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Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

theguardian.com

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Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#401

Post by dave_sullivan »

coldcode wrote: post #125
dave_sullivan wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is the market so broken? Student debt. Look at the housing market: in the 70s you could buy a house for much less because houses cost less because people didn't have more money to overpay. With a thirty year explosion of the mortgage industry and the idea that anyone should qualify to own a home, suddenly consumers had extra money to outbid people on buying houses. This broadly increased property prices with no…

What a programmer centric view. 99+% of people are not programmers. You want to be in any other STEM job you need a university degree(s). Almost any reasonable paying job other than programmer require actual training and education.

Play it out 20 years and:

* 80% fewer lawyer jobs because algorithmic contracts will kill the rest of the lawyer jobs that e-doc review didn't kill already. The 20% that remain will be lawyers/programmers.

* 80% fewer medical doctor jobs because all surgery will be done by robots because it's safer, radiology will be automated because it's more accurate, and most diagnoses will be automated through DNA analysis and readings from wearables. Doctors will need training in presenting (quite possibly bad news) results to patients and training to run the machines. The 20% that remain will be doctors/programmers.

* 80% fewer jobs in "driving vehicles" or "packing things" (truckers, factory workers, Uber drivers) because self driving cars will be mature 20 years from now.

* Restaurant jobs will still be around. But the cooking will be automated for 80% of the food sold in America.

* Business process automation paired with private equity firms and competition from startups will automate away a surprising amount of managerial roles.

* 80% fewer retail jobs because Amazon has helped make it so you can just walk in and pick something up and walk out and be charged for it, without any human involvement.

20 years is the difference between 1994 and 2014. I might be wrong about some of it, but I think people underestimate how much the job landscape is going to change and how important of a skill "programming" (which means a lot of different things) will be. Everyone should learn to program. And basic income, but that's a whole different can of worms.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#402

Post by dragonwriter »

coldcode wrote: post #125
dave_sullivan wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is the market so broken? Student debt. Look at the housing market: in the 70s you could buy a house for much less because houses cost less because people didn't have more money to overpay. With a thirty year explosion of the mortgage industry and the idea that anyone should qualify to own a home, suddenly consumers had extra money to outbid people on buying houses. This broadly increased property prices with no…

What a programmer centric view. 99+% of people are not programmers. You want to be in any other STEM job you need a university degree(s). Almost any reasonable paying job other than programmer require actual training and education.

> Almost any reasonable paying job other than programmer require actual training and education.

Programming requires “training and education”, too.

But for many jobs, especially if you have connections that let you bypass filters designed to winnow the applicant field down to a manageable number that throw out lots of otherwise-atrocious candidates, you can demonstrate that other than by the degree that is “expected” for the field.

Computing is by no means unique in this respect (and the big players in computing are as much known for near-total exclusive preference for top schools as is the case in the worst of other fields.)

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#403

Post by aoenstkn4nto »

raverbashing wrote: post #227
khawkins wrote: post #83

The fact that the article features an English professor is unsurprising. This is a supply-side problem--liberal arts degrees are in relatively low demand, but institutions continue to graduate students at unsustainable levels. No one is telling the students that they're spending 4-12 years getting an education which is worth less than what they're paying for it. For the most part, the only jobs that hire for English…

A lot of English majors work in journalism, copywriting, advertisement. Tech companies also employ them for writing documentation. Same for other "liberal-arts" degrees.

Not to mention writing books, writing for television, plays, screenplays, etc.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#404

Post by saint_fiasco »

tpeo wrote: post #291
dsr_ wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Degrees are not reliable signals of productivity. I would much rather hire someone who didn't finish college but has had five years of progressive responsibility in the right area, than someone who had just finished a four or five year degree course but had never worked.

I didn't say they were. They aren't, that's the issue. A college degree overshoots the level of qualification necessary for a general skills job and comes short of the qualification necessary for a specialized position. Also, your crosswise comparison between an experienced candidate without a degree and an inexperienced candidate with a degree only tells me that you put more weight into experience than having a degr…

For most people, college education funges against job experience. It's hard to work full time while also being a college student.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#405

Post by saint_fiasco »

Domenic_S wrote: post #345
nsxwolf wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do employers keep putting so much value on something so worthless? There must be cheaper ways to demonstrate to employers you have something equivalent to whatever it is they think they're getting from any old 4 year degree.

It hasn't been proven that employers put so much value on a degree. Certainly a lot of people think that employers think that, but I've yet to see a real life hiring manager come out and say "I don't care how much experience you have, without a degree I won't consider you."

In B2B deals, government contracts and the like, sometimes companies like to brag about how many PhDs and Masters they employ.

If you are selling a product to a government or a big enterprise, it helps to have a lot of people with impressive credentials in your staff.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#406

Post by [deleted] »

Domenic_S wrote: post #345
nsxwolf wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do employers keep putting so much value on something so worthless? There must be cheaper ways to demonstrate to employers you have something equivalent to whatever it is they think they're getting from any old 4 year degree.

It hasn't been proven that employers put so much value on a degree. Certainly a lot of people think that employers think that, but I've yet to see a real life hiring manager come out and say "I don't care how much experience you have, without a degree I won't consider you."

[deleted]

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#407

Post by anonacct37 »

ambicapter wrote: post #281
anonacct37 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true in software. Source: mid 6 figures principal engineer w/ high school diploma. Other jobs are pickier.

mid 6 figures? As in, half a million?

400 actually

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#408

Post by anonacct37 »

soVeryTired wrote: post #265
anonacct37 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true in software. Source: mid 6 figures principal engineer w/ high school diploma. Other jobs are pickier.

I'd say it used to be true in software. Try repeating that achievement starting out today. You'll be lucky to get any sort of tech job at all.

I started full time in 2008 when the recession was bad. I don't know if 2008 was a long time ago or not.

Turns out when companies are making money, they want to hire engineers to build new stuff. When they are losing money, they want to hire engineers to automate.

There were certainly some lucky breaks involved. I like to think of it as I'm lucky the doors opened, it wasn't luck that had me searching for open doors and walking through them when I found them.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#409

Post by forapurpose »

geebee wrote: post #311
chrisseaton wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the most part, the only jobs that hire for English and other liberal-arts degrees are universities and schools This is such nonsense. Most jobs don't care what degree you have as long as you have a degree, and with an English degree you can apply for 90% of jobs. You could graduate and go on to be anything from an advertising executive, to a soldier. Most jobs don't care - it's technology that's unusual.

I don't think it's nonsense - I don't entirely agree, but I would agree with a milder version of the statement. I do know an English majors who is a director at at a top tech company, so I would agree that many companies will hire English majors. However, that's different than saying you can get hired as an English major vs saying these companies hire for English majors. Engineering and CS are majors that companies s…

> Engineering and CS are majors that companies specifically target

In your industry.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#410

Post by forapurpose »

khawkins wrote: post #83

The fact that the article features an English professor is unsurprising. This is a supply-side problem--liberal arts degrees are in relatively low demand, but institutions continue to graduate students at unsustainable levels. No one is telling the students that they're spending 4-12 years getting an education which is worth less than what they're paying for it. For the most part, the only jobs that hire for English…

> This is a supply-side problem

It's a demand-side problem. Most higher education is funded by state and federal government, and they have been cutting funding dramatically, reducing demand for skilled academics.

It doesn't have to be that way. The U.S. could fund higher education at the levels it used to, and fund reasonable incomes for the higher ed workforce. To create a less educated population than the prior generation is to go backward.

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