Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level | Hacker News Reader

Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level

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21 pointsckinnan27 comments

Ooohh... It just dawned on me right now, why all the higher education hatin lately.

Lots of young kids just graduated from college and they can't get jobs, so they're thinking, "Aw crap... I just went $100,000 in debt and I can't get a job. What the hell did I just waste 4 years in school for? School sucks. I was lied to. This wasn't worth anything. I'm screwed."

My heart goes out to you. It's not your fault that the economy sucks. It's not your fault that the world told you you'd get a job if you went to college. It's a pretty sick carrot to dangle in front of you.

Your education though, does have a value. But so does work experience. Your degree does give you an advantage over those without degrees, but it doesn't give you an advantage over those with degrees and work experience. Even those with work experience can't get jobs right now and they don't have parents they can move back in with. Imagine how screwed they are.

The year after you graduate is often the scariest, most depressing you will have experienced thus far in your life. My friends from college a year or two behind me, they'd graduate and phone me depressed. They'd ask themselves and me, "Why did I just go through that? I'm lonely. All my friends moved away. I work with a bunch of old people."

It's normal. It's normal to feel this way. I think college creates a lot of hope in us. The world makes us think that if we just make it through college, life will be easy, but getting that degree is only the start. Don't look at Matt Damon, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs and think you could have been like them, why didn't you drop out sooner. Those guys are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Make the most of your time now. Get experience. Keep your skills up to date. Go travel if you can afford it. Expand your mind. Keep working hard. It does pay off.

That is why it's such a problem graduating into a down economy. If you can't get a job in your field, when the economy turns around, say it's in a few years, you will actually be at a disadvantage compared to fresh graduates. Fresh grads get a lot of slack, especially at big firms, they get put onto "graduate training schemes" and "fast-track programmes" and so on. In many companies there are only two entry routes, graduate or experienced. The experienced hires do the work, and the managers are from the graduate scheme. If you miss the window of the first and aren't yet the latter, you're a bit stuck. It's not the end of your career, but it's a disadvantage that will take years to work out.

Why is this a problem? These people should just allocate their time to the new opportunities created by the downturn. I have several friends who are unemployed recent grads and they seem to be just sitting on their asses, sending out resumes, waiting for the economy to turn around. Why they aren't starting their own projects or seeking consulting work (I believe consulting / temping is somewhat counter-cyclical?) I can't quite figure out.

Seeking employment at a large company is only one investment strategy and perhaps not the best one right now given the fierce competition caused by the downturn.

Consulting/temping is very much pro-cyclical. The consultants and temps are the first to go when the economy goes down, and the last to be hired back.

Playing devil's advocate here (your suggestion is exactly what I'd do, and it's worked fairly well for me), but...

One reason they don't may be that it's almost never rational to start a new project over sending out a resume. The resume offers the possibility of immediate monetary payoff for relatively little work, and while the chances are low (particularly in this economy), they're certainly higher than the chances that your new project will succeed. The latter has no immediate monetary payoff, requires lots of work, and has risks that are so varied that you don't even have a framework for evaluating them.

It's only when you put a lot of these risks together in sort of a "career portfolio" that it makes sense to take them. Any individual project will probably fail, but together they give you the skills and experience that will a.) get you hired and b.) let you succeed more often with these independent projects.

Alas, in my experience most people don't take such a long-term view of their careers...

That consulting is pro-cyclical surprises me - I always figured that large corporations had some people who weren't terribly efficient and that in a downturn they would be cut and their workloads would be outsourced to a 3rd party, whom the employer wouldn't need to offer perks and raises and who would have to pay full FICA him/herself.

It's a huge pain to fire an employee - there're dozens of potential "wrongful termination" lawsuit hitches, and if you run into any of them, you've just cost the company more in legal bills than you'll ever save in that employee's salary. For that reason, companies usually will keep full-timers even if they aren't quite as efficient as consultants or new hires, because the costs of getting it wrong and inviting a lawsuit don't outweigh the marginal benefits. Unless the employee is grossly incompetent, in which case you both save more in lost productivity, and there's a lower chance of a successful lawsuit...

How many people hire consultants with no experiences? What would they consult on?

Anyway, personal projects are better than nothing but they aren't a substitute for commercial experience, which is about a lot more than just coding. It comes down to not knowing what you don't know. Employed programmers deal all the time with people saying "can we do X" where X is something you'd never considered and might require some research to figure out, and the actual code is simple when you come to write it. People working alone can't help but approach from the angle of "I can do Y, so that's what I'll do".

It depends. I've found that there are certain "career resets" you can push to get a fresh start on your career. Grad school. Law/business school. Founding a startup. Nobody cares if you waited tables or bagged groceries for 2-3 years if you manage to get into Harvard Law afterwards.

In my case, I graduated and took a job at what I thought was a startup but turned out to be a slow-growing small business. As Marc Andreesen says, "these are great places to go if you don't want your career to go anywhere either." So I quit and founded a startup. It failed, but I learned enough hot skills to prove to my interviewers that I hadn't spent the last year and a half dicking around. Then I got into Google, and once you have Google on your resume, nobody cares that you spent two years working on JSF webapps for a company nobody's ever heard of.

I totally agree, but those are the "nuclear option" if you will. $100,000 in debt, and spending as much again on an MBA is not to be undertaken lightly.

I appreciate my great good fortune to be graduating into the early years of the dotcom boom... But when the NASDAQ imploded I had 3 solid years experience framed on my CV in terms of "I have done X using technologies A, B and C accomplishing result Y". That's what matters a few years out of college and without it it would be very difficult to "catch up" or even to get a foot in the door.

Luckily in the software industry that's an easy problem to solve. Get a job that pays the bills. Create a website/webapp in your free time and call it a business of which you are now the CEO. Learn and apply all the relevant tools and techniques.

Assuming it never generates enough revenue to get past the "hobby" stage, a few years from now you it will still have value in your resume. Someone who worked on their own project for years is always an attractive candidate for a programming job (at least to us).

I wouldn't call it "easy". To actually learn anything from it you would have to be 99% of the way towards really launching a business.

Note to recent graduates about the value of your degree:

I graduated right after 9/11. Right after. I remember when I was in school that our local paper had 5 pages of jobs open in my field. Good paying jobs even for those with no experience. By the time I got my diploma in the mail, I had not had one single phone call. Those 5 pages of ads had been reduced to a single column on the back of the sports page.

I remember going over and over to the University career center week after week trying to polish my resume, going to mock interviews.

At one time, I had started calling companies up and offering to work as an entry-level engineer for minimum wage if they would just give me a place to use my skills.

No such luck.

In the end, I got a job working in a warehouse for very little money. Over just a few months, the economy go a little better and I ended up getting a job as an engineer for a tiny firm that went out of business.

After I did get some experience, I have found it easier and easier to obtain a job. Even to the point I am at right now where two groups at my current job are in a fight to win me over for a new assignment. Even in this terrible economy.

Here is my advice:

Your degree is worth something....

Don't take the economy personally. They don't want to hire you right now because they can get an expert cheap instead. This will change with time.

Right now is a great time to think about Graduate School. When you graduate you will be light years ahead of your peers. Promotions will come much easier for you later down the road with a graduate degree.

Please don't give up. Your loans can be deferred. Spend some quality time with your friends and family.

You have to wonder how much selection bias skews this. It seems like "those who would complete more school" isn't that far off from "those who are ambitious and willing to work hard". Without schooling, I wonder how well that second group would perform. Pretty well, I'd think.

Similarly, there is no indication they have adjusted the results for IQ. According to some estimates "each IQ point raises worker productivity 1.76-2.38%" where I take "worker productivity" to mean lifetime earnings. http://www.ehponline.org/members/2002/110p563-569grosse/gros...

The direction of causation may be wrong here, because economists of education, sociologists, and other persons familiar with the data are well aware that young people from well-off families are much more likely to begin higher education and much more likely to complete it than poor young people.

Here are some links about the issue. The overall picture in the past decade has been that high-ability, low-income students are at a clear disadvantage in the college admission process compared to low-ability, high-income students. (The links below are in approximate chronological order of publication, from oldest to newest.) Is anything changing recently about this?

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_...

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0621.pdf

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ff0615S.pdf

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/carnrose.pdf

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/kahlenberg-affacti...

http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/05/a-thumb-on-the-scale.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid-leveragi...

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=510012

http://www.equaleducation.org/commentary.asp?opedid=1240

http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....

http://www.reason.com/news/show/123910.html

http://www.ihep.org/publications/publications-detail.cfm?id=...

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/11...

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hkBGMsvJKR...

I'm kinda wondering what the variance is on these numbers. I'd imagine that the doctoral numbers have quite a few tenured professors and industrial researchers making six figures, but the median is shifted downwards by a large number of postdocs making $30-40K.

If having a masters basically guarantees you a salary of $60K, but getting a doctorate means you have a 50% chance of making $30K and a 50% chance of making $100K, I think a lot of people would rather get the masters...

I think the 30K v. 100K goes into the difference between a career of academia or of business.

If pay is influencing you decision to go for a Ph.D you probably shouldn't do it.

There aren't that many tenured professors making six figures. I suspect the PhD numbers are high due to the quants making 7-8 figures.

The Ph.D. distribution is probably concentrated towards the bottom with a few spikes (guys like D.E. Shaw) raising the average.

Well, this is a median, not a mean, so the quants can't raise it that much. A bifurcated distribution with a couple peaks could though, which is why I was thinking tenured professors + industrial researchers + Googlers on one end, with post-docs on the other.

I'm not sure if this should surprise anyone. Of course higher education is worth it for most people. It's just if you're a programmer, after you learn basic programming skills, a lot can be easily self taught.

But programming by itself is not knowledge. It's a means to solve problems. It's a very important and critical skill and like any other, it's difficult to become a master, but how are you applying it?

For example, let's say you are trying to solve a problem in crystallography. You need to be a good programmer to come up with a nice refinement algorithm, but without a fundamental understanding of the problem you're trying to solve, you're not going to be able to solve it. The same goes for financial modeling, or some other kind of optimization problem.

In any field you have to keep teaching yourself new skills, since the technologies and approaches change. Even the foundational knowledge changes, but what education helps you get is a core understanding of depth that allows you to adjust. There will always be those who can do it without getting a good education, but those are rare, and in the worlds I've lived in, almost non-existent.

Yes exactly. It's easy to learn a new language or API. But it's not easy to learn CS on your own. It's not like you can just sit down and read Knuth from cover to cover. And it's not easy to learn domain knowledge on your own either, you have to be around practitioners.

Right, and it seems most of the college hating HN crowd are focused on solving a problem that they can with the knowledge they already have, and then profiting from it, thus not requiring a college degree.

You can just sit down and read Knuth from cover to cover. The problem is most people that don't get a CS degree also avoid reading Knuth on their own.

I think one of the large gaps between those groups on average is those without a CS degree think theory is useless. When you are forced to learn the theory you end up using it constantly. However, when you see a theory without the associated experience it seems useless. So it's hard to know what to study on your own. For most people it's the rigorous nature of a good CS program that forces them to put forth the associated effort.

You go to Knuth when you have already learnt the vocabulary, tho'. If you can't frame your problem in the language everyone else in your field uses, reference materials and search engines are of very limited use. You might not even be able to discuss it with your colleagues except by them basically taking over the problem and studying it from scratch themselves.

It's not the education that matters, it's how you use it.

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