“ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!).
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.