Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major • Hacker News Board

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#181

Post by stillsut » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 3:40 PM UTC

p33p wrote: post #57

As an actuary, I can not recommend it to anyone with a technical background. I have degrees in mathematics and actuarial science, and I consider my actuarial science degree completely worthless. A mathematics and/or computer science degree will teach you more in terms of how to think than anyone with an actuarial science degree. If you’d like to take a major where your professors literally teach to the exam/test, the…

Former actuary here. Let me try to explain some of the frustrations that occur in the profession:

Technical ownership is distributed from the top down and can not be overridden from bottom-up process improvements. Even if it made sense to integrate two departments that regularly pass each other data, that will be fought because that interferes with someone's corporate fiefdom.

There is no clear high-level diagram of how the whole company functions. So unlike a web-app with a client-frontend-routing-backend-database pipeline that a smart 15 year old could learn to conceptualize, instead you're expected to learn the inter-process requirements in a piecemeal fashion, one detail at a time as it arises in a weekly task. In the best case, this big picture starts to emerge ~5 years into a full time job. In the more likely case, your tasks never expose you to some part of the company's operations and they remain a blackbox and you'll be unable to reason about.

While inter-process communication remains opaque, complexity within each process proliferates. If you do life insurance, you need to support every product you sell for fifty years, so you deal with often poorly documented product rules and hard core legacy systems. Note - you can't deprecate anything because must honor those complicated agreements made decades ago.

Basically the frustrations boil down to doing interesting systems/data work but with being forced to do it in a worst-practices fashion.

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#182

Post by TangoTrotFox » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 4:38 PM UTC

vostok wrote: post #154

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of any degree is always going to be measured against supply and demand. There has been a huge push to get more people into computer science, thus increasing the supply beyond the rate of demand. Declining wages would be the logical conclusion (and motivation) for this.

Do you have a source saying that they're declining?

My comment was referencing the fact that computer science is ranked 30th by their metric of 'value', which does indeed seem to be much lower than one would have expected not that long ago. In terms of specific numbers, I'm also very curious but it's surprisingly difficult to find precise numbers. So what I did was grabbed an archive of the Burea of Labor services page on software developers. Here it is:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130305174000/https://www.bls.g...

Unfortunately that only provides 3 data points. The first number is the nominal value, the second is the inflation adjusted to 2016.

2010 = $90,530 = $99,643

2012 = $93,350 = $97,584

2016 = $102,280 = $102,280

Not sure what can be taken away from the numbers as there's only 3 points and with mixed directionality. But probably better than nothing. Do let me know if you find more indicative figures.

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#183

Post by p33p » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 5:03 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #175

p33p wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By all means, if you can get through the exams, you will be left with a low stress, well paying job at an insurance company, and you’ll likely have great job security. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But as Christensen talks about in one of his books, those are hygiene factors. You can find fulfilling, motivating work as an actuary, but salary should not be the main reason for choosing a career.

> salary should not be the main reason for choosing a career. Why?

Professor Christensen says it better than I ever could: “Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Feelings that you are making a meaningful contribution to work arise from intrinsic conditions of the work itself. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work.“

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#184

Post by sizzle » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 5:15 PM UTC

amigocontigo wrote: post #157

sizzle wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you leave the field for? What do you do now and are you happier since leaving?

I left for software development and am now working on a PhD in CS. It was the best choice I ever made. Being an actuary was a valuable experience though, mainly because I learned money really does not make you happy (as long as you have enough to live comfortably) and I won't be happy in a job where I do not feel challenged mentally. I also got really good at self-study, which has turned out to be an incredibly valua…

"money really doesn't make you happy"

I've come to this conclusion as well after losing a loved one, helping others makes me truly happy. Good luck in your future endeavors.

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#185

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 5:19 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #120

pkaye wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also heard vet school is pretty expensive.

Causality can't run from vet school being expensive to veterinary practices being profitable. It can only go the other way - profitable practices lead to school being expensive.

> Causality can't run from vet school being expensive to veterinary practices being profitable.

Yes, it can: expense of getting into the field limits competition.

Now, long-term steady-state eventually the market should adjust so that the people are willing to pay the up front cost because of the actual rewards, but real meaningful effects are often not long-run steady-state effects.

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#186

Post by sjb554 » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

Consulting actuary here. I majored in Econ, started taking exams after I graduated.

I don't really see the value in the actuarial degree, but I do see the value in taking the exams. Some people might be frustrated with their place in a given company, but overall it is a great career. One of the keys is to stay up on current tech and always be learning new things. It seems pretty easy to get stuck into a position where you are making baskets all day.

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#187

Post by sjb554 » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 5:58 PM UTC

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #130

danschumann wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also doesn't factor in the completion % as risk. The harder the degree, the more chance you have of being saddled with debt and no prospects. ( I may have gone the actuarial science route, meanwhile tinkering with websites as a hobby, without considering websites as a career, circa 2004, then failing out of actuarial science, later getting serious about the web stuff ).

I also tried actuarial science out, just barely failing the first test twice (you need 6 out of 10 to pass, I got 5 both times). I say this as a software engineer: actuarial science is hard . There is a ton of material and the tests are easily the most insidious you will ever take. To give an example of the insidiousness, imagine a calculus problem that has about 6 or 7 steps required to solve this - calculate the de…

If you think that's fun, the FSA exams are a whole new level of crazy. The math mostly goes away outside of financial statement type stuff, and in comes thousands of note cards on bland regulations (stuff like FAS106).

But, people have to be weeded out in some way, amirite?

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#188

Post by eyeball » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

p33p wrote: post #104

eyeball wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The society of actuaries is now testing basic analytics and R programming as part of the exam system. The Introduction to statistical learning book is on the exam syllabus.

You are correct, and I view it as an attempt to remain relevant in an area they feel threatened by. We will see what the exam ends up being like, but I have little faith in the SOA being able successful test someone’s experience in “predictive analytics” with a five hour proctored exam.

Yeah. Definitely seems like their “predictive analytics” push is reaction to the rise in popularity of “data science”.

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#189

Post by rayalez » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 6:08 PM UTC

rm999 wrote: post #5

Full dataset is here: https://www.scribd.com/document/388081338/BANKRATE-Most-Valu... For those of you who are wondering, Computer Engineering is 14th, "Mathematics and Computer Science" is 23rd and Computer Science is 30th. If I had to guess, CS has a wider income distribution than many of the higher ranking degrees, which are dominated by engineering degrees (many of which have lower unemployment rates too). The no…

Most of them seem to make sense, but why is Zoology #2?

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#190

Post by salemh » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 6:16 PM UTC

dajohnson89 wrote: post #93

kaitai wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's a stereotype, there's a bit of truth to the idea that actuarial jobs appeal to people who want a steady, non-adventurous 9-5. At most places, innovation is not prized in an actuarial position. A certain conservativism is demanded (I'm not talking politics here; I'm talking a cautious nature). That's one reason it's rare to see someone switch from actuarial science to machine learning, for instance. A lot o…

seems like a nice way to make good money, while being able to pursue your hobbies after work.

My sibling is an actuary (5-6 years work experience) on a break to pursue passion projects. The only issue with that comment is you need to continually study/take actuarial exams on a frequent basis. Though others in this thread are probably far more knowledgeable then me on this.

So his 40 hour work week turned into +15/30 hours with studying/exams for a number of years - perhaps not always consistent, but frequent enough to cause a bit of burnout.