> If people can self learn they will. I think doing so is much, much more difficult than others pretend like it is.
I'm not sure. But what's definitely true is that it's WAY harder as an adult.
Most self-taught programmers I know (including myself) learned to program as children/teenagers. Learning at that age is easier -- if not biologically, then at the very least because you have tons of free time.
The few I know who self-taught programming but didn't learn as youth already had really strong backgrounds in mathematics or physics, and leaned heavily on the skills that studying those fields teaches you.
> That’s not an apples to apples comparison, as Lambda School’s schedule doesn’t align with a university schedule.
It's apples to apples wrt income sharing agreements as an alternative to loans. You're of course right that there are significant curricular differences.
> A student will have spent about 2,000 hours in Lambda School by graduation - the equivalent of ~4 university semesters, because we go all day every day and don’t take breaks.
University students should be going every day and not taking breaks.
> And comparing the amount of debt vs the total possible cost doesn’t make for an accurate comparison either.
I agree that this isn't the best possible comparison, but I couldn't even find the data to make a better one. Does Lambda School publish average paybacks?
> Also note that by the time a Lambda School student is at year four, if we want to factor in the opportunity cost of time, a Lambda School student has paid Lambda School back and has three years of earnings/work experience.
On the other hand, a 4 year degree with 2+ majors is much more robust to shifts in labor market demand. Which does shift from under you feet.
In fact, that very dynamism is regularly referenced in Lambda School's marketing...
> ...and have earned an additional $250k?
So, do lambda grads not on average max out the payout, or do they on average make way less than $250k over 2 years? You can't have it both ways ;-)
To answer your question: I lived through dotcom, '08, and lots of shifts in tech stacks that corresponded with layoffs of folks who didn't have foundation skills to keep up (Java/C/mainframe programming grads from community colleges who never could "grok" the web). So I have one answer about this versatility/robustness vs. maximizing short term returns question.
But I'm sure people who have never seen a down cycle or major shift in tech have a different one.
I am skeptical that these income sharing agreements are so great. Especially in software.
Lambda School has a 9 month program that takes a 17% cut of your salary for the first 24 months of employment with a cap at $30,000. Which many students in software will hit, especially in high COL areas.
It's worth noting that this is more expensive than many/most universities, which charge less than $30,000 per year (9 months of instruction) even at the sticker price (which no one actually pays).
In fact, I wonder whether bootcamps are even cheaper than the full cost of university. The average student loan debt upon graduation for all US university students is $29,400 (again, for four years of college education with access to both applied and fundamental courses across many different majors vs. a 9 month boot camp focused on a particular skill set).
To be concrete: by taking out a loan for what lambda school costs, you could double major in both nursing and CS at a state U for about the same amount of post-graduation debt as you would have at bootcamps. Or CS and Econ. Or CS and Accounting. Or CS and Mechanical Engineering. In states that still invest in higher ed, you'll end up paying less (even with interest) than you'd pay lambda school.
There's a natural experiment on this question at Purdue, where there's an apples-for-apples comparison and loans are almost always cheaper than the income sharing agreement.
To me, these income sharing agreements and bootcamps seem like not great deals when you look at instruction time per dollar. And also when you look at the longitudinal durability of the skill-set that's being taught. They have a place in the market for sure, but they aren't the panacea to expensive education. They're not even cost-competitive.
They're just a different point in the design space of educational programs that extract as much of the added value of their product as possible.
Being able to either ignore or put up with office politics might be a pathology, but it's a pathology that is required in most well-paying work environments. Passing subjective judgement on it isn't helpful unless you're a) a high-level executive with the ability to drive culture changes; or b) able to provide examples of work environments that better conform to OP's preferred social interactions (which I do in my original post).
> If you are paid to perform a service based on the terms of a contract you are, by definition, a contractor.
1. "Contractor" means something specific in the Defense industry. Every employee, including members of the armed forces and employees of DHS, are "paid to perform a service based on the terms of a contract" (the employment contract). But, of course, literally everyone knows that when I say "contractor" I definitely do not mean "someone who has signed an employment contract with the federal government".
2. The expectations associated with grants are different enough from most other contracts that there's a useful distinction between "grant work" and "contract work".
I recommend learning how to put up with these things. Just stop caring about them. Treat it like laundry or dishes. You don't have to enjoy it, and there's no reason to get emotional over it. Just do it and move on. In particular, the job that you describe doesn't exist and where it does is exactly the type of development that's ripe for outsourcing.
If you can't find a way to play the game without emotional investment, then perhaps look for jobs in lower-paying sectors where you're less likely to encounter ambition and bullshit.
For example, have you looked for development jobs in the nonprofit and/or public sectors?
Nonprofit/gov't work in general can attract bad personalities, but IME the software development shops within those organizations tend to have very few of the types of people you want to avoid. The pay/prestige is low enough relative to other development work that you mostly get "true believers".
Universities (software development departments, not research groups!) are also typically nice laid back work environments.
Medium-sized non-software companies with small development groups (5-10 people) can also be good.
However, do realize that in all of those situations you are trading standups and TPS reports for daily interactions with non-technical end users, which come with their own set of frustrations.
Grad students are treated poorly, but the same 2-3 field split in STEM is true there as well.
E.g., CS PhD have plentiful $200K+ job opportunities after graduation and a relatively labor-friendly faculty market. Meanwhile, many mathematics PhDs postdoc into their 40s.
I work in this space and regularly interact with folks on both sides of that aisle.
I would hire both. If you want to do anything serious in the space, you need the resources to hire a well-rounded team. Maybe in five years this won't be true, but at the moment this is a space where technological capabilities are driving policy making decisions.
I had to choose one, the answer depends on if this is a soldier or a general.
If it's a soldier ($ or $$ salary), I would choose a CS PhD who has demonstrated an interest and aptitude for learning about policy. There are a lot of opportunities for that person to learn about policy including part-time fellowships with think tanks and federal agencies, sometimes even embedded in a lawmaker's staff. Conversely, taking a policy person and getting them to the point where they can adequately process the fire hose of AI fairness/safety/explainability research is going to require a lot more effort.
If it's a general ($$$ or $$$$ salary), I would choose whoever I could manage to hire that has the most influence in whatever agency or legislature is most relevant to the policies I want to push.
But again, especially for soldiers, it's a false choice, and if you find yourself in a situation where you have to make this choice then you need to focus on fundraising instead of your first hire...
I don't think it's money grubbing. I think it's a genuine attempt to connect with the zeitgeist and be relevant, paired with a fundamental misunderstanding about what's actually happening inside self-driving groups.
But the intention doesn't really matter.
What matters is the utility of the output!
In fact, somewhat ironically, I think a lot of the good work on ethics for AI is coming out of engineering, business, statistics, and economics departments. And those academic departments to do be a bit more "money grubbing" relative to philosophy :-)
> Gen-ed humanities courses taught to giant lecture halls aren't quite the same as the much smaller courses the majors take
This depends on the type of institution. Liberal arts and most honors colleges at large universities have small class sizes with high-quality instruction for their gen-ed humanities.
> You are extremely likely to be put on the spot and made to defend a subjective position you've taken.
This is also true in (good) mathematics and computer science programs, where you'll need to learn how to communicate well to technical audiences and defend all manner of subjective positions.
Also, something similar is true for the transferability of humanities skills! The writing skills you develop in humanities courses do not directly transfer to technical writing. Learning to write well for any audience will teach you a lot about good writing, but your random English major will probably be completely useless when it comes to writing proofs, design/requirements documents, technical documentation, or especially useful comments in their code. And if I had a dollar for ever business person with a humanities background who made an ass out of themselves in a technical meeting because they have no idea how to communicate with a technical audience about a technical subject... ;-)
> In math, and to some extent engineering or science, you can often reason your way through if you get stuck, or else there are simple procedures you can rote memorize.
I disagree. Your observation about lower vs. upper division courses is as true for STEM as it is for humanities courses. There's a lot of subjectivity/taste involved in upper-division courses, especially any proof-based or project-based course!
> But K-12 math education in the US is such a disaster that the universities wouldn't stand a chance if they wanted to do it.
That's a big problem. It's also a chicken-and-egg problem. Our elementary and middle school teachers are often innumerate, which makes it hard to prepare students for HS (where the quality is often still bad despite subject-area qualifications), which in turn creates problems for gen ed STEM at universities.
> if the tech bubble bursts, computer science may even be riskier than a humanities degree, which gives graduates a broader set of knowledge.
How do humanities degrees provide "broader knowledge" than CS degrees? Different, sure, but broader?
Good CS degrees are not coding bootcamps. CS students take a lot of mathematics and logic-heavy courses and can easily pivot from programming to jobs in insurance, finance, accounting, education, project management, and even law.
Good CS degrees also require a lot of technical writing, which opens up all of the stuff that's usually associated with humanities degrees.
Bad CS degrees exist. But then, so do bad English departments.
This also ignores the fact that a lot of CS students are taking courses in English/poli sci/History/etc, but very few humanities students are taking CS courses. E.g., I didn't have a major or minor in any of the above fields, but I took upper-division courses in the English, Relgiion, poli sci, and history departments. However, I only ever encountered one non-STEM major in CS courses beyond CS 101.
I know what your point is. My point is that the courts have considered your point and don't agree... and for good reason. Your legal analysis basically amounts to "I don't like that other people use Google's services, and they deserve to suffer for their complacency".
Several million dollars is not a lot of money for a group this size. We're talking "travel to annual meetings and fund administrative overhead (e.g. security clearances are not cheap)" money.
There's "not in it for the money", and then there's "dipping into my personal funds".
Also, again, for many of these scientists, 1MM+ is the annual opportunity cost they pay to stay in academia/public sector vs. private industry. If they were in it for personal payout, they'd have jumped ship a long time ago.
The authors wrote an article entitled "Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives?"
That's the title of the piece. Not "some possibly generalizable observations about the behavior of 15 year olds"
Sure, the paper's contents contain the massive CAVEAT EMPTORs, but that's exactly how bullshit works in academic writing.
Bold titles, sweeping statements in introductions and conclusions. But enough profuse caveats sprinkled around that you can always say to anyone who takes a closer look
"no see I mentioned exactly what I meant on page N"...
This is definitely my feeling, but e.g. my BIL prefers gift cards (NFL Shop and BWW when in doubt) over all other gifts including cash.
He doesn't like "stuff", but he's frugal and otherwise won't spend straight up cash on himself. Goes straight into savings.
I would never dream of getting him a gift card to help a shop, though. I get him gift cards for things I think he will enjoy but is too disciplined to spend money on for himself otherwise. It's actually a nice way to force myself to really think about him and "give an experience". Or, when I can't, some decent wings and a beer.
Not surprising. Computer scientists have a bit of experience with computation, after all. It would actually be more concerning if a bunch of new stuff was being invented whole cloth.
> but it's sort of putting the cart before the horse.
Not at all. ML algorithms are just fucking algorithms and computer scientists have been thinking about what it means for an algorithm to be correct since... Turing.
And have been proving various theorems about ML algorithms in particular since at least the 60s.
Complaints that "AI safety looks a lot like previous CS research" are basically equivalent to observations that "neural nets have been around for a lot longer than alexnet".
> I think there might be legitimate value in having a bunch of lawyers, sociologists, and philosophers set a target more-or-less in ignorance, and let the people on the technical side try to hit it.
I disagree. This is how you end up with endless navel gazing about trolley problems while actual vehicles kill people by accelerating without control because redundant parts are too expensive and engineers don't have enough voice. Philosophers are rarely interested in honest-to-god engineering ethics, which almost always boils down to "pay well enough to hire good people, and then listen to the good people you're paying good money to have around".
Most JASON scientists haven't worked at a government lab for decades. How is this relevant?
> ...I've never heard a contractor...
These aren't contractors, they are scientists. And not just any scientists. In most cases, they aren't even the scientists employed by a national lab. They're scientists employed by all manner of institutions, including universities who will pay their paychecks regardless of whether this funding comes in. Usually senior and well-respected.
Many of those scientists have, if not "fuck you money", at least "fuck you reputations" that translate into "fuck you money". E.g., the current chairperson is fucking Russell Hemley... he's not putting up with federal background checks because he needs the extra pennies...
JASON members work on JASON projects because they think those projects are important. Nobel laureates and other top scientists don't work on grant funded projects for the money... if all they cared about was feeding their families, they would just retire. And if all they cared about was money, they would pimp their reputations to private industry labs.
That's not what is happening here. The police are not purchasing access like an advertiser would; they are receiving special access for the purpose of tracking suspects.
> If you had, I imagine SCOTUS would rule differently.
The SCOTUS of the 1960s was very clear -- routing your communication through a corporate party does not, in any way, negate your expectation of privacy from your own government!
SCOTUS has changed drastically since the 1960s, and I will be unsurprised if SCOTUS rolls back every single 'privacy' case that it encounters. But that has nothing to do with the merits of these cases; it's a way of salting the earth so that Roe v. Wade can be overturned while appearing less overtly political.
I'm not sure. But what's definitely true is that it's WAY harder as an adult.
Most self-taught programmers I know (including myself) learned to program as children/teenagers. Learning at that age is easier -- if not biologically, then at the very least because you have tons of free time.
The few I know who self-taught programming but didn't learn as youth already had really strong backgrounds in mathematics or physics, and leaned heavily on the skills that studying those fields teaches you.