When I used to work as a personal assistant, I found that intimidating other people (not my boss) was a huge part of the job. Is that not true in this case?
Oh, just tell him to lower the salary they're offering. Isn't that the standard recourse? Then she'll decline the offer and he'll be able to give the job to the meek woman, or anyadjective man, of his choosing.
Bleah. I mean, well done you for doing what you can, but still.
I shouldn't make him sound so bad. She was a little intimidating, and my co-worker was actually cool with raising the salary to meet her demands, because he recognizes smart too, but he does have a slight preference for someone else. And honestly, this person isn't going to be curing cancer and it's a small office, so getting along with everyone is important.
Still, I'm trying to think of a context where 'intimidating' (as opposed to 'hostile' or 'unpleasant') would be a good reason not to hire someone, and I'm not coming up with much. But I'm sure your co-worker's a sweetheart, and if he's hiring an assistant, he should be able to hire someone he wants to work with. It's just kind of depressing.
Was she attractive? Don't hire an attractive woman! Bad for the office.
I'm not coming up with much
I think it's like this: there are going to be times when he wants something done a certain way, but he knows his limitations, and isn't sure that he's going to be able to be sufficiently articulate about the why, and he doesn't want to lose the battle just because he's outgunned, so to speak. If they were going to be equals, that would be unacceptable, but since she'll be his assistant, it's not a crazy concern. Honestly, I doubt she'll take the job. All three of us were like, "Is she going to be bored?"
Don't hire an attractive woman!
It's like you're speaking some crazy moonman language.
And honestly, this person isn't going to be curing cancer
Well, not if no one will hire her, she's not.
All three of us were like, "Is she going to be bored?"
If it's known when she's got work to do, and when she hasn't, why should she be bored, with the world of the printed word at her eyetips?
Don't hire an attractive woman!
That's not what America's sports talk radio hosts tell me (scroll down to the picture of the day):
http://czabe.com/daily/archives/2007/08/the_last_word_o.html
Thanks for raising the tone there, flip.
I think it's like this: there are going to be times when he wants something done a certain way, but he knows his limitations, and isn't sure that he's going to be able to be sufficiently articulate about the why, and he doesn't want to lose the battle just because he's outgunned, so to speak.
Did you consider offering the candidate his job?
Pretty much any boob will hit the wall before the nose, right? Mine are not very impressive, but my chest isn't, like, concave.
Glad to help!
Even those of us who know the freedom of the air and the dark of the forest have our human weaknesses.
It's true. I have a pert little schoz.
I was going to list other stupid hiring ideas, but I've gotta go now.
I will leave you with advice that another lawyer mentioned as the important theme to her case: "No touching other people's vaginas in the office!"
Research indicates it must be a very impressive boob, or one that doesn't squish.
I have an expanded ribcage. It may be to blame.
14: Heh. Or putting up a collection to buy him some testicles? If she's being hired as his assistant, he shouldn't be worrying about whether he can dominate her by force of personality. If she doesn't do her job as instructed, that's a problem, but if he doesn't think he'd have the capacity to ask that things be done his way in the face of her differing opinion, he's got some real issues.
if he doesn't think he'd have the capacity to ask that things be done his way in the face of her differing opinion, he's got some real issues
I'm just speculatin'. I mean, being slightly uncomfortable with an intimidating assistant isn't so strange, right?
Intimidating, or disobedient? Disobedient sucks, but if you're in charge, how hard is it to act like it?
Believe me, you want a smart assistant with her own opinions. She will be on your side and will spare you much pain. Oh, and you probably want to listen to her when she gives you advice, especially if you're sort of an ideas-person rather than a practical person.
"Won't she be bored?" I dread this question, since as a nerdy person with an affected manner, I've been "ooh, you must be too smart for this job"-ed out of several positions. In at least one situation, they later complained about the incompetence/not-with-it-ness of the actual hire.
What people really want is a woman who is deferential and loyal but mean to outsiders; and smart but not intellectual; and smart enough to conceal her smarts and only use them clandestinely. And they wonder why they can't hire someone like this for $13.52 per hour!
Oh yeah, roll on, Ogged. Huzzah for frank speaking!
Was she attractive? Don't hire an attractive woman! Bad for the office.
Also, a big leg woman ain't got no soul.
Pretty much any boob will hit the wall before the nose, right?
If you've got good posture. That is clearly what the sports talk show hosts care about.
I've been "ooh, you must be too smart for this job"-ed out of several positions
It can be a legitimate concern if you're trying to avoid turnover. You want someone smart, but not so smart that they'll find much of the job uninteresting and leave after a year.
I'm not walking into the wall any more but I submit it also takes a supportive bra.
29: I get that, but seriously, that's a chance you're going to have to take if you want a genuinely good assistant. No fair whining about how dumb ol' office manager is--with her bad choices in pizza and computer supplies--if you turn down smart people who just want a gol-dinged job to support their literary and political habits.
I yearn for an iron rice bowl!
29: And really, aren't jobs at the level where boredom is a huge problem pretty high turnover even if you deliberately hire only people you think are stupid enough for them? I know lots of people think that way, but I doubt that you actually cut down on turnover by all that much.
I'm not walking into the wall any more
Cala's eligible for the job.
aren't jobs at the level where boredom is a huge problem pretty high turnover even if you deliberately hire only people you think are stupid enough for them?
Not sure. The person before last in that position had it for something like six or seven years. The last person we never should have hired and honestly, never would have if I'd been around last year. Dumb as a stump, which is what happens if you only care about "fit."
Frowner has a delightful attitude, frankly.
And...as HR puts it...expertise with InDesign, PhotoShop, Illustrator, DreamWeaver, HTML, Java, copyediting and a broad range of university-specific systems too frustrating to enumerate here. Also, I can (inexplicably to myself) troubleshoot Excel, even though I can't actually use it very well.
People should be so lucky to have an assistant like me, even if I'm, er, posting-instead-of-finishing-some-non-urgent-but-existing-tasks.
Prior to going to a union rally again--1.75% isn't enough either.
Cala's eligible for the job.
No, she's not.
No, she's not.
I submit that those who walk repeatedly into walls are not too smart for the job. Or I meant to submit this without actually casting aspersions on actual Cala.
There was one person whose resume we really liked, and googling revealed her to be the proprietor of an online sex-toy shop, but she took another job the day before her interview here.
This is probably the right thread to gloat about the fact that my kind of useless secretary got promoted to work for a partner in real estate, and I got assigned someone new who seems great. Not flawless, but fast and spontaneously helpful. Life is good.
Life is good.
Aren't you leaving that life? Or hoping to?
Why not? Just because she has an advanced degree?
my kind of useless secretary got promoted
What a wonderful world.
"I told you, I'm the perfect servant. I have no life."
Just because she has an advanced degree?
Because she's unwilling to keep walking into walls.
When I interviewed for this job it was posited that I was overqualified for it, with reference to those Bill Richardson ads.
Yes, but even if things work out as hoped I'm here for months yet, and they're going to be busy. Life is just a whole lot more pleasant if I've got someone who can format a letter properly.
"No touching other people's vaginas in the office!"
What's the guidance on one's own vagina?
Now, LB, you've hurled me from my euphoric self-congratulation to the depths of anxiety--what made your sort-of useless secretary so useless? (Maybe I'm useless and don't know it.)
Or maybe I should learn to be useless and then I could get a promotion.
my kind of useless secretary got promoted
Gotta love the Peter Principle.
43: Actually, when her supervisor came into my office to tell me about it, I figured she was getting fired. While pleasant, she was in late, left early, and didn't get anything done inbetween, and while I hadn't complained, I figured another of her lawyers must have. Nope, turned out she was too senior to work for us little people.
Why do you google candidates?
To see if they're in any way related to the w-lfs-n clan.
What's the guidance on one's own vagina?
This was addressed in the last Ask the Mineshaft, no?
51: No, the uselessness was pretty gross. She was rarely at her desk, so it was hard to find her to give her work. She wouldn't respond to emails -- that is, if you emailed her a task, she would usually do it, but wouldn't give any indication that she'd gotten the email. A typical transaction would be that I'd email her "Hey Diane, can you do X?" and would hear nothing back. A while later, I'd walk by her desk, where she wouldn't be. Sometimes, the completed task would be in amongst the other stuff on her desk, sometimes not.
LB, what kinds of work did you usually give her? [Weird anthropological curiousity about the lives of other secretaries] Also, did you ever indicate your displeasure? I live in fear that people are displeased with me and don't mention it, even though this is unlikely, at least in a work setting.
I'm displeased with my secretary most of the time and rarely mention it.
Actually, that should be "all the time" and "never mention it".
If I had a secretary, I would be nigh on unstoppable. But I would probably be squeamish about giving my secretary stuff to do.
Auugghh. You're not my boss, are you? We would have just turned in a grant today? We can work through this together.
56 and 58 make me think that we're not as laid back as I think we are here. Those things wouldn't happen here.
You're not my boss, are you?
It's gonna suck when Brock fires you for spending all day commenting on Unfogged.
63: Not after I, ahem, discuss Brock's various postings with the Dean.
People wanted to fire me for years. God bless inefficiency. I was at the sub-secretarial level.
If I had a secretary, I would be nigh on unstoppable.
I believed this. Then I got a secretary, or "assistant." And indeed, I proved exceptionally good at getting her to do things. Which gave me lots of time to do what I should really be doing, and also to contemplate why I wasn't doing it.
"Diane, can you do a letter to Joe Schmoe, same address as the one yesterday? Text of the letter:
Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah.
Copy Jim P. and Ralph R., and Fed Ex it to Joe, fax to the other two."
So, a three minute job -- call up the old letter, cut and paste in the text, change the headers and the date, and print it on letterhead, do the FedEx labels and stand by the fax machine, but if I'm trying to do something else, it saves time having someone else do it. And then I'd have to come looking for her so I could sign it, because she wouldn't respond, and somehow the layout of the letter would always get screwed up, and it was just more trouble than it was worth. I tried having her format briefs once or twice, but it was easier just doing it myself.
I mostly just didn't ask her to do much of anything, or express displeasure -- largely because one of the other lawyers who shared her did try and get her to do some useful work, and it didn't get anywhere other than to provoke a hostile response.
67: And you're telling me someone makes a living doing (even if not not-doing) stuff like that? Well, you've made me feel better. Direct requests get speedy results from me, and I'm even often relatively self-directed. Although it's been so slow around here lately that honestly I've found it harder to work when there's actual work. Oh well, school year starts soon.
OT: Going back to the discussion here the other day regarding reporters writing too evenhandedly, I was disappointed to see this:
TOKYO -- As one of Japan's former top television newscasters, Yoshiko Sakurai used a sweet modulated voice to convey the view shared by the country's elite on a controversy dating back more than 60 years: Japan's wartime use of "comfort women," the euphemism for sex slaves.
No documents exist to prove that Japan's military coerced women into sexual servitude during the war, Sakurai said. The allegations "are not based on fact."
A great many historians outside Japan consider Sakurai's view mistaken, and the issue simmers abroad.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the issue a little plainer than "a great many historians"? I believe there are plenty of first-hand testimonies, some from women who are still living.
62: Remember that stupid thing with the other secretary I posted about last year? This is a big organization, and it's a badly run organization. Complaining to the secretarial supervisor is pointless, and that's about all there is to do.
I got along fine with her personally -- we'd chat about our kids -- but she got very touchy, very fast, about any pressure to do more or better work, and going to her supervisor wouldn't have been (from past experience) at all a good idea for me, professionally.
Do any of the lawyers here dictate letters on tape for their secretaries to type? The lawyers at my firm do, and I'm not entirely sure why.
68: There's a reason I told you that you should get a job as a legal secretary (if the money is better, which I suspect it probably is). Diane was awful, but not all that unusual IME -- I've known plenty that were close to that useless. Someone like you with brains and initiative would be such an incredible pleasure to work with. (And the new secretary I've been assigned is looking good that way. She seems a bit jumpy, almost overly responsive, but hopefully that's just 'Aaack, scary new lawyer' and will calm down once I prove myself to be not all that tense or demanding.)
71: Older lawyers do more of that. I've tried dictating briefs once or twice to get past writers block (not with the useless secretary, but a prior, excellent, one.) but mostly I just type stuff.
LB's experiences match my own very closely.
Teo, the lawyer in the office next to me spends all day long talking into his recorder. He dictates memos, letters, emails, replies to emails, everything. And has his assistant type it all. It's bizarres. I write it off to the fact that he's old.
Teo, do the secretaries in your office use a Dictaphone? I had one of those at my old job and it was truly great for transcribing. Yay foot pedal.
Of course, it cost $300, but that's because the company that makes it could get away with charging that since nobody else makes them. And probably hasn't since 1963.
My dad (a non-lawyer) used a Dictaphone in his office into the 1990s, if not indeed into the 21st century.
73, 74: That makes sense, but the funny thing is that all the lawyers in the office do it, and they're not that old. Chalk it up to inertia, I guess, but it seems really inefficient.
75: Yes, we use Dictaphones. The foot pedals are indeed awesome.
Actually, I'm not sure if they're proper Dictaphones. They do have pedals, though.
77: I knew a guy in his early forties who dictated everything, and if you're a bad typist (formatter, whatever), you've got a good secretary, and you've got the hang of the dictating, it's pretty efficient, I think. Not in terms of total time, but if the extra secretarial time it uses up would have been downtime for the secretary, and it frees up busy lawyer time, it's efficient.
The lawyers at my firm
no and no. Teo, get out of that place.
A lot of people hire Finnish and Swedish illegals for secretary work. There's a streetcorner where they stand waiting for work.
Upon further research, the things we use are not Dictaphones (just foot pedals attached to regular tape players). I also see that Dictaphone, like pretty much every other company in the speech technology industry, is now owned by Nuance.
if you're a bad typist (formatter, whatever), you've got a good secretary, and you've got the hang of the dictating, it's pretty efficient, I think. Not in terms of total time, but if the extra secretarial time it uses up would have been downtime for the secretary, and it frees up busy lawyer time, it's efficient.
This makes sense, and I'm sure it is true that the time I spend typing is time the lawyers can spend lawyering. The time they spend dictating may well be less than the time they would spend typing letters themselves, even though they're all pretty good typists.
Doctors do a lot of dictating. My niece works from home as a medical transcriptionist.
Teo, get out of that place.
It's not so bad. Really. I won't stay here forever, though.
Ach, lost tags. Should have said:
My niece works from home as a medical transcriptionist
.... in Delhi?
If your niece has any extra work, tell her to pass it my way.
If I don't get an academic job, I'm so fucked. I'm too smart and competent to ever get a job.
Dictating would cut down on the risk of tendinitis or carpal tunnel. At least for the lawyer...
I'm too smart and competent to ever get a job.
Try walking into some walls.
In my limited experience it's true, though, that once you have a PhD you're considered virtually useless for anything other than academic employment.
I should elaborate: I tried to get the kind of jobs I was offered just out of college, but found I couldn't get them once I had the PhD. Holding constant for me being me, I could only conclude it was the PhD, which is what a few people told me.
I used to do a lot of dictating. I have switched to the even more inefficient method of handwriting out drafts. I really should have learned typing in high school.
You're probably not serious, Adam, but it's a good job for a literate person with office skills and a good memory for odd vocabulary.
That is why we should all get M.D./Ph.Ds or Ph.D's in economics!
98: Heavy blog commenting has doubled my typing speed and accuracy.
101: Unfogged is not totally useless!
Heavy blog commenting has doubled my typing speed and accuracy.
And improved my html coding.
I think I was offered a tech support job back in those days, actually.
Has anyone ever considered, in a systemic way, rather than on a case by case basis what smart people with non applied technical degrees ought to do other than get an advanced degree, i.e. medical or law school.
There are a ton of jobs which people may find boring in organizations with little room for upward mobility, so they won't hire people they think will get bored and leave. Lots of other jobs require various types of experience.
Outside of investment banking and management consulting, I don't know of a lot of places that offer trainee positions. Lower tier banks now want people who majored in finance. High end places want people who got very good grades at highly-ranked name-brand schools, preferably athletes. (Athletes are good team players, but they've also demonstrated that they have stamina, which you need when they want to work you to death.)
I found that question mystifying when I came back from the Peace Corps -- I realized that I had absolutely no idea what an entry level job was for someone with a liberal arts degree and no specific ambition. That's how I ended up in law school -- I just couldn't figure out who'd hire me to do what.
At Teo U. there's a lot of recruiting by investment banks, consulting firms and insurance companies with no particular requirements as to major. Seems like those are the sorts of jobs people with liberal arts degrees from fancy schools tend to take.
There are also secretarial positions (like mine!), but those may fall under the "boring with no upward mobility" problem.
Also, marketing. The real problem is not so much lack of jobs as that no one ever tells you what the jobs are, I think.
Library science can be very interesting. You also learn research skill which could be useful outside libraries.
106: But there are bright people at Ohio State too, and they don't get recruited by consulting firms or investment banks.
I don't know about insurance companies; they didn't recruit when I was in school.
I think that people used to get entry-level publishing jobs, but I don't think that those exist anymore.
A lot of the people I know working for non-profits have degrees in government or subsidized MBAs. Lower tier schools offer degrees in non-profit management.
I don't understand why so much of our system is based on formal education.
It isn't just liberal arts. I knew someone with a B.S. in biology from Princeton who had done a fellowship in Japan. He got back to the U.S. and was temping, admittedly for some kind of bio-tech company, but he was really scrambling and without health insurance for a while. He went back to grad school in biology.
He just finished, actually, and is goign to be doing his post-doc in some sort of biology-ev-psych program at Col/umb/ia, I think. Is all ev-psych bullshit? His dissertation was on sleep cycles in gerbils or hamsters. (They're very weird.)
But there are bright people at Ohio State too
Nah.
I think that people used to get entry-level publishing jobs, but I don't think that those exist anymore.
Oh, they do; they just pay $18,000/yr to live in Manhattan. I had a job like that in a similar arts-related industry. Needless to say it won't let you be sole breadwinner.
Yeah. Those all seemed to involve being supported by my parents for an indefinite amount of time, which wasn't what I was looking for.
I also had no idea what I was going to do when I graduated from college (majoring in Political Philosophy and Mathematics) and that's how I ended up doing computer programming (web scripting and database work anyhow).
I think I was at the end of the era in which you get a programming job with good aptitude but no programming experience and learn on the job. Hopefully that isn't true but I get the sense that there are more people coming onto the job market with programming experience now. (Though, as I've said before, the job market for programmers in my town is small enough that I shouldn't take it as representative).
I kind of wish I hadn't had so much good fortune bouncing from one organizing/non-profit/government job to the next. I might have gone to grad school. Now my living expenses are too high.
I am an extremely lucky person, even if we're only considering profession and career. Which is why I was reading Invisible Adjunct in the first place, lo these many years ago, where I saw a young poster named ogged, and another named Fontana Labs, and followed them back to their place....
114: When I was in college, I heard a talk by some guy who had hired someone with a degree in music, possibly a masters, to work in computer programming. I think he'd done that in the 80's though, and it was a small company.
But here's the basic point. My paternal grandfather never went to college because of the depression. He felt that there was something of a ceiling on what he could do, because he lacked a degree, but he became a vice-president for contracting. Because of a quirk in his defined-benefit pension, he retired early and after a couple of years, he went to work as a controller for a small high-tech start-up full of PhDs who didn't understand business. But before that he had stayed with the same company. That company grew and merged with others, but he stayed. I don't know what they had him doing in the beginning, maybe he was working in the mail room, but there was upward mobility from the mail room to management.
Most of the office manager/ admin types I know do not move up. Maybe they become secretarial pool supervisors, but they don't move into other areas within an organization. They go back to grad school--if not medical or law, then architecture or education. Fund raising and development is a bit of an exception, but I'm sure that there will be on year certificate programs in that soon enough too.
Fuck Ohio State.
I realize I fucked up pretty much my entire chance at a decent professional life by going to grad school. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
116: Was Ogged young once? Must have been before my time.
Thread hijack, but:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/6941392.stm
is something I am finding inexplicably sad.
Must have been before my time.
Indeed it was, in the days of Zizka.
I have no degree, and I lucked into a good programming job before I had even finished high school. One side effect is that I have never been on the job market, and have no idea how it might work.
re: 122
There was a great interview with him recently on Newsnight where he was joking about how people suddenly stopped calling him a wanker once he got cancer.
ogged in 54: I actually did want to know, hooker.
(1.) Cala, what's wrong? Is the job market really that bad?
(2.) Of course this problem is one I've faced and continue to face, partly, because I can't be supported by my parents, but I wasn't just thinking of myself. I really think that we've taken credentialism way too far when every damn job requires some kind of post-graduate education, even though you still learn most of what you actually need to know on the job.
I'm basically a free-trader, but I can't stand the argument which says that the displacement caused by getting rid of free-trade barriers can be ameliorated through more formal education. Who's against more education? Well, I guess that I am.
I love formal education. I think a University education is a fine thing, but we all have to go into more debt acquiring post-graduate degrees to do things which we ought to be able to learn on the job.
The job market sucks. And I don't think I'm good enough to land a job. Blahblah on how education isn't means to an end but you know, whatever, it is.
My experience with corporate mobility is probably not typical, since I've mostly worked in a historically-male department in a historically-pink-collar segment of a historically-patriarchal industry at a firm who's previous, long-term CEO was a fairly unabashed pragmatic feminist. So I've seen lots of people, just as many women as men, start out as admins or mail-roomers and move up to being VPs. Some of them had humanities BAs and some had only HS diplomas or 2-year business/secretarial backgrounds. In fact, the Exec. VP who's in charge of our division of the company NEVER FINISHED HER BA AT ALL. And she went to a 2-tier state college too. So, yeah, youse guys with PhDs are all fucked.
Blahblah on how education isn't means to an end but you know, whatever, it is.
My mom said I should stop to appreciate how much I'd learned in getting my PhD, then I should go get a job selling cars, like my cousin.
I can't remember if you're still in grad school, or junior faculty somewhere?
Slol just started his job selling cars. Why do you ask?
132: It's hard to carry off real urbanity while selling used cars. Although the TV commercials are a sight.
I'm hoping that by not getting the PhD I won't be considered (erroneously) to be as overqualified for something as I would be if I were to get it. I want people at a place I want to work to stop and ask: "What kind of idiot would take so long to get an MA? The kind of idiot we hire."
Hey, what makes you think my cousin sells used cars? He's a class act.
I think I was at the end of the era in which you get a programming job with good aptitude but no programming experience and learn on the job.
Noooooo!
Another problem is that, at least for a certain sort of person, many of the jobs one could get one has prejudices against: secretarial work? offends my amour propre! Marketing? would be surrounded by marketers! And BG's right that, increasingly, the sort of work that one could learn on the job if reasonably intelligent is being offered mostly to people who studied some ad-hoc "major" in college that's really just corporate training pushed into the academy so that companies don't have to waste time on training. Though actually I was interviewed for a programming job at a financial institution in Chicago that had a four-month (or similarly rather long) paid training period, so it's not universal. But it does seem that you can either get a job where you don't need an applied major, but you will be worked 20 hours a day, or you can get one with a sane work week, but you'd better have studied the right things in college.
That's why I'm going to become an actuary. Or an actuary crossed with a dentist.
Ben w-lfs-n has never denied wanting to be an accountant.
My experience has led me to discourage the starry-eyed youth from going to grad school for a PhD (it's not worth the pain and sorrow) and to discourage the jaded ABD from leaving grad school before a PhD (it's not worth the pain and sorrow).
This of course involves telling both classes of people exactly what they don't want to hear.
It is also an area in which I, however improbably, agree with T. Burke.
Tim Burke, the man wreaking havoc and destruction with his pernicious procedural liberalism. You know, Captain Evil.
The Persian blog-proprietor is jestingly referring to the reasonable liberal from the east coast as an impresario of villainy.
Ah, yes. Of course. Well, Mr. Urbane must concede a point to ol' Captain Evil now and then.
slol, I'd decided not to go to grad school long before I came across that essay of Tim's, and mostly made my peace with that decision, but good lord was it a relief to read it and have my decision validated.
Also? I now read
Short answer: no.
Happy to point it out to you, Josh.
I just want to make sure: every single person referring to "grad school" here is using an implied "in the humanities", right?
discourage the jaded ABD from leaving grad school before a PhD
But for jaded ABD's with no funding at schools with high fees, encouragement is no longer an issue.
139: There's a wonderful line in Kay Jamison's memoir, "Graduate school was the fun I missed out on as an undergraduate," which always cracks me up. Her field was psychology, and her case is unusual in that she was very depressed and hypomanic in college but, though untreated, she was in remission during grad school. Grad school was also great in that you just had to perform ultimately; nobody cared how you did it or whether you showed up to class all the time.
I know one very happy priest who was dissuaded from pursuing a PhD in Medieval Studies, but he does have, in addition to an MDiv, a PhD in psychology (not the mathematical, experimental kind).
Actually, I read it a couple of years ago. Mostly I wanted to agree that you and Tim got it completely right.
Also, I want to find those people who were saying in the early '90s that we were just about to enter the golden age of the academic job market (as all the boomers would retire and open up vast numbers of tenure-track positions) and strangle them.
I know that being miserable is normal. It's just that I'm continually questioning why the hell I decided to spend my twenties being bored and miserable.
148: Ned my guess is that this applies to many social science types too, though they can probably get some think-tank jobs and work with public agencies.
Anecdotally, it's not unheard of in the hard sciences. A friend of a friend who is Chinese got a PhD in neuroscience from Yale and couldn't get a job. Everyone encouraged her to go to medical school, but she doesn't like blood (or maybe it was touching people), so she's going to law school and planning to do IP stuff. Still, it seems like a waste to me.
The careers of pure scientists in biomedical research who don't get funding are dead--unless they can go work for a pharmaceutical company, but in some areas that's not feasible. I think that all those people ought to go to medical school too. If the science part doesn't work out, they can always fall back on practicing medicine.
I intended to go into epidemiology, but it turned out that this department is virology. Yes, my decision-making process was as stupid as that sounds.
My parents often say that a college degree now is the equivalent of a high school diploma forty years ago. They generally say this while trying to convince me to go to grad school, but they're still right.
I have several friends with great lab skills and BSs in biology who do very well as techs. There are special med tech and lab tech programs, but these guys got jobs in research just based on the things they know how to do.
My ABD nephew does very well the same way, with good pay and plenty of job flexibility.
I know that being miserable is normal. It's just that I'm continually questioning why the hell I decided to spend my twenties being bored and miserable.
That is really an excellent question.
they just pay $18,000/yr to live in Manhattan
More like $25,000 these days, but that's still not enough. They're also impossible to get; I've been applying like mad for months now, and the result has been exactly one phone interview (for a job I learned today I didn't get). I think I'll stick with the law firm for a while.
156: That is totally true, but it's dumb. My creepy crazy roommate has a degree in med tech from one of the bad U Mass schools. She thinks that counts as a college education. I think it's the equivalent of high school, and, actually, she works as a secretary now, anyway.
In the 60's you could get a BA in History, get put in a training program and make a career. Some people went to business school straight out of college, but an MBA was a pretty rare thing. Very few people had fancy summer internships.
We shouldn't all have to go to graduate school, and personally, I think that fewer people should go to college. Everyone who has an aptitude for academic work and who wants to go shoudl go to a 4 year-college, but it shouldn't be necessary for entering/ staying in the middle/lower-middle class. Who needs to get a BA in Human Resources management?
Noooooo!
1) You have way more programming experience than I had when I left college. I was a math geek but not at all a computer geek (another sign of how much more common computers are now than they were 10-15 years ago, if I were in HS now I would almost certainly be doing some computer programming).
2) As I said, my observations may not be representative. I suspect that everyone with programming ambitions in the area moves to Seattle, so all the entry level programming jobs are there as well.
The humanities seldom prepare someone for a job. A med tech degree is far more advanced than HS, and it prepares you for a career. Lots of BAs end up going back to JC-type programs to get employability.
I've written tens of thousands of words on this. To me the problem with the humanities PhD is double: 1.) it doesn't necessarily lead to a good job and b.) the strangulating methodologies usually imposed take the fun out of the "cultural enrichment."
The problem is really bad. In Mongol studies, a fascinating field, one of the best guys (Paul Buell) has never had a tenure-track job, and another (Timothy May) works at some godawful place in Georgia.
In the 60's you could get a BA in History, get put in a training program and make a career.
This still existed when I finished college. At least there was an ad running on my college's job listing site for some finance type company (an old and established one, but I don't remember the name) that singled out humanities/social science majors as preferred recruits. It sounded extremely competitive with really long hours, but those who made it through the training would make a lot (and probably keep the long hours).
162: What I find infuriating about her is that she thinks she considers herself an educated person because she had a smattering of poorly-taught non applied courses, but she's not literate.
163: I think that life for white, college-educated men was a lot less competitive 40-50 years ago, and the hours were much better. Mostly it is good that the world has changed, but shorter hours would be better and not needing to know what you want to do with your life at 19 would also be good.
What I find infuriating about her is that she thinks she considers herself an educated person because she had a smattering of poorly-taught non applied courses, but she's not literate.
How does she work as a secretary if she can't read?
every single person referring to "grad school" here is using an implied "in the humanities"
i.e. not the sciences; I think the difference is one of (significant) degree, but not of kind.
40-50 years ago the rest of the previously industrialized world had been bombed to hell in WWII and women weren't working. Made things much easier on the white men, although it also calls to mind Megan's post about the water distribution in the California desert and how quickly things get perceived as rights no matter how unsustainable they are.
I dunno.
167: But with a science Ph.D. you can usually get a job in industry doing research, even if it is somewhat more applied.
I guess I can always be a really smart mom!
169: That's what I always thought too, but Pfizer's just laid off a bunch of people. Anyway this person with a PhD in neuroscience couldn't get a job. A BA in nursing would be a better bet.
I don't know if it's a sign of growing insanity that, as the years go by, getting an econ degree and doing something economical with it appeals to me more and more.
153:
It's just that I'm continually questioning why the hell I decided to spend my twenties being bored and miserable.
Yeah, it would be totally different if you were working unpaid overtime in some office job -- endless fun.
That is admittedly very important to happiness.
I'm going through a pretty good period right now, when money isn't a debilitating problem and I'm really enjoying my work. I'll get back to you when I'm preparing for exams.
I'd at least be making more money and talking to more people during the day.
this person with a PhD in neuroscience couldn't get a job
This sounds like there's more to the story. Jobs requiring bio-ish PhDs are totally available. There's totally not a lack of challenging, paying opportunities out there for PhD'd scientists once you forsake academia...
Peeve: realizing that liberal art college faculty salaries (and some research school salaries) are less than what I'm making as a postdoc...
is the implication that he would never be intimidated by a male.
The "career opportunity" thing in IT has completely changed in the last 20 years. In our company, I don't think there's more than a handful of people over 40 who have a "relevant" degree, and almost nobody under 40 who hasn't.
I know a guy who left school to work in a factory, got a job in their IT department as a mainframe tape monkey, simply by expressing interest, and is now a shit hot Unix support wonk. Simply couldn't happen now, and I don't think that's a good thing.
Thank the random fluctuations of an uncaring universe the Netherlands have gotten quite that bad at demanding qualifications -yet. Wasted three years convincing myself that studying artificial intelligence was fun and rewarding, before deciding no it wasn't and more or less lucked into a decent career once I stopped going to university.
For those with some computer affinity but no qualifications, why not try testing? That's something any reasonable intelligent/creative person can pick the basics up off in a few weeks/months, it's fun and there's no real training for it yet apart from on the job training and the usual work training courses...
The company I work for doesn't do much training itself, but it reimburses for graduate school for admins or phone reps who want to go get an MBA (If you want a humanities degree I think but am not sure that you're on your own). Of course this means you have to go to school while holding down a full time job, so it's far from ideal, but at least it's a crack in the otherwise impenetrable facade of the upper tier, and doable for someone who doesn't yet have a lot of family responsibilities. It's people with Ivy MBAs that they actually go out and court.
I wish I had been hardheaded enough to get a degree in something employable. It would have saved me from many years of boring, boring jobs.
Counterfly in 177:
This sounds like there's more to the story. Jobs requiring bio-ish PhDs are totally available. There's totally not a lack of challenging, paying opportunities out there for PhD'd scientists once you forsake academia...
She's Chinese, so visa issues might have precluded her getting a job in the private sector. I don't know.
I guess I can always be a really smart mom!
Wow. Cala's got it bad. Someone stick an IUD in her quick!
I know a guy who left school to work in a factory, got a job in their IT department as a mainframe tape monkey, simply by expressing interest, and is now a shit hot Unix support wonk. Simply couldn't happen now, and I don't think that's a good thing.
This is just not correct. One of the best sysadmins I know, and the best one I work with, has a GED and zero college experience. Another guy I work with who is well on his way to becoming a shit-hot support wonk got hired into the company to do completely entry-level zero-skill work. My other friend who is currently a high-level sysadmin / all-around ops guy at a startup got a 4-year degree in some bogus business communications and ended up getting hired to do brainless desktop support stuff in the b school one summer. It happens all the time.
Jake, I'm delighted to hear that, but it isn't my experience. Maybe the good old USA still has a bit more social mobility left in it than Europe.
A BA in nursing would be a better bet.
If you have an RN, you can always get a job monitoring clinical trials, which pays decently and won't even require you to touch a patient ever. As long as you don't mind lots and lots of air travel.
I've known several people to train-on-the-job for tech work in the last 10-15 years, but they weren't paid on a level with credentialed people and couldn't move to new companies, at least not easily. Credentials are portable.