>> The median wage for workers with some college education but no four-year degree is $835 per week, about 10 percent less than it was at the turn of the century, after inflation
This is a crazy sentence if you think about it. For a significant part of society wages did not only stagnate, they dropped. I don't think the trend will reverse any time soon. If the wages of another profecion rose 10 percent and were equal before, we would see a 22 percent difference (which is a lot!).
Since this is the trend for all workers with some college education but without a four year degree, i think it's a dire situation for those people. There's no easy way out (the article suggesst moving!).
The suggestion in the article may be smart on an individual level, but it could lead to a further segregation between sucessfull and not sucessfull regions.
It would be interesting to calculate how much better wages are given country of origin. What I mean is, there are currently about 28 million immigrants living in the U.S. with about 1.2 million arriving every year (both documented and undocumented.)
According to statistics, 30% of new immigrants have no high school diploma, so while the average wage is low, it's probably much higher than they would be getting in their native country (otherwise, presumably, many woudn't have left in the first place.)
This may be putting pressure on wage growth for native-born Americans but overall growth as a whole may be stronger than it looks.
> According to statistics, 30% of new immigrants have no high school diploma, so while the average wage is low, it's probably much higher than they would be getting in their native country (otherwise, presumably, many woudn't have left in the first place.)
Also, employers don’t value foreign degrees very much, so if the category of people with “some college” or a “college degree” includes many more immigrants, you’ll see average incomes go down.
The statistic isn’t useful standing alone. The turn of the century was two decades ago, and college attendance rates have changed substantially. I can’t find a statistic for “some college,” but the percentage of people who have completed college increased from 20% to 30% from 2000 to 2015. The group of people who have “some college” in 2019 is much broader than the same group in 2000.
Think of all of the time and dollars wasted on unnecessary college educations because employers required it (even the most junior role requiring a 4 year degree to check the box) but wages are still stagnant or sliding back.
On the other hand, $835 a week is over $20/hour, which to my blue-collar redneck-steeped brain, seems like pretty damned good for somebody with no education - and a partial college education is not worth a flying fuck, because the way things are structured, it's typically all core high school++ courses for the first year or two, before going into actually field-specific training.
My first year was programming and vector calculus. Second year was operations systems internals and differential equations. And this wasn't even a top tier school.
Computer Science and Engineering are more trade-focused programs that provide real value. Liberal arts are inherently fuzzy, and worthless economically without the paperwork that signifies completion.
I think there is a bit of a simpson's paradox thing going on here. Going by the BLS data here[1], in Q1 of 2000, 31.5% of workers (who are over the age of 25, all races and genders) had no college and 15.6% had some college but no degree, so people with some college but no degree were between percentiles 31.5 and 47.1 in terms of educational attainment. In Q1 of 2019, 21.9% of workers had no college and 18.6% of workers had some college but no degree, so people with some college but no degree are now between percentiles 21.9 and 40.5.
In other words, in 2000, the 25th percentile worker by education level had no college education, and in 2019 the 25th percentile worker by education level does have some college education (but no degree). The 25th percentile worker by education level makes more money in 2019 than they did in 2000, even when adjusting for inflation, but which category they are counted in has changed as the population becomes more educated.
(more can be said, and has been said elsewhere, about how much of the purpose of higher education is to develop one's skills and how much is to serve as an IQ / conscientiousness test that employers can't be sued for using)
> benefits esp. health insurance? otherwise not sure these are comparable.
I'm confused by this argument. Has the value provided by health insurance gotten better to make up for the additional cost? If you're paying those 10% into health insurance and the benefit hasn't increased with that increase in cost, I'd say you're moving backwards.
Minimum wage drives down demand just as artificially forcing a lower price for something increases demand. Minimum wage is NOT just money. If an employer is required to provide benefits, those are also a form of minimum wage increase, but one that does not show up the same way as cash income.
ALWAYS remember: All benefits are paid for by reducing wages one way or another.
The effect of benefits on minimum wage is actually BIGGER than the current hourly minimum wage. Consider health insurance. Employers are required to pay for insurance for their employees working more than 30 hours. They cannot force the employee to pay more than around 10% of the cost AND the insurance must cover at least 60% of the costs. Average health insurance costs are (according to a quick google) $440 per month which leaves the employer paying $400 each month for health insurance per full-time employee (that's a $2.50/hr minimum wage increase for all full-time employees).
This leaves four options. The first is to raise prices across the board (hardly feasible). The second is to hire a ton of 29 hour "part-time" employees, but there are still hidden per-employee costs like extra unemployment, worker's comp, training, scheduling issues, etc. The third is to work employees 45-50 hours per week because the overtime cost in that range is still less than the cost of 1.5 time is still cheaper than all the fixed costs for bringing in another employee.
The final option (probably what we see here) is to use the other options until inflation allows you to recover from the pay issue, but with cash benefits not recovering in order to pay for all the other benefits the employee is buying.
These same things apply to all the other benefits ranging from vacation to 401k.
This also ties into 1099 negotiation. DO NOT negotiate with the cost of employment salary in mind. Instead, negotiate with the total cost of benefits in mind. Ask what the total cost of ownership for an employee would be. You need to be compensated for that $400 per month health insurance. You need to be compensated for that 3-4 weeks of vacation you can't take. You need to be compensated for losing 1 year of unemployment benefits if your job disappears. You need to be compensated for that 401k match. Especially don't forget that extra 7.5% you need for the other half of social security.
I worked for a company a few years ago for a while before finding out their cost to hire me as a contractor was around 100k per year while an employee with the same position would be paid 90k in cash and another 80k in benefits. That made a huge difference the next time I sat down at the negotiation table.
Yes, dramatically so. Cancer now has a 70% survival rate. HIV is not a death sentence. You can get a heart valve installed without cutting apart your rib cage.
That stuff doesn't come free. It would be kind of neat to offer the option of a 1950s level of care, only modernizing things if cost would be reduced by newer technology. Lots of people survived the 1950s just fine. Even just going back to 1995 would be a huge difference, avoiding all currently active patents.
Absolutely the technology has advanced. But a 21" RCA TV in 1956 cost 5,221 - technology is supposed to make things better and cheaper. And it has - according to one study I read(1) significantly so. Patients are spending less time in hospitals, getting better quicker. Why is the cost of healthcare benefits rising?
> The average worker received 32 percent of total compensation in benefits including bonuses, paid leave and company contributions to insurance and retirement plans in the second quarter of 2018. That was up from 27 percent in 2000, federal data show.
Wait, many more people have college education nowadays than at the turn of the century, so you should expect the overall value of a college education to drop a little... simple demand and supply.
On top of that, there are a lot of college education programs that have close to no market value (i.e. leading to no actual jobs or already in saturated job markets) so you should expect this to impact the median earnings, and lead to adjustments to take place over time (instead of seeing a linear growth).
I've hired people with both some college and an actual degree. I honestly haven't seen a big difference in ability. In fact, the ones with only some college (especially those with a family) seem to be more reliable and willing to do the occasional boring things that those with a degree tend try to avoid doing.
That's probably my own experience and it involves a low sample size, but as a small business owner, Id argue that you can really benefit by dropping the degree barrier and looking for other indicators of maturity and reliability.
Somewhat different experience: I was a hiring manager at a large tech company where we needed mostly hardware engineers. Company was very big on credentials, so we always recruited from top unis. We had just a handful of "partial-degreed" engineers who had often worked their way up from electronic technician positions while attending college part time. Turns out we needed both types. The top credentialed engineers did lovely designs but never got any of their hardware to actually work. The "mechanics" always had to come in to fix things.
Not OP, but sometimes 'lovely' designs also nearly work and all that is needed to bridge the final gap is knowledge earned through practical experience.
This happens in construction too. Architect/engineer sign off on a design, the "no education" guy swinging the hammer has to make adjustments in the field to get it to actually work.
I worked for my dad a couple summers when I was a teenager. He was a contractor doing wood frame construction in southern California. I never heard him swear so much as when the plans called for something that was next to impossible to build.
Later on I did some framing work on my own. Ran into several cases where the designer completely ignored the dimensional instability of wood due to changes in humidity. Often that was really hard for the "no education" guys to fix.
Yes, it was mostly this. The sharp credentialed engineers could design, model and simulate complex systems like nobody's business. But, of course, models are never quite exact representations of the real world, especially when it comes to hardware. So the engineers with pracitical knowledge would look at the hardware and (usually rather quickly) spot missing decoupling, debouncing, metastability, sneak paths, etc issues.
Some contracts (mostly government) have a strict definition of what an FTE is/can be. Because it's the government, instead of having a nuanced understanding of the field, they treat everything as a series of buckets - "you have a college degree? You're Engineer II. No degree? Clearly Engineer I." There's some wiggle room with technical experience and whatnot, but it's tricky to do.
So, when the government customer puts out a request for bids, they'll say something like "we want a system that does X, Y, Z, and we expect this to require 3 FTE 2s and a part time PM for 6 months" - generally establishing the upper limit of what they'll pay/how many hours should be billed to the project. (This gets interesting when you realize that the customer doesn't really know how the sausage is made, so they talk informally with contractors to get a feel for what's possible/go to a team they've worked with before, get a feeler for what the requirements should be for a project/what to expect cost wise, and only then put out the formal request. 9/10 this means that the government PM has a team they want in mind, and basically has the team write their own requirements sheet).
Any way, long story short the credentialed designers look good on a contract, and produce valuable designs that can get approved/validated by the Powers That Be, while the mechanics who implement things come up with the product. Both are providing value, just in different ways.
Also, sometimes you need to start with a lovely design, even if you know it will never survive production.
The hability of coming up with high level designs that solve a complex problem does not always include the debugging/troubleshooting skills needed to make something actually work well.
>Id argue that you can really benefit by dropping the degree barrier and looking for other indicators of maturity and reliability.
I've hired dozens of Software Engineers and could only tell you the degrees and/or schools of a couple of them. I don't even look at that. Can you demonstrates proficiency in what I'm asking you to do? Do you seem intelligent and willing & able to learn? Do you fill a gap on the team? Those are the things I want to know.
I think the barrier specifically for software engineering is probably a bit lower now than in the past. Information was tougher to get at 10-15 years ago than it is today, and many of the candidates who in past times would not have gotten the necessary structure from a university can now go to a few bootcamps and be pretty much on par with people who completed a 4-year degree.
I think software engineering is a unique case because on the one hand actually writing code isn't the "real work"; the real work is the thought and design that comes before writing the code.
On the other hand, even after you've performed the "real work" of thinking things through, the fact that your code works isn't the "real product". The real product is the degree to which the code can be understood, maintained, and extended.
I think that the idea that software engineering is a trade skill produces two problems:
It encourages management to discount software engineers' expertise and view the planning that comes before writing code as a waste of time.
I think when people today say "trade skill" they think of things like factory work and relatively routine construction. However, a programmer is more like a traditional artisan who must always be honing their craft and learning new techniques.
In my opinion, a better way of looking at it is that companies should start actually treating software engineers like engineers. I.e. by viewing them as professionals with the expertise to inform project planning and a professional obligation to follow best practices and design.
Your description of what it means to be a software engineer sounds a lot like being a carpenter. I would definitely call being a carpenter a trade skill.
Much like being a software engineer the real product of a carpenter is how what the build withstands the elements, can be repaired, maintained, and extended, and that is only achieved after putting in the thought and design that comes before construction. Much like a software engineer, a carpenter must keep up to date on building codes and regulations, different materials and how they are used safely, and collecting, maintaining, and extending their tools.
Software engineers often talk about "sharpening the saw". That's literally something a carpenter would do.
I would think just the opposite. HN is very much a west coast, $300K salary, everyone either works at a FAANG or cool startup bubble completely ignoring the “dark matter” and regular old enterprise developers.
But seeing how I taught myself assembly language in the 80s and learned how to optimized programs to run on 65C02 1Mhz computers with 128KB of RAM in middle school, I don’t see why teaching yourself how to do low level hardware programming is any different than learning anything else.
My BG is similar (thank you Commodore). I think the aptitude to do low level is different than doing other types of programming. You have to think more like a computer than when you work upstairs at the UI level. I think if you had a low level bootcamp and a "traditional" bootcamp, you'd have a higher success rate coming from the "traditional" bootcamp.
I often see people say they did "C bit twiddling". Is that just a folksier way to say C programming (as I have suspected) or does it mean something distinct?
There are people, not too many anymore, who write C without even remembering how to use the bitwise operators. They can't use any of: left shift, right shift, bitwise and, bitwise or, xor, complement. They may use unions or pointers, but not for any sort of aliasing. To them, byte order and struct packing are fuzzy concepts that never come in to play.
Most of these programmers have moved on to Java, Javascript, and Python.
Those doing "C bit twiddling" are the other C programmers. Most commonly I hear the phrase from people who are capable of this low-level programming but never liked it. People using the phrase seem to be mostly people who have moved on to languages like C++, C#, and Go. People actually doing the "C bit twiddling" seem to just say "C programming" as you have suspected.
So I guess it is a way of saying "C, including the parts I don't miss" for people who could do it but never liked it.
C bit twiddling for me means a bit of inline assembly, inspecting the assembly generated by the compiler, figuring out why the files generated didn’t work across platforms (found out about the endian difference between x86 and whatever the mainframes we were also targeting), etc.
I've found that it is often those who move into programming after an earlier career in a trade are markedly better than those that went to college and got computer science degrees.
They tend to just get things done, without spinning themselves in circles building unhelpful mountains of abstractions or searching high and low for a place that they can apply their algorithms coursework.
My experience has been the exact opposite. It's just that both the problems resulting from just getting it done and the benefits of finding the proper abstraction don't come until months later. So by that time it looks like the non-CS developer was more productive.
I don't know. Google has tens of thousands of developers hard at work apply advanced algorithms to everything. I mean, why else would they hire the way they do if that's not the case?
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but since people seem to be taking your comment as sincere: Google doesn't have people applying advanced algorithms to everything. It's a common complaint (or at least observation) among new hires that Google likes to hire top CS students and put them to work doing fairly basic engineering work.
Though the flipside is that they make lateral transfers very easy, so those that are the most motivated by more challenging or even just more CS-oriented work find themselves drifting towards it.
If Google got rid of all their engineers that weren’t working on search and ads would it really make a difference since 85% of their revenue still comes from ads?
90% of modern software is plumbing with computers. Skilled work, but doesn't require degrees because we're not really doing anything all that interesting.
You don't need a degree for plumbing. It comes in damn handy when you're doing things like flow dynamics or combustion simulations
99% of software engineering is just data plumbing and processing. It does not require big picture thinking skills beyond the immediate problem or creative problem solving ability. Sure those skills help sometimes but the return diminishes rapidly and you could get by without them pretty much all the time. It's really not any harder than normal plumbing. The medium we work in and the tools and methods we use are different but that's mostly it.
I think this is less true than most people believe.
A well-intentioned intern can make a programming decision in an afternoon that might take a team of senior SWEs months or more to clean up later once the code or data is being used for something important.
We brush the bad engineering decisions under the rug by calling them "tech debt", but the truth is that if we invested more up front in hiring people with big picture skills and experience we'd probably save significantly more money in the long run, despite their higher salaries.
>A well-intentioned intern can make a programming decision in an afternoon that might take a team of senior SWEs months or more to clean up later once the code or data is being used for something important.
And a new maintenance tech with the wrong grease gun can cause millions of dollars of downtime. This kind of risk exists in all industries.
It's not something with a formal professional exam board that you have to pass, like law, medicine, chartered accountancy, or regular engineering. Nor is it a pure academic discipline. It's a commercial skill: a trade.
To sign mission-critical and potentially life-critical software and provide better safety guarantees. And have a professional body to protect employees from pressure to lower quality.
Just like aeronautical and construction engineering, surgery, dentistry...
I don't disagree with that. I was trying to make a point.
I usually tell people "I program computers" when they ask what I do. I used to say "I do computers" but people are more used to computers and software now so fewer people ask, "so, you do computers?" so I had to change it up a bit.
Maybe I misused the term. I meant it more as a way to describe how learning software engineering is just as much about modeling sound principles and learning by example as it is learning theory and terminology. You don’t need a 4 year degree in order to do that, not because it isn’t a highly skilled occupation but because, on the contrary, it is highly specialized.
as someone that falls into the category described in this article I may be able to shed some light into my personal way of thinking.
I've always been very grateful and always been willing to do any work I can or go out of my way when I can to get the job done. This stems from the fact that I am grateful for my boss for "taking a chance on me". I know hiring doesn't always work out and I do what I can to be the shining star of people they look for, in the future to hire.
It was very rewarding when in fact my direct manager said to me in conversation " How do we find more people like you?"
Probably the best compliment I could have received.
Before anyone else chimes in, I am not underpaid. I work for a great company and am probably paid above market average.
> In fact, the ones with only some college (especially those with a family) seem to be more reliable and willing to do the occasional boring things that those with a degree tend try to avoid doing.
Some would call it „willing”, some „more desperate”.
Not every drop out is Feynman, it’s not like I’m judgmental - just an observation on who is more likely to be swarmed with lesser tasks in a workplace environment, especially among colleagues with academic credentials.
Being willing to take on tasks as menial as picking up some pencils for the team might be a symptom of desperation. It equally might be a symptom of a lack of egotistical arrogance [that one is above such tasks].
Also called into question is the definition of a lesser task. You see, in the Feynman scenario they could not have got much work done in a short time without more pencils—no matter who was fetching them.
Putting "Registered Nurses" at the top of the list of occupations that are available without a bachelor's degree seems kind of misleading.
Yes, it is technically possible to become one without a bachelor's degree, but it does require a minimum of three-quarters of a bachelor's degree and it is becoming more and more common for new RNs to be required to go ahead and get a bachelor's.
Indeed, the criterion for requiring a degree is a regulatory one, involving licensing. But a degree may be a practical requirement if you're competing with people who all have degrees. One reason for a nurse to stay in school for another year is to open up future jobs or education opportunities, e.g., grad school.
This was my first thought as well, a lot of the other 'uneducated' jobs they list are also pretty specialized and require some other form of long term certification accumulation.
In the UK there was a drive by the Labour government to push everyone into higher education. Not to blame them for this but it has effectively made it worse for some people who took any degree and at the same time has made it hard to fill trades and apprenticeship schemes (at least in Scotland).
There is a kind of snobbery to working jobs which I think is wrong. My pal who is now a leccie (Electrician) can charge crazy money and is laughing all the way to the bank. Maybe I will quit my dev job and become his apprentice :)
In the US, there's a great deal of protectionism that really makes it difficult for your average person to start a random electrical business.
You usually need 4+ years of experience as a licensed journeyman. That requires 4-5 years of apprenticeship school and usually 2-3 years as a helper before you will be able to get in. No chance at that "startup" until you're in your 30s usually.
Next, you need a few hundred for the exam. You need thousands in "working capital". Then you need tens of thousands for a bond. Not many people have that kind of money lying around.
Finally, as a final dose of nepotism, you have to be "pre-approved" to take the exam. That means that a few people who already have master's licenses must approve you to become their competitor.
During the big offshoring craze in the UK 15 years or so ago I knew of developers who retrained as trades people - you can't offshore plumbers, electricians etc., you need them on site.
Well that's what you would expect the cohort that would have gone into higher apprenticeships now have better options and those jobs are now 100% degree entry.
Note that back in the day the entry requirements for advanced apprenticeships where quite high - higher than for entry level jobs in Banks or Nursing
>> My pal who is now a leccie (Electrician) can charge crazy money and is laughing all the way to the bank.
Can he scale his business to more than a single employee? Does he get many connections that allow him to move on - e.g. become a senior engineer at a nuclear facility? What happens to him when we move on to some other "smart" electricity scheme which outdates all of his practical skills?
The self-employed electrician lives on connections and contacts to get work. There usually isn't a formal career path into a "senior position", but remember that by law of numbers those are only open to a fraction of people.
> What happens to him when we move on to some other "smart" electricity scheme which outdates all of his practical skills?
Maxwell's equations aren't going out of fashion. Some regulatory updates are necessary, though. Cost of doing business.
GP already talked about taking on apprentices, with the implication being the the friend is already scaling their business past a single employee.
The practical skills are unlikely to become outdated quickly, since they are mainly about standards compliance and electrical safety. Even if something as large as the shift from gas lighting to electricity >100 years ago happened today, there would probably still be need for electricians, just as we still have gas engineers now.
How far away is that? 20 years? That's 20 years worth of
"laughing all the way to the bank" for that guy.
Also, does every business need to scale more than 1 employee? Even if it's 2, 3 people max, that level of "freedom from worry" would make that duo/trio very happy indeed.
AFAIK smart electricity for scheme for even a block level is notoriously hard with today's tech, the number of edge cases must be enormous.
Source: I live in the UK and have multiple friends in trade work.
Most can take on other workers or young apprentices quite easily. The two i know that have done it now only work their trade 2-3 days a week and spend most their time doing the admin / business side.
Not sure how piratical skills in electricity can become outdated? New legislation can be released around safety i guess...?
Weird how all of these think pieces pondering places and lifestyles available without a degrees only focus on healthcare and manufacturing.
I've met numerous people in my 10+ years of software development without a degree. I don't have one either.
As I heard from one candidate in an interview, “software development is one of very few career paths left to have a middle class lifestyle without a degree.“
My biased opinion is that devs without a degree hustle a little more and are more willing to tackle brownfield projects and nasty refactoring/conversion efforts.
> As I heard from one candidate in an interview, “software development is one of very few career paths left to have a middle class lifestyle without a degree.“
That's very true, and it's because technology is more of a meritocracy than most other professions. Your compiler doesn't care about your credentials, or who your family is, emotional pleas, or any of the other myriad factors that get people into jobs they're not capable of. The culture of meritocracy is pretty heavily under assault, but I'm confident it will survive for a while yet.
I agree with this. I think their methodology of scouring requirements in job ads might have something to do with it. I don't know if I've ever seen a listing in software development that didn't mention requiring a degree. I don't have a degree, and it's never stopped me from applying, but it is usually in there.
And by 'good jobs' they mean 'anything near a decent wage'... for dropouts. This is one of the most patronizing, anti-competitive articles I've seen in a long time. If you want evidence of coastal elitism, read this article as exhibit A.
As a dropout who learns faster on youtube than in a classroom, and making more than my state senator's entire family, let me give everyone reading this advice: Don't be scared away by elites protecting their jobs in large cities. Come in at 70% of the price, excellent work ethic, and give them a run for their money. Most Americans live in a country that values cost efficiency over credentials. We hold meritocracy above bureaucracy, and it should be celebrated not discouraged.
Hey now, dont knock it till you try it. the article talks about college drop-outs, not highschool flunkies, and i think theres a real point to be made here.
College isnt for everyone, but parents push super hard to get their kids there and I dont know why. I went to a 2 year trade school for diesel engine repair. It was affordable and I could pay my way through with a job at a local pizza chain. Try finding a 4 year college you can afford with that pay-grade.
living in a big city isnt for everyone. I did a stint in Brooklyn once, learning to service buses and garbage trucks. The pay is good but the pace is sometimes insane because thats the pace of the city you live in. Theres a lot of pressure to deliver it right the first time, and i dont regret learning that work ethic, but I didnt find home in that city.
What i can say for the trade i have is that its rewarding and sometimes pays close to cut-rate lawyer money. I dont worry about bills and ive got plenty of cash to hit the pub once a week to see the game. The world needs electricians, plumbers, and even mechanics to keep running. Check out the hourly base pay of most of these trades and try to imagine pulling a little overtime, which is usually part of the trade in salary jobs as well im told. HVAC is also a great trade with endless advancement and opportunity.
If you can't afford college but you have enough of a support system to get good grades and extracurriculars, there's a good chance you'll get into a good university with a generous financial aid program. If you get into a top university and your parents make combined <$100,000/yr, it's likely you won't have to pay any tuition at all.
Also, I agree. Emergent population behaviors do not equal a cabal. Nevertheless, emergent population behaviors exist. Humans work in their own self interest. NY is a big city with a lot of competition.
The initial comment was about the misguided idea that cities are filled with "elites" who are trying to "protect" our jobs. That is nonsense and not supported by any evidence whatsoever.
The median personal income in the US, including all ages, is 30k per year. You're the one being a coastal elite here if you think the advice in this article isn't helpful to the average person.
Suff's comment, at best, is humble bragging. I found it pretty disgusting, to be honest.
Implying that the ordinary person has the opportunity to make more than another person's entire family is -- by it's nature -- a joke. You can't be anywhere near average and make more earn more than 3+ average people. Using a normal distribution, that puts you a MINIMUM of 3 standard deviations above average -- literally the 0.1%. Using the actual income distribution (since it's distinctively NOT normal) -- it puts you in the top 2%. But if you actually work for a living (as opposed to collect returns on investments), it's likely in the top 0.1%.
A state senator is likely to be above average -- as are family members. In general, we don't strive to elect average. We strive to elect excellence.
Maybe it was meant to be a pep-talk. But just because one person dropped out of school and did well, doesn't mean that everyone can do the same. Maybe the OP is a genius. If not, he got lucky. And not everyone can be a genius or lucky.
Being intentionally vague about income metrics by diffusing it among a population. State senator salaries are publicly available, so really more than anything making the point that I'm not some keyboard warrior making $1 over the median wage, trying to give advice. Hopefully it comes across as useful to some. Apologies for my lack of context.
OK, so when they have a section titled "San Francisco is not for you", you pay attention, you read the programming, you accept it as truth, and then you work until you are 73. YMMV. Good for you. Good luck.
Allowing yourself to be exploited is a great way to ensure that careers face a race to the bottom with employers offering fewer benefits, less pay etc all because people are desperate to find a job.
This isn't a 'meritocracy'. This is exploitative behavior disguised as being beneficial mixed in with a bit of survivorship bias. I've had friends of mine take software jobs paying well the average (as in, 50k and below in an expensive city) thinking that by just working extra hard the company will reward those efforts.
Allowing yourself to take advantage of the fact that you don't have eye-wateringly high, ivy league levels of student debt, and therefore can offer better cost efficiency is a BIG advantage. If you ALSO have massive debt and require massive pay, without a degree, well, yeah, you're screwed both ways. Same solution though: work extra hard.
These companies you're offering 'better cost efficiency to' are already likely earning 100x+ off of your average software engineer. There is absolutely zero benefit to coming to negotiations devaluing your own experience and skills, because that means companies will lowball you even further.
You're not the arbiter of cost efficiency. The company looking to hire you is. When you presume you're worth less than what you actually are, you're opening yourself up to abuse.
What you're describing is in essence the various entertainment industries which take advantage of fresh grads, forcing them into long overtime and for less pay.
_Assuming_ there are no other applicants for the job, you are correct. However, as Jeff Atwood would say, "In theory there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."
Not to nitpick but most Ivy League schools have robust financial aid(families making less than 100K have no loans etc.) and the average debt load is <$40,000 which is very manageable with an Ivy League degree.
Thanks for posting this. Many posters here seem to be ignorant of that fact that poor high schoolers with excellent grades and other accolades regularly get into top institutions - including Ivy League schools - and pay zero tuition due to generous financial aid packages.
Especially when the barrier to entry for a good college is getting lower and lower, and community colleges are getting better and better. The only thing holding up a lot of colleges now, is their low acceptance rate and their past prestige.
And their endowments... and tax payer subsidized student debt programs... and rich people paying $10m to skip the line... not sure I would characterize that as clinging to life support. I would say though, that it's a giant waste of money and an efficient market gives ZFs about how much money you wasted.
It will be an exponential decline once people start realizing that they are not as good as their prestige holds them to be. Once that happens their tax subsidies, student applications, bribes from wealthy families, etc will all go with it. What is the core product that an Ivy League level school is offering that makes people come there? Prestige, and I don't care what business your in, you will decline immensely once you lose what made you the best. ExpertsExchange and Netscape Navigator are just two examples (albeit wildly different market) of rapid decline when their bread and butter was not as good relative to their competition.
I promise you, unless these prestigious schools are able to vastly change their business model, they are going to decline heavily.
Colleges aren't good because of prestige or acceptance rates, they are good because they have good faculty. Everything else is a result of having sought after faculty.
I think what I hear you saying is not to take a 30% cut on wages that have stagnated. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you should take a swing at that $300k/yr 'elite' job, not the leftovers patronizingly displayed in the NY Times article. If you can do that job for less than $300k because you don't have $250k in student debt, that's what the free market calls a competitive advantage. You should be empowered to use your advantage, not discouraged like this article attempts to do.
Also, my Dad grew up on a shit farm, forced to work for free until he escaped as a teenager. I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Work hard, get smart, get rich, in that order.
==To figure out how many of these jobs are open to people without degrees, the economists scoured nearly 30 million local job ads across 121 metropolitan areas to determine their minimum educational requirements. They called them “opportunity jobs.”==
I would be interested to know what percentage of these jobs are actually filled by people without degrees. It could be that these markets have less degree holders so they change the requirements to increase applications. What matters is who ultimately gets hired.
Who cares if nursing or carpentry don't require college. They require specialized qualifications in nursing or carpentry, regardless of how we categorize the certificate or lack thereof.
I don't see how any of this relates to "opportunity," in the sense that they're going for in this article. These jobs aren't any more accessible than college-required jobs.
Having worked in Cedar Rapids there's really only 1 employer that makes up the "good job" pool - used to be called Rockwell Collins.
I'd guess there's a similar situation in most of towns on this list, which would mean living there is a huge risk unless you plan on working at the one or two companies in town for life.
I feel like there is an implicit assumption in the article that people without a college degree won't want to switch jobs as often because they have less upward mobility as a whole.
The article's definition of "good job" is cost-of-living adjusted:
"""
It has to pay more than the national median wage, $37,690 in 2017, adjusted for the cost of living in the area.
"""
I question their CoL adjustments. The median US rent is ~$1k/month[1], whereas in SJ it's ~$2.7k[2]. That's ~$20k more per year, twice what they adjusted for. ($37k → $47k, or $10k additional CoL expenses.) That's not accounting for any other CoL, such as higher gas prices and CA's higher state tax.
>> Mr. Wardrip, Mr. Fee and Ms. Nelson define a “good job” in simple terms: It has to pay more than the national median wage, $37,690 in 2017, adjusted for the cost of living in the area.
I'm not usually one to be pedantic, but it seems like there's many MANY "terrible jobs" that pay $37k or more. I assume they had to keep it simple for their definition, and much of what makes a job actually good is subjective, but I was hoping this would have a little more nuance. It seems obvious to say pay is only part of what makes a good job good.
To perform a statistical analysis, you want an objective measure, and money is a great proxy for value. You can pay people to be frustrated and stressed.
The interesting thing about this definition, to me, is the Lake Wobegon-esque effect that statistically half of all jobs are "good" because they're above the median. A poverty level or inflation-adjusted absolute metric might be more useful; you could measure the effect of policies based on the reduction of or increase in the number of good jobs.
It also makes me wonder if those are all entry level jobs or require a lot of experience. If they are available to somebody just starting out, that's one thing. But that's not "good job" money 10 years in if you are trying to live a life and work towards some semblance of financial security/independence.
Without really doing research myself. If there is 1 factory left in Youngstown, and it’s hiring for 3 welders or something, and 1 accountant. And those are the only 4 jobs in Youngstown, then Youngstown’s “share” of good shit jobs is pretty high and there is still absolutely no reason to move there. My bro makes a lot more than me in DC without a college degree (or skills) bc he’s good at talking and handsome. I had to leave DC b/c I just am not good enough to get a good job there, and if you don’t make a lot there, then you have to move. So I get that if you’re a loser in capitalism move to a cheap city, but this share metric I think makes cheap cities look like good cities. The shares are likely high b/c there are NO educated jobs, and the cities are probably harder places to earn in (there are more nurse jobs in DC than Toledo, and my brother would not be able to do whatever the hell he does in Toledo, there is still more sense there than money).
I think the main drive of the article is "just don't even try to move here" which is very anti-competitive. Sounds to me like writers in NY have a hard profession, and do not want more people competing with them for lower wages.
TL;DR if you don't have a college degree (or have one that does not get you a foothold in a lucrative industry) stay out of all the cities that are a clusterf*ck of white collar professionals driving up prices on everything.
The tradesmen I hire are making very good money in the largest US cities, well above $100k. No one wants to be a plumber/electrician/welder/carpenter though if they can help it. And their pay is rising faster than all the other people I hire.
Because your back/body will be shot by age 55 unless you transition to management or entrepreneurship. My buddies who did trades (the smart ones at least) all have plans to get other income sources or save the majority of their money for the inevitable outcome of a career of physical labor.
This. In my experience, I have seen parents who were in tradesmen encourage their children to get white collar jobs. A career that is physically strenuous and outdoors is no joke.
Depends. If you're a programmer, you can save a ton of money in absolute terms working in the bay area or Seattle or NYC. If you're then willing to move later, suddenly that money is worth a lot more.
"The last Cruze remained inside the plant, awaiting a final inspection. By then, it had already come to be much more than a car. It was a token of the most coveted working-class possession: a secure, well-paying job with health insurance and a pension."
I mean, guys, it's not much folks are asking for here.
As a white-collar professional and a software developer, what's something that we can do to lessen our effect on this phenomenon? I don't current live in a large city, but I've considered moving to one if I need to find work in the future. I've been lucky to work remote for most of my career, so living in a metro area with fewer tech jobs hasn't been an issue. However, if I were to move to one of the big tech cities, obviously I would be contributing to the pricing problems that already exist.
Stop paying too much for housing because the commute is 15min or the schools are good. Stop buying hipster beer and eating at those stereotypical gentrified restaurants that charge too much for everything. Buy your groceries somewhere other than Whole Paycheck.
Basically just live below your means.
But that is going to be hard for most people in tech to do because most people in tech were raised upper middle class and they simply don't know how to live below that and a lot of the rest are not from the US and they're mostly just going to do whatever makes them fit in.
And unless you can get everyone with money to live like they don't (which you can't) that's not actually going to solve anything. Telling everybody to just change their lifestyle is not a real solution to anything anyway.
The last thing one should do to solve housing inequality is to intentionally buy a lower priced home that could have formerly been afforded by a family with lesser means (thus forcing them to attempt to afford a higher priced property) in a sanctimonious attempt to avoid doing just that.
Ultimately, there is nothing an individual can do to help housing affordability. That is a societal problem.
If you really want to help housing equality, buy ana apartment building, not a house, and add more units
>The last thing one should do to solve housing inequality is to intentionally buy a lower priced home
And driving demand for luxury condos (or whatever) is better? Then you're giving an incentive for some developer to bulldoze the cheap "blighted" homes and apartments to make more luxury condos or overpriced new townhouses, or whatever.
> And driving demand for luxury condos (or whatever) is better? Then you're giving an incentive for some developer to bulldoze the cheap "bliAnd driving demand for luxury condos (or whatever) is better? Then you're giving an incentive for some developer to bulldoze the cheap "blighted" homes and apartments to make more luxury condos or overpriced new townhouses, or whatever.
No you're not. If you buy a luxury condo, you have reduced demand for luxury condos, since there's one less individual who both wants and can afford a luxury condo. If they build enough luxury condos as people who can afford them, then eventually it's no longer profitable to build luxury condos, and they'll have to concentrate elsewhere. However, the false restriction of the market enabled by policies such as 'neighborhood preservation' and lack of funding for rapid public transit means that development companies can basically make their entire year's profit only meeting the demand of the rich.
(Also, every new development is going to be branded as a 'luxury condo'. No one sells a 'boring old condo', ever).
> There's no winning here.
Yup. If you define 'winning' as 'I don't want my purchase of something to affect the price of similar things', then certainly, you cannot win.
Also, every new development is going to be branded as a 'luxury condo'. No one sells a 'boring old condo', ever
This is true everywhere. Builders are not going to build cheap houses. My wife and I were looking for a house three years ago. At the time, it was only three of us - including my 15 year old step son. We were looking at buying in a county in the Atlanta burbs. We had two choices - old small houses being sold by the relatively few people who lived their or buy in one of the many neighborhoods where builders were building new houses. We purposefully chose the cheapest, smallest floor plan offered by the builder - and even that was over 3000 square feet, five bedroom. I’m not trying to humble brag. It was less than 330K all in and we only needed 5% down. Any software developer with 5-7 years of experience could easily afford it - especially a dual income couple.
That's a backwards interpretation of demand. Buying a good has the effect of increasing scarcity and thus increasing price.
You could just... decide not be in the market, despite being able to afford it. Market price is defined by what people are willing to pay for and sell for. If you are not willing to pay anything for a luxury condo, that reduces the price for everyone by making it less scarce.
You don't have to buy all the luxury condos in existence to eliminate the market. If people decide not to buy them, there is no demand, by definition.
Housing trickles down to an extent, for lack of a better term.
Luxury condos lose their luster, and then become just regular condos. Regulars become cheap. It's effectively entropy. Also, people that can afford to live in a luxury home, don't want to live in a meh, or even crappy home. Yet, if they can't get a luxury home, they settle the meh one. Since they can pay luxury prices, the meh one becomes more expensive, and the less well off get frozen out, because they can't compete.
If you build at the high end, or more accurately "market rate", not only can developers recoup the cost of construction, but you're also taking pressure off the meh and crappy houses, because the people that can afford luxury prices, take the nice home. Also, those currently live in what was considered "nice", upgrade to the new luxury home, because they're now in downscale, thus freeing that house and and lower the prices.
Why does this seem to be different with software as opposed to other areas of engineering? Is it a generational thing?
Before jumping into the tech industry, I worked in the automotive industry and spent a lot of time around engineers. They were mostly all over 40 and they mostly all fit the stereotype of the frugal engineer. I don't see too many of those engineers in the Bay Area.
That is true. But how many people actually care to do that? Sure you you can personally not litter but without the massive public awareness campaigns of decades past concerned individuals would never have been able to solve the problem of littering. The public at large needed to be on board. Ditto for "socioeconomic littering". While I'd really like to see some solution that doesn't involve regulation getting the upper classes to not spend their money improving their quality of life doesn't seem like a tractable approach. What's the point of having the money if you can't use it to better your life?
How exactly should we vote supply and demand out of existence? You propose a left-ish solution but the same left-ish people that would enact it also support housing regulation, and due to supply and demand, your goal simply can't be met. This is not a systemic issue in most places where the program exists, it's an issue of current regulation (and the people that created it).
> How exactly should we vote supply and demand out of existence?
You can't, but there are things that can be done to compensate or mitigate:
- Anti-union regulations like "right to work" laws are an anti-market intrusion that weakens the power of labor. Vote against them.
- Support works councils (they've worked well in Germany) for more democratic governance, which right now I believe are illegal in the US (read this in a Bloomberg article earlier, though haven't verified).
- Support things that make bad jobs less bad. For example, there are benefits offered by 'better' companies, like good health insurance or paid parental leave, that could be provided by the state or mandated by the state.
- Support land use and transportation changes that would allow more people to participate in the economies of 'superstar' cities without ruinous housing costs.
Note that two of these things are even market-oriented, not all the positive changes have to be about more/bigger government.
> - Anti-union regulations like "right to work" laws are an anti-market intrusion that weakens the power of labor. Vote against them.
How is forcing me to join a particular union pro-market?
Also, how am I supposed to vote on this or any of the other things you mentioned? I get one vote per legislative body every 2 || 6 years and that one vote has to cover dozens of issues like this that come up in the interim.
I always though the right way to do things in a democracy is to talk to your neighbors and reach consensus (campaigning). The purpose of a democracy isn’t so individuals can say “I voted”; voting is merely democracy’s technique for communal action. One could even convince enough people to buy an ad.
It should be obvious given that a person has one vote.
> How is forcing me to join a particular union pro-market?
A contract stipulating joining a union for a job is no more anti-market than a contract specifying work hours or clothing requirements or how much vacation you get. If that's how the business has decided to run, the free market perspective is that they should be allowed to. It's market forces that can compel a company to agree to such a setup, after all.
However, a regulation saying that this type of contractual obligations is illegal is very obviously an intrusion on the market. Not that I think all intrusions are bad, but I don't see a compelling reason to support this one, given that corporations already tend to have the advantage over workers and this reduces workers' collective leverage.
Agreed that it's hard to vote narrowly on this topic. But no different from any other political subject, really.
Certainly businesses today are free to mandate union involvement, even in right to work states. However, it is actually anti free market to stipulate thar businesses must do this. There's no way to spin that as anything other than authoritarian
> But businesses cannot mandate union membership for employees in right to work states. That's what "right to work" means.
Yes they can.. That is what 'right to work' means. If a company mandates union membership and you do not want to join the union, or decide to leave the union, a company in a right to work state will fire you. This is like a union in a non-right-to-work state, where, if there is a union, and you refuse to join it, you can no longer work at the company. This is how it works for teachers unions too (in California at least) -- if you leave or refuse to pay dues, you are automatically let go.
> Not sure what 'this' you're referring to here, could you clarify please?
If you tell all businesses in your state that you must have a union (or accept a union if your employees vote for one), then that is mandating that the company mandate union membership from their employees by a mechanism other than the company's directors' own will. This is an infringement on their liberty (justified or not).
> Yes they can.. That is what 'right to work' means.
No, it does not.
> According to the Legal Defense Foundation, right-to-work laws prohibit union security agreements, or agreements between employers and labor unions, that govern the extent to which an established union can require employees' membership, payment of union dues, or fees as a condition of employment, either before or after hiring.
> "right-to-work laws" refers to state laws that prohibit union security agreements between companies and labor unions
You cited one particular definition by one particular foundation that marginally fit your purposes better. I don't see why I shouldn't do the same.
Right to work usually means the company can fire you for any reason, and you can leave the company for any reason.
While true that a company cannot expect an agreement with a union to be legally enforced, they can certainly decide to mandate membership in a union of their own accord. For example, it is reasonable for a company to specify in its job description that it only wants to hire certified Realtors or members of the ACM or whatever other group the company deems necessary.
> Nobody was talking about this?
This is what 'unionization' means in the context of a 'union shop'.
>Right to work usually means the company can fire you for any reason, and you can leave the company for any reason.
Oh, so this is actually pretty common: you're confusing "right to work" with "at will employment". They're not the same thing.
> At-will employment is a term used in U.S. labor law for contractual relationships in which an employee can be dismissed by an employer for any reason (that is, without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning,[1] as long as the reason is not illegal (e.g. firing because of the employee's race or religion). When an employee is acknowledged as being hired "at will," courts deny the employee any claim for loss resulting from the dismissal. The rule is justified by its proponents on the basis that an employee may be similarly entitled to leave his or her job without reason or warning.[2] The practice is seen as unjust by those who view the employment relationship as characterized by inequality of bargaining power.[3]
> You cited one particular definition by one particular foundation that marginally fit your purposes better. I don't see why I shouldn't do the same.
I could cite endless definitions from various sources. Here we go, since apparently you want this:
> The Right To Work principle–the guiding concept of the National Right To Work Committee (NRTWC.org) and the National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTW.org) –affirms the right of every American to work for a living without being compelled to belong to a union. Compulsory unionism in any form–“union shop,” “closed shop,” or “agency shop” –is a contradiction of the Right To Work principle and the fundamental human right of freedom that the principle represents.
> The National Right To Work Committee advocates that every individual must have the right, but must not be compelled, to join a labor union.
> Specifically, the right-to-work means that employees are entitled to work in unionized workplaces without actually joining the union or paying regular union dues.
> There’s some confusion surrounding "right to work laws"—perhaps due to the somewhat misleading title. While the "right to work" logically sounds like the right to have a job, or to keep a job once you have it, the term is related to membership in a labor union. More than half of U.S. states have enacted so-called "right to work" laws that guarantee no person can be compelled to join a union or pay union dues, as a condition of employment.
> I’ve heard that my state has a ‘Right-to-Work’ law. What does that mean?
> In the public-sector union context, right-to-work laws mean that union members do not have to pay union dues to be members of the union.
> In states that have enacted right-to-work laws that apply to private employers, although they vary based on state law, most Right-to-Work laws prohibit labor unions and employers from entering into contracts that only employ unionized workers for the jobs in the contract.
> This is what 'unionization' means in the context of a 'union shop'.
No, it doesn't. This
> Under this, the employer agrees to either only hire labor union members or to require that any new employees who are not already union members become members within a certain amount of time.
is not the same thing as
> If you tell all businesses in your state that you must have a union
The former is about a particular business decided to only hire people who will join a union, likely because of market pressure from the union/its members. The latter would be a a state mandating that union membership is required by law. Those are not the same thing. The former may happen because of market forces, the latter is obviously because of government force.
I assume this would mean trying to vote for politicians that would remove the artificial supply and demand in somewhere like San Francisco where, if stories are correct, the local population doesn't allow for dense development. I'm not sure what you do in locales like New York where development is already dense in many areas.
NYC has some similar problems, albeit not as severe. IIRC much of the existing housing in NYC is 'illegal' in the sense that current zoning would prevent it from being built today due to density restrictions.
For a counter example, you can look at Tokyo as a place that's more of a free for all, and indeed while it's still fairly expensive, it's much less so than the bay area or NYC.
This article title is ridiculous. These aren't the "good jobs" at all. These are the "best jobs available assuming you have no particular skills and no college degree".
Anyone else notice the publish date for this piece is May 2. It's in the future. I wonder if this is a presentation bug or it was accidentally published early
That isn't going to matter is it. The date in some regions goes up to Friday May 1 but not on to Saturday May 2. At least not at the point in time I'm writing this.
A postdoc is a training position, most people are postdocs for 3-5 years before moving on to faculty track or staff scientist (where you finally get compensated appropriately).
This is a crazy sentence if you think about it. For a significant part of society wages did not only stagnate, they dropped. I don't think the trend will reverse any time soon. If the wages of another profecion rose 10 percent and were equal before, we would see a 22 percent difference (which is a lot!).
Since this is the trend for all workers with some college education but without a four year degree, i think it's a dire situation for those people. There's no easy way out (the article suggesst moving!).
The suggestion in the article may be smart on an individual level, but it could lead to a further segregation between sucessfull and not sucessfull regions.