“ traditionally IQ effects on income are modest. ”
I don’t believe that’s true. Studies show that an IQ of 145 doesn’t equate with an income higher than someone with an IQ of 130. And that’s generally true. But the real question would be are there more people making +$100k with an IQ one standard deviation about 100 as below 100. And at that level the outcome is clear.
I know a few tech people who are trying to convince their non-tech-employed friends or significant others to go to coding boot camps and find tech jobs. And every time I hear a story like that I just sigh. And every reason you laid out here, Freddie, is a reason why.
Seattle is crawling with people who went to coding boot camp and whose coding skills are so poor they can’t get jobs coding. It’s a classic “no such thing as a free lunch” situation. If something is hard enough that most people can’t do it, how do you expect to learn to do it in a six to twelve week camp?
Being good at coding, or at engineering, or at finance, requires not only a decent IQ, it requires an ability to think sequentially. Humans are really good at intuitive leaps and pattern recognition—both of which are mental shortcuts. To slow down and think of each step involved in a complex process is difficult and/or indescribably tedious for our brains.
I know of a few coding bootcamp success stories from people who earned a math or physics bachelor's before realizing they needed a practical skill to get a job outside teaching. They may not have written a line of code before the bootcamp, but they have spent a lot of time breaking down logical problems into discrete steps.
Other backgrounds don't seem to fare nearly as well coming out of boot camps.
In that case they could probably succeed without the bootcamp, since free online resources for learning to code are abundant. But I guess the structure of the course would be useful to some, as would the certificate to get your foot in the door with prospective employers. The old advice for self-taught programmers was to do a couple personal projects and publish them online as a kind of portfolio, but that may not be good enough in today's job market.
It's fascinating to hear this. I'm always curious how contemporary coding bootcamps are doing these days. I went to a coding bootcamp about 10 years ago after getting an liberal arts degree and have been working as a programmer - not necessarily "in tech", mind you - ever since. Financially, it was the single best investment I've ever made, and it's not even close. Back then, coding bootcamps were still brand new, unknown, and seen as risky and even scammy depending on who you asked.
Reflecting back on those in my ~20 person cohort, not everyone got jobs right out of bootcamp, but the rate of people who did eventually get jobs in the industry felt like it was outrageously high. I mean, probably 15/20 of us or thereabouts were making at least $60k writing code as junior developers/apprentices within a year. I don't know if that was a product of the time or what, but for most of us, it is not an understatement to say it was transformative.
Regarding your point: "If something is hard enough that most people can’t do it, how do you expect to learn to do it in a six to twelve week camp?"
I don't know if this was a product of how admissions worked at the place I went to, or the quality of the teaching, or what, but of the cohorts I observed, almost everyone (3/4?) ended up being competent (i.e., where you would expect a brand new junior developer to be). A few of those folks (1-3 per cohort) ended up being exceptionally good. About 1/4 to 1/5 washed out, and not in a "you're almost there, try again and you'll get it!" way. Almost no one was borderline. The folks who washed out clearly should not have been there at all, and it sometimes got messy. Which is just a long-winded way of saying: I think you're right. Pushing people who do not self-select into these careers because they promise a better standard of living is cruel, and perhaps a certain kind of indictment of our times, in a way.
I think the original boot camps were just that....not afraid to wash people out, and selective. Then some assholes saw a business opportunity and created Trump U for techbros. Now you have a bunch of people who had no business near a keyboard who got scammed.
I dunno. I got a degree in English and film, and a master's in critical theory, hoping to become one of those detestable leftie academics I hear so much about. But I ran out of runway, and learnt to code to finish off a leftie website I was setting up, and discovered I enjoyed that, and turned that into a financially successful career. It turns out that writing a 5000 word Lacanian analysis of the T-rex fight in Peter Jackson's King Kong has transferable skills to working out how to implement 10 contradictory requirements in software ... Who knew?
So if people ask me advice, the best I can come up with is: give it a go for a couple of weeks and find out if you like it. There's no other engineering trade where you can do such a low cost trial period. If you _really don't_ like it, don't waste your time. Beyond that: you might be good enough to be useful, so give it another 2 weeks, do some MOOCs etc.
I would now add: avoid copying from generative AI until you're good enough to understand the output. I'm sure you can cheat your way into a job with ChatGPT copypasta but you will be found out very, very fast; or at least, you will be anywhere worth working.
I think the "human skills" side of a typical programming job is severely underestimated by people who haven't worked in those jobs. Most of the time you are not solving hard technical problems in novel ways. You're gluing together existing components to make some web or mobile app that has the same technical underpinnings as a million other web and mobile apps. So it's all about defining business requirements, communicating with stakeholders, and coordinating the work of many people across a big codebase.
Indeed. I've seen a few people suffer because CS degrees gave them no intuition for that at all, so they could build a toy network stack from first principles, but were terrified of talking to customers or sales guys or whatever about what you actually needed to build. It seems to me that this is a very 'vocational' trade, and may be better taught through apprenticeships than academic degrees, and maybe the academic side should go back to being more a mathematical discipline. But what the hell do I know ...
Sounds a lot like my path. I think all that time spent close reading early modern sonnets while also contemplating large societal-scale cause and effect in my English - history double major and my uncompleted PhD in English were incredibly beneficial to helping me do my current job of debugging stack traces one hour and designing architecture to serve a complex business requirement the next.
I *really* did not expect that I'd see someone mention Clojure (and its famous stack traces...haha) in Freddie's comment section...what a time to be alive!
I've heard horror stories about Clojure traces where for whatever reason core.async (which is of course an external library) has to be used heavily and where exceptions might not be caught locally.
OTOH, dating myself way back here, binary core dumps ("symbol table? we don't need no steenkin' symbol table") were all we got if we threw an exception on the ol' CDC 7600 and SCOPE. Also started out pretty impenetrable.
My story was similar, and I cannot emphasize enough how valuable it is to be able to identify and reconcile those conflicting requirements, and shift between different level of abstraction too.
"It turns out that writing a 5000 word Lacanian analysis of the T-rex fight in Peter Jackson's King Kong has transferable skills to working out how to implement 10 contradictory requirements in software ... Who knew?"
Surprises me not in the least - one of the better programmers I met early in my career was an MA in English (lit, I think).
Yeah, not sure who that guy from the Atlantic thinks he’s bringing the news to. What, engineers make good money? Ya don’t say!
But the reason engineers make good money is because there are a finite and limited number of people who have the capacity and the inclination of being engineers. If you overwhelmed the market with supply….guess what….they would no longer make good money. But also guess what….the Venn diagrams of the people majoring in basket weaving probably don’t overlap very much with those of engineers. Telling people who have no hope of being engineers that it’s great to be one is truly useless info. The athlete comparo is spot on. To the average person or student who isn’t on track to becoming an engineer, they have no more hope of becoming one than of becoming a major leaguer.
However, taking classes with engineers was fun and I helped quite a few write papers. No one in their right mind would continue in engineering if the math baffles them.
Which blows up the whole "just learn to code!" Team D apologist retort. Of course, the apologists already know this, it's basically a rationalization for supporting shitty policies.
You have to get pretty far down the engineering competence curve before you find someone who can’t create any value. Only a handful of us will conjure billion-dollar companies into existence; a larger but still elite club will earn mid six figures from Big Tech and buy homes in California, but legions of workaday computer whisperers are still clearly worth normal white-collar salaries to a normal companies in regular metro areas.
Whereas even a 95th percentile directing student will never create a single dollar in box office revenue. A 95th percentile literature major will not write a successful book. A 95th percentile history major will not get tenure. These fields are brutally competitive, much more so than engineering, because there is only room for the most successful handful of individuals to create (economic) value with them at all. It’s as if unicorn founder paid a middle class living and Google SWE paid couchsurfing wages, and those were the only two jobs in all of tech.
That’s all fine, but it’s totally possible for an English literature student to plan on writing as a vocation, run into the realities of how continuing to write would require further enmeshing themselves in the academy, and decide to opt out and just become a high school teacher instead. This was basically my path 15 years ago: I did have professors at my elite college say that I could get a PhD and do creative writing on the side; instead, I teach kids and do creative writing in the summer. And I mean, if my dad was a former head of Goldman Sachs, I might have eventually become a famous writer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Benioff
Dear JA: I second that. (In fact, I was here before you - retiring soon after teaching HS/JrH for a long time. But I find it reassuring to know you’re out there somewhere having travelled a very similar path.) There are forces at play that have no direct connection to merit that can be determinative. Social capital is huge; temperament, to the extent that it exists separately from IQ or other important factors, is also big. And there’s also Luck, not always the good kind, despite the blythe way career advice givers routinely sneak it into their equations. A good college friend spent years trying to crack the film biz. Got a MFA from AFI, hung out in the right neighborhoods, etc. At one point he was set to direct his own script, had production and acting talent lined-up, and most of the $. And that was as close as he got. The arrangements fell apart and now he’s a therapist (and is happily doing quite well for himself).
I know a pretty fair number of talented and commercially successful science fiction anf fantasy authors. Some even manage to support themselves and their families doing so. Interestingly, almost none of them have English or Literature degrees. In fact, there are probably more blue collar workers than those with humanity degrees (not counting ex military who got their humanities degrees as part of their officer education). This is perhaps biased because of my preference for hard- & military- SF but I'm not sure modern college degrees contribute to making you a more (commercially successful) writer...
I was on the English-Lit-to-teacher track as well, but happily found a job as a technical writer. Now I'm an analyst at a software company. One of my English Lit friends in school is also in technical writing, another friend who was a history major is in instructional design. Lots of people with "humanities" degrees end up somewhere rather different, but successful, because it pays the bills. And if you're relatively talented, that's what happens, (as Freddie has observed).
Engineer here, near retirement (graduated 1980), pretty successful given that I did not relocate to Silicon Valley (family ties) or go into management :)
1) Technical writers who are sufficiently engineer adjacent to translate from engineer/tech writer pidgin to field service bulletins in one pass are, in my experience, nearly as rare as competent bare metal firmware developers (and not nearly as well paid; OTOH the technical writers seem to be saner at the median cut).
2) Anecdote from my second job (1982 - 1987, doing moderately intense systems programming for a nuclear fuel enrichment plant - not the kind of place you want bugs):
We had a programmer maybe 6-8 years older than me whose only degrees were BA and MA in English (I'm pretty sure lit but couldn't swear to it; *might* have been comp).
He was first rate. He could not do the work I did, but he more than earned his keep, and furthermore he had somehow learned a programming language called TECO which frightened the rest of us - I remember sitting down once with one of his three line utility scripts *and* the TECO manual and I still couldn't figure out how it worked. Job security for him, I guess :)
"A 95th percentile literature major will not write a successful book. A 95th percentile history major will not get tenure. "
You don't go into lit to write successful books and I doubt most history majors go into it planning on being a professor. In both cases, a chunk of them go in to law school. Another chunk become teachers, often by design. Still others go into tech.
I was the a ~95th percentile English and history double major, went to grad school in English, and still ended up as a normal white collar tech worker in a "regular metro area". And I wouldn't change my educational path, because I think all that English and history classwork was valuable for what I now do. I think the thinking that's most wrong with Derek Thompson, et al, is the academic essentialism entailed in assumng that a particular field of study is required for a particular kind of job, and in all but the most hardcore STEMmy jobs (maybe 10%?), it's really not true.
Few literature (philosophy, history, linguistics) majors chose those majors to train for a particular career or to write a book. They learn about literature and other disciplines––a liberal arts education includes science and social thought––and then most go on to have some flavor of white-collar career. In the aggregate, they eventually make good salaries. It takes a few more years but then they catch up to the salaries of almost all other majors (and surpass business majors).
If you are pretty smart, can think and write well, and have your shit together, you can get a good income. (The problem is the way costs of middle class life has gone up, but that's a different story.)
Pretty much the point I came here to make. This is one of the articles that is true in that, yes, most English majors will not successfully become engineers, but Freddie is imagining a massively more competitive world for engineers than the one that exists. Hell, you need people like QA engineers who can barely code if at all but just check everyone else’s work. Even they can make pretty decent money.
I think this is just about tournament fields. You can make a good living as a 50th %ile civil engineer, programmer, accountant, doctor, nurse, schoolteacher, electrician, plumber, etc., because those jobs are just normal jobs where you produce value by basic competence. You can't make a good living as a 50th %ile musician, actor, artist, or academic, because those are tournament fields where there is only room for a small number of people to make a living. (Though academia is what it is because of the overproduction of PhDs relative to academic positions.)
There are ways that a one-in-ten-thousand programmer can make a lot more money, tournament-field style, but most of those other jobs aren't really like that. The very cleverest plumber in Illinois probably makes a decent living, but isn't going to be buying a football team anytime soon.
I think making sure kids understand what fields are tournament fields is very important, as well as making sure they understand what majors basically require graduate school before you can work in the field. (Congratulations on your BA in Political Science. Are you going to grad school or law school?)
I noticed the 8% unemployment rate for aerospace engineers, compared to about 2% for the other majors whose graduates have high median earnings. Seems to be an understated reason Elon’s management works at SpaceX? Companies are overpaying for aerospace engineers in that the labor market isn’t clearing. But, for whatever reason, they can’t pay less. Maybe if one did pay less, competitors would poach their better engineers. Regardless, when wages exceed the clearing level, employers have an opportunity to make working conditions worse (assuming no unions). Employees have a hard time comparing working conditions between firms. And an individual firm can make conditions slightly worse for some employees without creating opportunities for poaching. Elon took advantage of this hidden softness in the labor market for aerospace engineers, to get away with a management style that wouldn’t fly (lol) in other sectors.
Aerospace engineering is too specialized. I see that unemployment rate as indicative of a lack - or perceived lack - of transferrable skills to other industries. Mechanical engineers can work anywhere there's manufacturing and computer programmers can work anywhere there's paperwork. But aerospace engineers only have a few employers. Those employers often may require security clearances, which is a kind of credential that artificially constrains supply and raises wages, leaving those who can't or won't out in the cold. Lastly aerospace engineering could still have an overhang of workers from the contraction the industry experienced after the end of the Cold War.
I've never been convinced that the people who make these posts have the slightest interest in recruiting college kids to pursue engineering degrees or whatever. That's just the socially-defensible pretense for stroking their own egos.
Basically, they succeeded in landing a well-paid or prestigious job of some kind, and now they're looking back to gloat about how clever and correct the choices they made were. While others were partying and reading "poetry," they studied Economics. They chose wisely and learned How to Code! Therefore, it's only just and fair that they succeed while others struggle. Nice morality tale, helps ease some of the self-doubt you get earning six figures working on a payday lending app.
Same as all the "just use this ONE NEAT TRICK to get ahead; it worked for me!" advice-givers. At best, it's projection (what works for one doesn't work for another), at worst, it's Just Universe Fallacy (they're not getting ahead because they're too dumb to follow my advice).
Yeah, asking a successful person their secret to success is useless without knowing the base rate of how many other people tried the same thing and failed. So much of success is luck, and it's hard to distinguish "I placed a bet and won" from "I thought of a clever bet with high expected value that others didn't think of".
I'm glad you stated that weed out courses are good.
I think engineering and pre-medicine programs are commendable for weeding out students fast (at the latest by the end of sophomore year). That gives the student time to try something else before college ends.
Contrast this with, say, a legal career where you can muddle through undergrad and fall into a mid-ranked law school as a default. You end up with massive debt and in a career you probably won't excel at or enjoy. All that could have been avoided if a freshman or sophomore year weedout course simulated a document review exercise that put you off the whole thing.
I appreciate careers that fail people fast and have stronger median outcomes, rather than careers that fail late in the training loop and have power law outcomes.
As a student, you won't like it, but you want to fail fast. When I took Russian the teacher gave a 'flunk out' test early. If you failed it, you had time to drop the class. I dropped the class. It never showed on my transcript, just one semester I only carried 12 credits. Physics, Math, Engineering tried to drop students fast. Frankly, I think the main reason that Premed required Calculus and Physics was to take advantage of the Math and Physics departments' ruthlessness. Then they added Organic Chemistry, Biochemistry, and their own pre-med courses to complete the filtering - but the student was far better off switching their major their freshman year than graduating as a Biology student who had focused only upon Medicine but was not accepted to Medical School.
My kids both did early adjustments of their career plans due to their experience in classes. You need good and honest guidance - you are good at a, x, and z; you ar not good at b, c, or y. Consequentially, they should adjust their plans accordingly.
I'm a bio professor at a 2nd tier liberal arts university, and unfortunately the trend lately has been to avoid weeding out students. We have hundreds of majors, 90% plus that all want to be health professionals, and some of them can't even do well in intro bio let alone organic chem or physics. One "solution" has been to space out early courses so it is less overwhelming, but if poor students muddle through the beginning they almost never perform better in later courses. The end result is that they end up switching majors at a late point that prevents them from graduating on time, do a "general science" degree, or some just drop out. It's all in the name of DEI and has only become worse with test-optional admissions. If you can't get a decent score on the middle / high school math on the SAT, then it's unlikely that you'll perform well in a STEM program. I'm moving to a STEM-focused university soon and I hope they address student challenges in a more realistic manner.
I have mixed feelings about the "weeding out" process. As its presented by the people who do the weeding out, its framed as a difficult, perhaps even harsh at times, process which benefits students who "can't hack it". But its framed like this by the people already in that field and it often feels like a gatekeeping function to maintain some kind of status quo for the people in those fields already.
It's not like weeding out was necessary designed by disinterested third parties given a task to design a system which is meant to find the people capable of being successful engineers or doctors or whatever. Nor has it been designed to create useful alterations to the education process for these specialties to actually be able to expand these fields to include people capable of performing well in them but who otherwise stumble because the "weeding out" process includes marginal instruction in 1st year calculus since successful engineers through it was easy to begin with.
Full disclosure -- I started out as a Comp Sci student in the mid-80s but got weeded out because the math killed me. And calculus killed me in large part because it was taught by foreign exchange adjuncts with impossibly bad English skills, probably because there was some idea that the people who they expected to succeed could more or less teach themselves calculus anyway. Regardless, I've succeeded very well in the IT field anyway and largely in my opinion because of innate ability (and I still don't get why calculus was so important).
The idea that kids and their parents don't know this info is insane. I did some interviews with high school college admissions counselors (i.e. those who advise high school students on going to college) on how to increase applications to our liberal arts college and this was the central focus of what each of them said, that their students and parents are heavily focused on optimizing for careers in STEM.
The other thing that really bothers me about the STEM focus is that it ignores the fact that most kids who graduate with a four-year degree, which is a relatively small subset of the total cohort of people at any given age, will be economically fine regardless of major. I've seen the data on this and it's pretty clear. Of course anyone can be detailed by addiction, mental illness, etc., but if you get the four-year degree and aren't derailed by any of those things, your odds of being in the upper deciles of the income distribution are very high.
Optimizing for *more* income, at the cost of doing something for a bit less but still good money that you find more interesting and fulfilling, doesn't make a ton of sense even if the optimization is viable (which as you point out, Freddie, it's probably not for most people).
Engineer is a legal title in the two largest Canadian provinces. It requires more steps than just a degree. So the 26% number is a technicality. The number of graduates doing “engineering” is much higher, you just can’t always call it that.
I'm a lead developer and typically wind up mentoring junior programmers or tech talent in projects. Unfortunately most of these recent grads seem to have felt compelled to pursue the career path, and possibly really like the idea of it, but otherwise have no talent for even basic problem solving.
I'm working on a short duration project at the moment and am exec asked me how many juniors I wanted for help. I asked why? If I already have some all the heavy lifting solving the problems for someone else to fill in the blank, I've already replaced them with AI. Indeed, it's faster for me to prompt a language model when I know what and how it should be done, than spent 5 times as much effort coaching someone to do it.
It's not even the coding ability itself that's an issue, very few people can actually do any meaningful problem solving on their own. I have some devs I like to work with who are sloppy coders, but they can tackle complex issues in creative/useful ways, and I can always clean up their work product after.
I started in civil engineering and became lost on the hill of partial differential equations. People would die if I was allowed to become an engineer. I switched majors.
However, the fellows in Engineering made college dating a lot of fun so it wasn't a total fail ! (This was not my intention but an unintended positive result).
I wonder - seriously, not being rhetorical - how what fraction of practicing Civ Es (not counting those want to get their PEs, for which I assume/hope there are questions that *do* require PDEs) actually need to know PDEs on a regular basis. I know that whenever I have actually seen an analysis of stress concentration (rather than gross bending/torsion moments and torques), non-steady state heat flow, ... done for realz it's been rule of thumb formulas extracted from Holy Writ (or, in very recent times, when real money is involved, finite element).
I'd be quite surprised if 10% of the EEs I have worked with over the years remembered even year 1 calculus, what the AP math test required back in my day (along with fighting off the dinosaurs with our early gen HP/TI calculators).
To take the course in Heat Transfer req. PDE. I think, looking back, I might have been able to manage projects...like a hosp admin might not be a physician but I felt that to be a true engineer one needed to be good at the math. BUT even tho I switched majors I had a level of engineering appreciation I would not have had. I am now in a radio club with a lot of engineers, and I'm not completely lost. I wish there were a way that everyone could learn these aspects of how things work. I sorted myself out but I never forgot what I learned and if I had gone straight to my major (am a librarian) I would not have known these things at all.
yeah, I assumed as much. Again, I'm a ChemE (BS) / EE by trade (at my school heat transfer, which is a big deal for chemical engineering, was all about understanding which empirical formula to use when; the actual heat exchanger designers were in the MechE program).
And I would take project management and human soft skills over math ability pretty much any time.
Still glad it worked out for you, including some good dating opportunities!
Computer science is very different from software engineering. Almost none of what you learn from a computer science degree at a place like MIT or Caltech (I did the latter) is applicable to the typical software engineering job. They are preparing you for academic research or the small fraction of programming jobs that involve creating original solutions to hard technical problems. It's cool, intellectually stimulating stuff! But in terms of labor market value, the degree is almost entirely signaling, not training. Many of the people who complete those degrees are excellent programmers by the time they arrive on campus; all of them have the intelligence and "STEM mindset" to quickly pick up the particular technologies in use at any given programming job. My wife studied chemistry and makes a much better professional software engineer than I ever did, having learned the particulars of programming on her own, and without the baggage of adopting "programmer" as an identity from an early age (you aren't the shit you like!).
Honestly, the same is true in many disciples. Many economics departments, for instance, prepare students for academic research, despite the fact that most graduates end up doing something more “vocational” like consulting.
I would almost say that this is the exception, rather than the rule. Biology has medicine as an “applied” discipline, but most do not.
It’s just that most people have no knowledge of CS, so the point you’ve made here is valuable.
Hm, while I largely agree that academic CS teaches fairly little useful, judging by the graduates I interview for jobs (academic software engineering like the programs at CMU _was_ not much better, although my dataset is very stale on that topic):
1) the signaling value of the degree helps a moderate amount on getting that first job out of school,
2) the networking potential while undergrad, if your university is decently connected in the area, can be a huge leg up if you can get a non-toy internship.
Very much agree! We had tech companies recruiting on campus, so getting that first job was pretty easy if you had decent grades and could demonstrate competence.
Plus more than a bit of screening value for the school, though not so much the specific degree, I think - I started undergrad at Caltech in the ancient days of 1976 (biochem => ChemE) and I think that for someone to make it through four years and come out with a BS indicated at least some ability to think, work, and to some degree write. Rather than Berkeley where I finished undergrad; still reasonably selective but not to anything like the same degree.
I really agree with the overall point of the article, but what's the evidence for this claim?
>1. There are almost certainly more students who pursue majors they aren’t equipped for than their are students who are insufficiently career-oriented when they choose one
We can identify students who pursue majors they can't do because they fail. But how do we identify the second group?
For the strength of the opinions expressed above, you don’t present any real evidence. You could be right, but I’d actually like to see some indication that we’re overproducing mediocre engineers. An anecdote by a buddy of yours does not suffice.
keep me/us informed on how you do on that drug that will cause weight loss. Also: hope you get into an exersise program. I like jogging. Get you outside into the "real world"
I think any field where there's a stereotype that "Asian Tiger Moms push you into this job" doesn't really need the boost. Doctors, lawyers, programmers, engineers...everyone knows these are lucrative jobs. If anything needs a PR boost, it's low-status but skilled trades like plumber or electrician, where a decently smart, skilled worker can make $60k or more after a few years without debt and then go into business for themselves if they want to. Someone with a 115 IQ could really excel at something like that rather than struggling to get by as a third-tier computer programmer with a degree from a state school branch campus.
“ traditionally IQ effects on income are modest. ”
I don’t believe that’s true. Studies show that an IQ of 145 doesn’t equate with an income higher than someone with an IQ of 130. And that’s generally true. But the real question would be are there more people making +$100k with an IQ one standard deviation about 100 as below 100. And at that level the outcome is clear.
I worked in an industry where most of the people were successful and had 130-ish IQs. It was strange to retire and then deal more with typical people.
I know a few tech people who are trying to convince their non-tech-employed friends or significant others to go to coding boot camps and find tech jobs. And every time I hear a story like that I just sigh. And every reason you laid out here, Freddie, is a reason why.
Seattle is crawling with people who went to coding boot camp and whose coding skills are so poor they can’t get jobs coding. It’s a classic “no such thing as a free lunch” situation. If something is hard enough that most people can’t do it, how do you expect to learn to do it in a six to twelve week camp?
Being good at coding, or at engineering, or at finance, requires not only a decent IQ, it requires an ability to think sequentially. Humans are really good at intuitive leaps and pattern recognition—both of which are mental shortcuts. To slow down and think of each step involved in a complex process is difficult and/or indescribably tedious for our brains.
And even worse, coding boot camps are not a free lunch. The higher level modules there can cost 12k or more for a few weeks of classes.
I know of a few coding bootcamp success stories from people who earned a math or physics bachelor's before realizing they needed a practical skill to get a job outside teaching. They may not have written a line of code before the bootcamp, but they have spent a lot of time breaking down logical problems into discrete steps.
Other backgrounds don't seem to fare nearly as well coming out of boot camps.
In that case they could probably succeed without the bootcamp, since free online resources for learning to code are abundant. But I guess the structure of the course would be useful to some, as would the certificate to get your foot in the door with prospective employers. The old advice for self-taught programmers was to do a couple personal projects and publish them online as a kind of portfolio, but that may not be good enough in today's job market.
Doing this in a high-CoL area seems crazy to me.
It's fascinating to hear this. I'm always curious how contemporary coding bootcamps are doing these days. I went to a coding bootcamp about 10 years ago after getting an liberal arts degree and have been working as a programmer - not necessarily "in tech", mind you - ever since. Financially, it was the single best investment I've ever made, and it's not even close. Back then, coding bootcamps were still brand new, unknown, and seen as risky and even scammy depending on who you asked.
Reflecting back on those in my ~20 person cohort, not everyone got jobs right out of bootcamp, but the rate of people who did eventually get jobs in the industry felt like it was outrageously high. I mean, probably 15/20 of us or thereabouts were making at least $60k writing code as junior developers/apprentices within a year. I don't know if that was a product of the time or what, but for most of us, it is not an understatement to say it was transformative.
Regarding your point: "If something is hard enough that most people can’t do it, how do you expect to learn to do it in a six to twelve week camp?"
I don't know if this was a product of how admissions worked at the place I went to, or the quality of the teaching, or what, but of the cohorts I observed, almost everyone (3/4?) ended up being competent (i.e., where you would expect a brand new junior developer to be). A few of those folks (1-3 per cohort) ended up being exceptionally good. About 1/4 to 1/5 washed out, and not in a "you're almost there, try again and you'll get it!" way. Almost no one was borderline. The folks who washed out clearly should not have been there at all, and it sometimes got messy. Which is just a long-winded way of saying: I think you're right. Pushing people who do not self-select into these careers because they promise a better standard of living is cruel, and perhaps a certain kind of indictment of our times, in a way.
I think the original boot camps were just that....not afraid to wash people out, and selective. Then some assholes saw a business opportunity and created Trump U for techbros. Now you have a bunch of people who had no business near a keyboard who got scammed.
I dunno. I got a degree in English and film, and a master's in critical theory, hoping to become one of those detestable leftie academics I hear so much about. But I ran out of runway, and learnt to code to finish off a leftie website I was setting up, and discovered I enjoyed that, and turned that into a financially successful career. It turns out that writing a 5000 word Lacanian analysis of the T-rex fight in Peter Jackson's King Kong has transferable skills to working out how to implement 10 contradictory requirements in software ... Who knew?
So if people ask me advice, the best I can come up with is: give it a go for a couple of weeks and find out if you like it. There's no other engineering trade where you can do such a low cost trial period. If you _really don't_ like it, don't waste your time. Beyond that: you might be good enough to be useful, so give it another 2 weeks, do some MOOCs etc.
I would now add: avoid copying from generative AI until you're good enough to understand the output. I'm sure you can cheat your way into a job with ChatGPT copypasta but you will be found out very, very fast; or at least, you will be anywhere worth working.
I think the "human skills" side of a typical programming job is severely underestimated by people who haven't worked in those jobs. Most of the time you are not solving hard technical problems in novel ways. You're gluing together existing components to make some web or mobile app that has the same technical underpinnings as a million other web and mobile apps. So it's all about defining business requirements, communicating with stakeholders, and coordinating the work of many people across a big codebase.
Indeed. I've seen a few people suffer because CS degrees gave them no intuition for that at all, so they could build a toy network stack from first principles, but were terrified of talking to customers or sales guys or whatever about what you actually needed to build. It seems to me that this is a very 'vocational' trade, and may be better taught through apprenticeships than academic degrees, and maybe the academic side should go back to being more a mathematical discipline. But what the hell do I know ...
Sounds a lot like my path. I think all that time spent close reading early modern sonnets while also contemplating large societal-scale cause and effect in my English - history double major and my uncompleted PhD in English were incredibly beneficial to helping me do my current job of debugging stack traces one hour and designing architecture to serve a complex business requirement the next.
I currently work at a Clojure shop, and only Clojure stack traces are comparably opaque reading material to Lacan. Love every minute ...
I *really* did not expect that I'd see someone mention Clojure (and its famous stack traces...haha) in Freddie's comment section...what a time to be alive!
I've heard horror stories about Clojure traces where for whatever reason core.async (which is of course an external library) has to be used heavily and where exceptions might not be caught locally.
OTOH, dating myself way back here, binary core dumps ("symbol table? we don't need no steenkin' symbol table") were all we got if we threw an exception on the ol' CDC 7600 and SCOPE. Also started out pretty impenetrable.
Hey, at least we had a FORTRAN compiler.
I can't tell you how many times I've wished some of my fellow engineers would go off and study English for four years or so.
My story was similar, and I cannot emphasize enough how valuable it is to be able to identify and reconcile those conflicting requirements, and shift between different level of abstraction too.
"It turns out that writing a 5000 word Lacanian analysis of the T-rex fight in Peter Jackson's King Kong has transferable skills to working out how to implement 10 contradictory requirements in software ... Who knew?"
Surprises me not in the least - one of the better programmers I met early in my career was an MA in English (lit, I think).
Yeah, not sure who that guy from the Atlantic thinks he’s bringing the news to. What, engineers make good money? Ya don’t say!
But the reason engineers make good money is because there are a finite and limited number of people who have the capacity and the inclination of being engineers. If you overwhelmed the market with supply….guess what….they would no longer make good money. But also guess what….the Venn diagrams of the people majoring in basket weaving probably don’t overlap very much with those of engineers. Telling people who have no hope of being engineers that it’s great to be one is truly useless info. The athlete comparo is spot on. To the average person or student who isn’t on track to becoming an engineer, they have no more hope of becoming one than of becoming a major leaguer.
However, taking classes with engineers was fun and I helped quite a few write papers. No one in their right mind would continue in engineering if the math baffles them.
Which blows up the whole "just learn to code!" Team D apologist retort. Of course, the apologists already know this, it's basically a rationalization for supporting shitty policies.
You have to get pretty far down the engineering competence curve before you find someone who can’t create any value. Only a handful of us will conjure billion-dollar companies into existence; a larger but still elite club will earn mid six figures from Big Tech and buy homes in California, but legions of workaday computer whisperers are still clearly worth normal white-collar salaries to a normal companies in regular metro areas.
Whereas even a 95th percentile directing student will never create a single dollar in box office revenue. A 95th percentile literature major will not write a successful book. A 95th percentile history major will not get tenure. These fields are brutally competitive, much more so than engineering, because there is only room for the most successful handful of individuals to create (economic) value with them at all. It’s as if unicorn founder paid a middle class living and Google SWE paid couchsurfing wages, and those were the only two jobs in all of tech.
That’s all fine, but it’s totally possible for an English literature student to plan on writing as a vocation, run into the realities of how continuing to write would require further enmeshing themselves in the academy, and decide to opt out and just become a high school teacher instead. This was basically my path 15 years ago: I did have professors at my elite college say that I could get a PhD and do creative writing on the side; instead, I teach kids and do creative writing in the summer. And I mean, if my dad was a former head of Goldman Sachs, I might have eventually become a famous writer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Benioff
Dear JA: I second that. (In fact, I was here before you - retiring soon after teaching HS/JrH for a long time. But I find it reassuring to know you’re out there somewhere having travelled a very similar path.) There are forces at play that have no direct connection to merit that can be determinative. Social capital is huge; temperament, to the extent that it exists separately from IQ or other important factors, is also big. And there’s also Luck, not always the good kind, despite the blythe way career advice givers routinely sneak it into their equations. A good college friend spent years trying to crack the film biz. Got a MFA from AFI, hung out in the right neighborhoods, etc. At one point he was set to direct his own script, had production and acting talent lined-up, and most of the $. And that was as close as he got. The arrangements fell apart and now he’s a therapist (and is happily doing quite well for himself).
I know a pretty fair number of talented and commercially successful science fiction anf fantasy authors. Some even manage to support themselves and their families doing so. Interestingly, almost none of them have English or Literature degrees. In fact, there are probably more blue collar workers than those with humanity degrees (not counting ex military who got their humanities degrees as part of their officer education). This is perhaps biased because of my preference for hard- & military- SF but I'm not sure modern college degrees contribute to making you a more (commercially successful) writer...
Their advice to me if I want to write then just write (lots of feedback and revission of course).
There is good parts and skills components in creative writing education but politics seems to increasingly pushing these out of the way.
By the standards of literature, the quality of such writing is pretty poor. But knowing your market speaks louder than any degrees.
Studs Terkel, Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko, etc.
I was on the English-Lit-to-teacher track as well, but happily found a job as a technical writer. Now I'm an analyst at a software company. One of my English Lit friends in school is also in technical writing, another friend who was a history major is in instructional design. Lots of people with "humanities" degrees end up somewhere rather different, but successful, because it pays the bills. And if you're relatively talented, that's what happens, (as Freddie has observed).
Engineer here, near retirement (graduated 1980), pretty successful given that I did not relocate to Silicon Valley (family ties) or go into management :)
1) Technical writers who are sufficiently engineer adjacent to translate from engineer/tech writer pidgin to field service bulletins in one pass are, in my experience, nearly as rare as competent bare metal firmware developers (and not nearly as well paid; OTOH the technical writers seem to be saner at the median cut).
2) Anecdote from my second job (1982 - 1987, doing moderately intense systems programming for a nuclear fuel enrichment plant - not the kind of place you want bugs):
We had a programmer maybe 6-8 years older than me whose only degrees were BA and MA in English (I'm pretty sure lit but couldn't swear to it; *might* have been comp).
He was first rate. He could not do the work I did, but he more than earned his keep, and furthermore he had somehow learned a programming language called TECO which frightened the rest of us - I remember sitting down once with one of his three line utility scripts *and* the TECO manual and I still couldn't figure out how it worked. Job security for him, I guess :)
"A 95th percentile literature major will not write a successful book. A 95th percentile history major will not get tenure. "
You don't go into lit to write successful books and I doubt most history majors go into it planning on being a professor. In both cases, a chunk of them go in to law school. Another chunk become teachers, often by design. Still others go into tech.
And some go to work in government, or even (gasp) become senators.
I was the a ~95th percentile English and history double major, went to grad school in English, and still ended up as a normal white collar tech worker in a "regular metro area". And I wouldn't change my educational path, because I think all that English and history classwork was valuable for what I now do. I think the thinking that's most wrong with Derek Thompson, et al, is the academic essentialism entailed in assumng that a particular field of study is required for a particular kind of job, and in all but the most hardcore STEMmy jobs (maybe 10%?), it's really not true.
Few literature (philosophy, history, linguistics) majors chose those majors to train for a particular career or to write a book. They learn about literature and other disciplines––a liberal arts education includes science and social thought––and then most go on to have some flavor of white-collar career. In the aggregate, they eventually make good salaries. It takes a few more years but then they catch up to the salaries of almost all other majors (and surpass business majors).
If you are pretty smart, can think and write well, and have your shit together, you can get a good income. (The problem is the way costs of middle class life has gone up, but that's a different story.)
Pretty much the point I came here to make. This is one of the articles that is true in that, yes, most English majors will not successfully become engineers, but Freddie is imagining a massively more competitive world for engineers than the one that exists. Hell, you need people like QA engineers who can barely code if at all but just check everyone else’s work. Even they can make pretty decent money.
I think this is just about tournament fields. You can make a good living as a 50th %ile civil engineer, programmer, accountant, doctor, nurse, schoolteacher, electrician, plumber, etc., because those jobs are just normal jobs where you produce value by basic competence. You can't make a good living as a 50th %ile musician, actor, artist, or academic, because those are tournament fields where there is only room for a small number of people to make a living. (Though academia is what it is because of the overproduction of PhDs relative to academic positions.)
There are ways that a one-in-ten-thousand programmer can make a lot more money, tournament-field style, but most of those other jobs aren't really like that. The very cleverest plumber in Illinois probably makes a decent living, but isn't going to be buying a football team anytime soon.
I think making sure kids understand what fields are tournament fields is very important, as well as making sure they understand what majors basically require graduate school before you can work in the field. (Congratulations on your BA in Political Science. Are you going to grad school or law school?)
I noticed the 8% unemployment rate for aerospace engineers, compared to about 2% for the other majors whose graduates have high median earnings. Seems to be an understated reason Elon’s management works at SpaceX? Companies are overpaying for aerospace engineers in that the labor market isn’t clearing. But, for whatever reason, they can’t pay less. Maybe if one did pay less, competitors would poach their better engineers. Regardless, when wages exceed the clearing level, employers have an opportunity to make working conditions worse (assuming no unions). Employees have a hard time comparing working conditions between firms. And an individual firm can make conditions slightly worse for some employees without creating opportunities for poaching. Elon took advantage of this hidden softness in the labor market for aerospace engineers, to get away with a management style that wouldn’t fly (lol) in other sectors.
Aerospace engineering is too specialized. I see that unemployment rate as indicative of a lack - or perceived lack - of transferrable skills to other industries. Mechanical engineers can work anywhere there's manufacturing and computer programmers can work anywhere there's paperwork. But aerospace engineers only have a few employers. Those employers often may require security clearances, which is a kind of credential that artificially constrains supply and raises wages, leaving those who can't or won't out in the cold. Lastly aerospace engineering could still have an overhang of workers from the contraction the industry experienced after the end of the Cold War.
I've never been convinced that the people who make these posts have the slightest interest in recruiting college kids to pursue engineering degrees or whatever. That's just the socially-defensible pretense for stroking their own egos.
Basically, they succeeded in landing a well-paid or prestigious job of some kind, and now they're looking back to gloat about how clever and correct the choices they made were. While others were partying and reading "poetry," they studied Economics. They chose wisely and learned How to Code! Therefore, it's only just and fair that they succeed while others struggle. Nice morality tale, helps ease some of the self-doubt you get earning six figures working on a payday lending app.
Same as all the "just use this ONE NEAT TRICK to get ahead; it worked for me!" advice-givers. At best, it's projection (what works for one doesn't work for another), at worst, it's Just Universe Fallacy (they're not getting ahead because they're too dumb to follow my advice).
Yeah, asking a successful person their secret to success is useless without knowing the base rate of how many other people tried the same thing and failed. So much of success is luck, and it's hard to distinguish "I placed a bet and won" from "I thought of a clever bet with high expected value that others didn't think of".
I'm glad you stated that weed out courses are good.
I think engineering and pre-medicine programs are commendable for weeding out students fast (at the latest by the end of sophomore year). That gives the student time to try something else before college ends.
Contrast this with, say, a legal career where you can muddle through undergrad and fall into a mid-ranked law school as a default. You end up with massive debt and in a career you probably won't excel at or enjoy. All that could have been avoided if a freshman or sophomore year weedout course simulated a document review exercise that put you off the whole thing.
I appreciate careers that fail people fast and have stronger median outcomes, rather than careers that fail late in the training loop and have power law outcomes.
As a student, you won't like it, but you want to fail fast. When I took Russian the teacher gave a 'flunk out' test early. If you failed it, you had time to drop the class. I dropped the class. It never showed on my transcript, just one semester I only carried 12 credits. Physics, Math, Engineering tried to drop students fast. Frankly, I think the main reason that Premed required Calculus and Physics was to take advantage of the Math and Physics departments' ruthlessness. Then they added Organic Chemistry, Biochemistry, and their own pre-med courses to complete the filtering - but the student was far better off switching their major their freshman year than graduating as a Biology student who had focused only upon Medicine but was not accepted to Medical School.
My kids both did early adjustments of their career plans due to their experience in classes. You need good and honest guidance - you are good at a, x, and z; you ar not good at b, c, or y. Consequentially, they should adjust their plans accordingly.
I'm a bio professor at a 2nd tier liberal arts university, and unfortunately the trend lately has been to avoid weeding out students. We have hundreds of majors, 90% plus that all want to be health professionals, and some of them can't even do well in intro bio let alone organic chem or physics. One "solution" has been to space out early courses so it is less overwhelming, but if poor students muddle through the beginning they almost never perform better in later courses. The end result is that they end up switching majors at a late point that prevents them from graduating on time, do a "general science" degree, or some just drop out. It's all in the name of DEI and has only become worse with test-optional admissions. If you can't get a decent score on the middle / high school math on the SAT, then it's unlikely that you'll perform well in a STEM program. I'm moving to a STEM-focused university soon and I hope they address student challenges in a more realistic manner.
I have mixed feelings about the "weeding out" process. As its presented by the people who do the weeding out, its framed as a difficult, perhaps even harsh at times, process which benefits students who "can't hack it". But its framed like this by the people already in that field and it often feels like a gatekeeping function to maintain some kind of status quo for the people in those fields already.
It's not like weeding out was necessary designed by disinterested third parties given a task to design a system which is meant to find the people capable of being successful engineers or doctors or whatever. Nor has it been designed to create useful alterations to the education process for these specialties to actually be able to expand these fields to include people capable of performing well in them but who otherwise stumble because the "weeding out" process includes marginal instruction in 1st year calculus since successful engineers through it was easy to begin with.
Full disclosure -- I started out as a Comp Sci student in the mid-80s but got weeded out because the math killed me. And calculus killed me in large part because it was taught by foreign exchange adjuncts with impossibly bad English skills, probably because there was some idea that the people who they expected to succeed could more or less teach themselves calculus anyway. Regardless, I've succeeded very well in the IT field anyway and largely in my opinion because of innate ability (and I still don't get why calculus was so important).
The idea that kids and their parents don't know this info is insane. I did some interviews with high school college admissions counselors (i.e. those who advise high school students on going to college) on how to increase applications to our liberal arts college and this was the central focus of what each of them said, that their students and parents are heavily focused on optimizing for careers in STEM.
The other thing that really bothers me about the STEM focus is that it ignores the fact that most kids who graduate with a four-year degree, which is a relatively small subset of the total cohort of people at any given age, will be economically fine regardless of major. I've seen the data on this and it's pretty clear. Of course anyone can be detailed by addiction, mental illness, etc., but if you get the four-year degree and aren't derailed by any of those things, your odds of being in the upper deciles of the income distribution are very high.
Optimizing for *more* income, at the cost of doing something for a bit less but still good money that you find more interesting and fulfilling, doesn't make a ton of sense even if the optimization is viable (which as you point out, Freddie, it's probably not for most people).
Well I watched a video on YouTube about how many engineering graduates in Canada become engineers
It was 26 percent of if I remember correctly
So careers and life can be quite strange
Can education really be tuned to promote success
Or is it ultimately the school of hard knocks
Also I find grade school teachers to be very caring and hard working
But many are lowly paid even though they love their work
And we need teachers
Engineer is a legal title in the two largest Canadian provinces. It requires more steps than just a degree. So the 26% number is a technicality. The number of graduates doing “engineering” is much higher, you just can’t always call it that.
I'm a lead developer and typically wind up mentoring junior programmers or tech talent in projects. Unfortunately most of these recent grads seem to have felt compelled to pursue the career path, and possibly really like the idea of it, but otherwise have no talent for even basic problem solving.
I'm working on a short duration project at the moment and am exec asked me how many juniors I wanted for help. I asked why? If I already have some all the heavy lifting solving the problems for someone else to fill in the blank, I've already replaced them with AI. Indeed, it's faster for me to prompt a language model when I know what and how it should be done, than spent 5 times as much effort coaching someone to do it.
It's not even the coding ability itself that's an issue, very few people can actually do any meaningful problem solving on their own. I have some devs I like to work with who are sloppy coders, but they can tackle complex issues in creative/useful ways, and I can always clean up their work product after.
I started in civil engineering and became lost on the hill of partial differential equations. People would die if I was allowed to become an engineer. I switched majors.
However, the fellows in Engineering made college dating a lot of fun so it wasn't a total fail ! (This was not my intention but an unintended positive result).
(EE here, 45 years in the field)
I wonder - seriously, not being rhetorical - how what fraction of practicing Civ Es (not counting those want to get their PEs, for which I assume/hope there are questions that *do* require PDEs) actually need to know PDEs on a regular basis. I know that whenever I have actually seen an analysis of stress concentration (rather than gross bending/torsion moments and torques), non-steady state heat flow, ... done for realz it's been rule of thumb formulas extracted from Holy Writ (or, in very recent times, when real money is involved, finite element).
I'd be quite surprised if 10% of the EEs I have worked with over the years remembered even year 1 calculus, what the AP math test required back in my day (along with fighting off the dinosaurs with our early gen HP/TI calculators).
To take the course in Heat Transfer req. PDE. I think, looking back, I might have been able to manage projects...like a hosp admin might not be a physician but I felt that to be a true engineer one needed to be good at the math. BUT even tho I switched majors I had a level of engineering appreciation I would not have had. I am now in a radio club with a lot of engineers, and I'm not completely lost. I wish there were a way that everyone could learn these aspects of how things work. I sorted myself out but I never forgot what I learned and if I had gone straight to my major (am a librarian) I would not have known these things at all.
yeah, I assumed as much. Again, I'm a ChemE (BS) / EE by trade (at my school heat transfer, which is a big deal for chemical engineering, was all about understanding which empirical formula to use when; the actual heat exchanger designers were in the MechE program).
And I would take project management and human soft skills over math ability pretty much any time.
Still glad it worked out for you, including some good dating opportunities!
Computer science is very different from software engineering. Almost none of what you learn from a computer science degree at a place like MIT or Caltech (I did the latter) is applicable to the typical software engineering job. They are preparing you for academic research or the small fraction of programming jobs that involve creating original solutions to hard technical problems. It's cool, intellectually stimulating stuff! But in terms of labor market value, the degree is almost entirely signaling, not training. Many of the people who complete those degrees are excellent programmers by the time they arrive on campus; all of them have the intelligence and "STEM mindset" to quickly pick up the particular technologies in use at any given programming job. My wife studied chemistry and makes a much better professional software engineer than I ever did, having learned the particulars of programming on her own, and without the baggage of adopting "programmer" as an identity from an early age (you aren't the shit you like!).
Honestly, the same is true in many disciples. Many economics departments, for instance, prepare students for academic research, despite the fact that most graduates end up doing something more “vocational” like consulting.
I would almost say that this is the exception, rather than the rule. Biology has medicine as an “applied” discipline, but most do not.
It’s just that most people have no knowledge of CS, so the point you’ve made here is valuable.
Hm, while I largely agree that academic CS teaches fairly little useful, judging by the graduates I interview for jobs (academic software engineering like the programs at CMU _was_ not much better, although my dataset is very stale on that topic):
1) the signaling value of the degree helps a moderate amount on getting that first job out of school,
2) the networking potential while undergrad, if your university is decently connected in the area, can be a huge leg up if you can get a non-toy internship.
Very much agree! We had tech companies recruiting on campus, so getting that first job was pretty easy if you had decent grades and could demonstrate competence.
Plus more than a bit of screening value for the school, though not so much the specific degree, I think - I started undergrad at Caltech in the ancient days of 1976 (biochem => ChemE) and I think that for someone to make it through four years and come out with a BS indicated at least some ability to think, work, and to some degree write. Rather than Berkeley where I finished undergrad; still reasonably selective but not to anything like the same degree.
I really agree with the overall point of the article, but what's the evidence for this claim?
>1. There are almost certainly more students who pursue majors they aren’t equipped for than their are students who are insufficiently career-oriented when they choose one
We can identify students who pursue majors they can't do because they fail. But how do we identify the second group?
Being a long time STEM professor, I agree strongly with Freddie here. I very much doubt any of my colleagues would disagree...
For the strength of the opinions expressed above, you don’t present any real evidence. You could be right, but I’d actually like to see some indication that we’re overproducing mediocre engineers. An anecdote by a buddy of yours does not suffice.
keep me/us informed on how you do on that drug that will cause weight loss. Also: hope you get into an exersise program. I like jogging. Get you outside into the "real world"
also side effects as if you don't have enough all ready.
cheers
I think any field where there's a stereotype that "Asian Tiger Moms push you into this job" doesn't really need the boost. Doctors, lawyers, programmers, engineers...everyone knows these are lucrative jobs. If anything needs a PR boost, it's low-status but skilled trades like plumber or electrician, where a decently smart, skilled worker can make $60k or more after a few years without debt and then go into business for themselves if they want to. Someone with a 115 IQ could really excel at something like that rather than struggling to get by as a third-tier computer programmer with a degree from a state school branch campus.