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High prestige, low satisfaction jobs

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Re: High prestige, low satisfaction jobs

#21

Post by dareonion »

amichail wrote: post #20
elblanco wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to say, Harvard's reputation in CS circles is pretty abysmal. I'm sure there are some fine folks there, but compared to the status of the school....meh. In hiring circles folks with CS degrees from Harvard are generally frowned upon, "couldn't they have just gone to a better school for CS/Engineering at a cheaper cost? Musta gone for the brand name recognition...we'll pass"

From http://www.seas.harvard.edu/faculty-research/people : "Harvard ranked # 1 in Mechanical Engineering; # 1 in Biotechnology & Applied Microbiology; # 5 in Mathematics; # 3 in AI, Robotics, and Auto Control (Science Watch, most recent data) Harvard ranked # 7 in Theoretical Computer Science In terms of citation impact, Harvard ranked second nationally in the category of Engineering and Computer Science in a 2002 an…

#1 in Mechanical Engineering. Really?

That specific ranking seems a little fishy to me. Also, I'm having a fair amount of trouble finding any corroboration online that Science Watch ever put Harvard up there in any ranking. If anyone could find a link to a Science Watch article with their methodology, I'd really like to see just what it was about Harvard that made them rank it over say, MIT (the current US News top) mechanical engineering.

Re: High prestige, low satisfaction jobs

#22

Post by elblanco »

amichail wrote: post #20
elblanco wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to say, Harvard's reputation in CS circles is pretty abysmal. I'm sure there are some fine folks there, but compared to the status of the school....meh. In hiring circles folks with CS degrees from Harvard are generally frowned upon, "couldn't they have just gone to a better school for CS/Engineering at a cheaper cost? Musta gone for the brand name recognition...we'll pass"

From http://www.seas.harvard.edu/faculty-research/people : "Harvard ranked # 1 in Mechanical Engineering; # 1 in Biotechnology & Applied Microbiology; # 5 in Mathematics; # 3 in AI, Robotics, and Auto Control (Science Watch, most recent data) Harvard ranked # 7 in Theoretical Computer Science In terms of citation impact, Harvard ranked second nationally in the category of Engineering and Computer Science in a 2002 an…

I can probably find rankings that put Harvard at wildly different rankings in all of those categories too. The fact of the matter is, outside of Law and Business (okay okay, Math too), Harvard does not exactly float to the top of anybody's personal list as a source of any kind of great engineering. That's okay, that's not what the school focuses on.

We actually had this exact discussion recently at a client site and brainstormed top schools we could look to recruit from for C.S. and Mechanical Engineering types and Harvard was not on anybody's list for either of those. Not top-10 and not in the discussion at all.

Most people are wildly surprised to find out that folks like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg studied at Harvard, almost verbatim the response is "Harvard has a C.S. department?" Most people assume Stanford or MIT.

Re: High prestige, low satisfaction jobs

#23

Post by nir »

capstone wrote: post #11
alnayyir wrote: post #8

Plumbers make more than software developers? I know some blue collars, plumbers included that are doing really well in the grand scheme of things, but I don't know any that make more than I do, and I'm 20 years younger than them.

Plumbers' riches is an urban myth. When I started out in web development, my billing rate was $325/hour, which a journalist could easily calculate into a $600,000+ year job. In reality, I made around $70k. I suspect the plumbers meme is based on similarly ill-informed calculations. The reality is more humble: $20/hour for hired hands, lots of expenses and unbilled downtime for independents, etc. The average for highe…

>When I started out in web development, my billing rate was $325/hour,

???

When was that? What technology? That's easily the highest rate I've ever heard of.

Re: High prestige, low satisfaction jobs

#24

Post by cma »

>These core values were explored by Veblen in his unconventional book The Theory of the Leisure Class.

Funny he should mention this; Veblen wrote another book after this, The Theory of Business Enterprise. In it Veblen gives a strong critique of the advertising industry (at least the part of it that is zero sum).

A large part of Google is advertising. A lot of that advertising is not zero sum--I believe it provides a lot of value--but over time they have moved more and more heavily into the zero-sum space (e.g. the purchase of DoubleClick, the general character of youtube ads). By that I mean things like brand-building ads that just associate an emotion or status/prestige with a product or company.

Re: High prestige, low satisfaction jobs

#25

Post by alnayyir »

capstone wrote: post #11
alnayyir wrote: post #8

Plumbers make more than software developers? I know some blue collars, plumbers included that are doing really well in the grand scheme of things, but I don't know any that make more than I do, and I'm 20 years younger than them.

Plumbers' riches is an urban myth. When I started out in web development, my billing rate was $325/hour, which a journalist could easily calculate into a $600,000+ year job. In reality, I made around $70k. I suspect the plumbers meme is based on similarly ill-informed calculations. The reality is more humble: $20/hour for hired hands, lots of expenses and unbilled downtime for independents, etc. The average for highe…

$60k sounds about right, although I know a couple blue collars (not plumbers, but no white-collar track professional development) that get closer than that to what I make.

But on the other hand, my rent is $500/mo, and they have mortgages and families.

Media overestimates how good the blue-collar middle class are doing sometimes (and other groups, when/if they're employed) thanks to wonky calculus like you've mentioned.

Re: High prestige, low satisfaction jobs

#26

Post by flacon »

amichail wrote: post #9
acconrad wrote: post #4

I can't help but find this entire article flawed because he's basing his analysis on a man who went from Harvard to Google...they're both incredibly prestigious, so really the article is about going from a low satisfaction to a high satisfaction job, which is kind of a no-brainer.

If he went to a software engineer position at Google, I would not say that's as prestigious as a Harvard professor.

I highly doubt he was hired as a "Software Engineer", more likely as a Chief Scientist, System Architect or something like that given the scope of his work and expertise, he will probably lecture for Google internationally on his work and have a large team working underneath him. His new position is no doubt worthy of such a move, though I dont know the details.

Re: High prestige, low satisfaction jobs

#27

Post by capstone »

nir wrote: post #23
capstone wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plumbers' riches is an urban myth. When I started out in web development, my billing rate was $325/hour, which a journalist could easily calculate into a $600,000+ year job. In reality, I made around $70k. I suspect the plumbers meme is based on similarly ill-informed calculations. The reality is more humble: $20/hour for hired hands, lots of expenses and unbilled downtime for independents, etc. The average for highe…

> When I started out in web development, my billing rate was $325/hour, ??? When was that? What technology? That's easily the highest rate I've ever heard of.

I was working for Arthur Andersen and later KPMG in New York. The technology stack was varied (Vignette/TCL is one odd example) and largely irrelevant to my rate, as was my value as a programmer (I wasn't very good back then). $325 was one of my more sedate rates actually, they've billed me out as high as $400.

People tend to think the crazy numbers were a byproduct of the internet bubble but the biggest factor was due diligence: certain big clients had to choose a Big 5 firm for their projects based on requirements such as, minimum number of employees, minimum years in business, minimum assets, etc. The whole racket was absurd, if you ask me.

Re: High prestige, low satisfaction jobs

#28

Post by basugasubaku »

flacon wrote: post #26
amichail wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he went to a software engineer position at Google, I would not say that's as prestigious as a Harvard professor.

I highly doubt he was hired as a "Software Engineer", more likely as a Chief Scientist, System Architect or something like that given the scope of his work and expertise, he will probably lecture for Google internationally on his work and have a large team working underneath him. His new position is no doubt worthy of such a move, though I dont know the details.

He stated in his first post about working for Google that he is exactly that:

my job title is simply "software engineer." (http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/06/working-for-google.ht...)

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