felt that he was at least technically savvy; and, beyond that, he might have the spark of one of the best qualities of a future colleague i.e. interesting-ness - one can't underestimate that.
On the other hand
> he just literally didn't know
That would have been disappointing to hear.
The answer, as I’m sure many already know, is idealism and a certain kind of naïvité. It’s not an absolute naïvité, but it is some kind of belief in the value of doing something that isn’t “mere” careerism. You think it’s noble to contribute to science. And you do contribute, a teeny eensy weensy bit. You also find out that it’s not everything you imagined it would be. And then you’re 30 and one day you unblind yourself. You look at the job market, and how much money various jobs actually pay. More importantly, you realize quite suddenly that money can actually make your life better, and that, whatever damage it might have wrought on your soul to pursue it, it would at least have enabled you to own a home one day. Maybe have kids. Shit. And the fresh grads who went straight into tech and finance making $300k (hold on, you can make $300k? Wait a second, that’s not a senior executive salary? That’s a normal-ish bourgeois white-collar HCoL salary that people make fresh out of school? Hold on, that’s basically a starting salary in that world? WHAT?)… just naturally understood.
Then you try to explain this on a message board or something. You don’t want pity (after all, your life is very good in the scheme of things), you just want some connection, or maybe even a, “that’s ok, that’s how we learn, life is a twisty path.” But half the people call you a class traitor. The other half call you a mediocre sucker.
ding ding ding. This is the real kicker. This is why it’s a waste of time to pursue. Want a PhD? A home? A family? Pick one or two. With the amount of time and effort it takes to achieve those these days, you won’t get to have them all. So you have to pick one. At 17/18 it’s easy to see the coming decade as longer than it really is, and opportunity cost will catch up to you quick.
Some people. That's very field-specific and won't last forever. Basically FAANG programmers and finance bros.
Is this world as normal and common as you describe? To me it seems more like a byproduct of a brief era in tech, today only accessible to people already in the system or creme of the crop students going to the right institutions and who have the skills, connections or luck to string together events that lead to them working there. Today, I know loads of people who did the right thing, but my current generation of graduates definitely isn't aiming for $300k starting salary, not even the best people I know can dream of that. Maybe it would be better to use a more grounded example, since many average workers in many careers will still take home considerably more than most PhDs - instead of using what feels like a closing window from a gold rush.
> But half the people call you a class traitor.
That doesn't make sense. You don't even change your class, you go from working for a wage to working for a wage. I only see the other reaction you mention, the "you're done, it's over, you wasted your life".
And, yes, it certainly is a closing window for a gold rush.
> You don't even change your class, you go from working for a wage to working for a wage.
True, but I’m literally employed as a capital-C Capitalist now. You’re technically right, but…
> I’m literally employed as a capital-C Capitalist
What do you mean, is that your job title? Or do you own capital? I thought the class separation was only in whether you were recurrently paid to work for someone else or if derived your wealth from owning something.
I think if that time was spent productively, it's not a loss at all. With AI the coming iterations will favor different kinds of combinations of perspectives and experiences towards identifying esoteric solutions. Or otherwise stated, people who are deep learners will find that they are able to deeply learn faster and at a larger breadth now too and this will produce new kinds of solutions to problems that in some cases haven't even been defined yet.
I think this will be a critical thing in the near timeline that Elon and others predicted, when more things can be automated. There will still be a lot of increasing demand for thought workers and researchers and engineers including those who started out in other thought-based disciplines. I believe tokenization of financial instruments or for development of new ones means an additional productive substrate layer to the economy and that is why big/smart money are flowing into it. Those + AI will be a big driver in growing the power of that new layer and driving wages for those people/teams pushing the envelope further there.
We have a lot of control over this kind of thing these days...meaning we can be productive in creating such incentives and possibilities because the yield is far greater. It produces and will produce way more knowledge and products/services in the future. I think people are severely underestimating the potential of the American system to produce 0 to 1 innovation in literally everything at huge scale with the right incentives/environment set up for people. Productivity here is not the issue, the problem is legacy notions on what is valuable and how to fund it. Legacy meaning no longer functionally or logically sound due to the advanced possibilities afforded by decades of compounded gains since WW2 or the Industrial Revolution or the Printing Press.
The bottom line of the story is this man had invested a decade in a field in what I could at best describe autopilot - it didn't seem like he had and lost passion or was simply making a finance-driven decision.
At the end of the day this is pretty much what happened and to dress it up would hurt our ability to connect to the problem and think about it.
An alternative view of someone choosing to change career paths later in life is that you gain access to a different background than the other candidates in your pool. that may not be valuable in your case, but often it is. At the very least he's recognized a sunk cost and cut ties, which can be hard to do.
But I do think there's communication value at describing things sharply. "John has been affected by alcoholism" and "John has fucked up his life by drinking - his wife left and took the kids" can refer to the same event, and while the first phrasing is more pleasant and respectful - it is the second phrasing that drives home the severity of what's actually happening.
The value of a PhD is what it brings to you. It will cost vast amounts of unpaid toil and tears, and it will not give you a well-paid job afterwards. But if you love the idea of discovering something genuinely new about this world, having the sheer freedom to dive into a research question without fear or restraint can be exhilarating.
And sure, you can also get a PhD by doing the minimum and letting your supervisor carry you through. But why would you throw years away on something you didn't care about, with nothing but a subsistence living allowance as a reward? You're only cheating yourself at that point.
This should probably be legally mandated to be printed on the application forms, like a Prop 65 warning.
I think this is part of the tragedy of our parents generation pushing college at all costs. It is very hard to know what you want to do for the rest of your life as an 18 yo. Even worse to take on all the debt in the world for something you don't end up loving or without a good path to repayment. In previous generations, some of these people would have done a stint in the service or taken a gap year but now there is too much pressure to know "now".
I can’t blame em, they seem to have lucked out and been around just at the right time.
I currently live in a smaller blown out rust belt shithole city. It used to be a fairly sized industrial center even through the decline of the region. I meet a lot of middle aged and older people here who will opine on about their father the chemist who invented some everyday, but notable item for [chemical conglomerate] in the 80s/90s. Some people here have established a fair bit a wealth for their family through their patents even.
Even here on HN I keep nothing commenters talking about their father the physicist or their mother the biologist. Nowadays those people seem to be struggling to figure out where if anywhere they can afford to start a family (or just giving up on the prospects)
> One interesting question is how does someone do that to themselves?
Some people pursue knowledge because they are interested in it and not because it maximizes their income potential. I find that admirable. Even more, I find the opposite pretty sad.
The field of social research in a nutshell
At an individual level, those statistics are fairly meaningless. You can bucket yourself into any number of statistical groupings but being a representative datapoint or an outlier doesn't really explain nor does it solve anything.
I learned to be more self-critical of my thinking than others were, and to recognize when others weren’t holding me to a higher standard. And I left.
The thing you know you must do probably is an internal thing, but can also be an external thing. It's hard to navigate this, but no one cares if it's hard.
"... instead of grabbing myself by the balls and admitting that I was climbing a ladder propped against the wrong building.."
Indeed a complex metaphor! Perhaps it has a Russian cultural source? An origin story?
But i also must ask: would it make any difference if one were climbing a ladder propped against the right building?
In any case I am glad I am not a Russian painter - it appears to involve skills that are difficult, painful and not at all easy-to-acquire.
But the story makes me sad. While I don't feel too bad about humanity reducing its investment on anything related to Foucault, the author appears to be a capable and motivated individual. It would have been great if they could have found something that they like which is also useful for everybody. Win-win.
Complexity becomes a way to postpone the verdict. etc.
Meh
to be honest, there's no interest in studying capitalism unless you study its mechanisms critically. and i fear yours was foucault-slop, pseudo-radical drivel that didn't even aspire to change anything. no change = no direction = no meaning.
there's some philosophical interest in the question, altho i cannot say exactly where. but if you start from a statement like that and your thesis is mostly a display of what you read, it's barely social science. it is social theory at best, and not particularly good social theory either.
the interesting questions - especially in social sciences - are the hows and not the whys. the mechanisms. that would have been more empirical and more interesting.
push it further and you'll find you're doing marketing research, which is applied sociology anyway: who buys what, and how, and maybe why, at the end.
but twenty years of foucault-slop isn't bad at all. at least you chilled.