Career paths that are, or have become, elite-or-bust

Parents Forum
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If the poster indicated her son had an interest in CS, I didn’t see the post. I think it’s fair to say that the higher salary per hour worked type jobs generally require something unique that not every graduate has. It is typically unique experience/knowledge/skill set related to the specific major, such as a wanting to hire someone who knows how to program in C++ and Python very well and has related work experience + major; but it can also be unique characteristics of the particular applicant.

There are numerous other majors besides CS associated with this type of higher salary due to specific knowledge/experience/skilset. Some examples are below. In many of these fields <= 40 hours is common. For example, I personally know some health workers in my area who earn 6 figures with a 12x3 = 36 hour work week, giving them 4 days off per week. I realize that the OP probably has no interest in most of these. They are just a small sample of possible examples, with only a bachelor’s.

  • Most Types of Engineering
  • Some Types of Nursing and Health Related Fields
  • Pharmacy / Pharmacology / …
  • Statistics / Math / Accounting
  • Some Types of Physics

There is also not a strict black and white division between some majors being high salary and others low salary. Instead there are many shades of gray, with a wide range of possible salaries. There are often also a wide range of possible salaries within a particular major, depending on the specific field of employment. For example, working for a private firm may pay better than a non-profit; yet many would still prefer the latter.

Salary prospects should be one factor considered in major and career direction, but one needs to balance it with personal enjoyment and interest. Not everyone can find work that they genuinely enjoy enough to do for free, but there are at least different levels of being miserable vs being tolerable.

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Drive, some creativity, gaining industry knowledge, understanding people, and personality/sales skills.

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Nursing, while relatively well-compensated compared to many other majors straight out of a degree program, tends to top out below the, say, top 5th percentile. That tends to be true for many of the allied health fields, actually.

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Data science would require more statistics and computing knowledge than most college social science majors acquire through their course work, but a social science major intending on data science as applied to social science could add additional statistics and CS courses. Some colleges (e.g. UCB) do have specific data science majors.

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Nurses also seem to have significant dissatisfaction and distrust of their employers. At most large hospitals and medical groups around here, nurses have unions (employees form unions because they are dissatisfied with their employers), and picketing and strike threats seem to occur every few years at each hospital or medical group (when the contract is being renegotiated).

Other health care workers (besides physicians) also seem to have significant dissatisfaction and distrust of their employers, which has been noted as a factor in low COVID-19 vaccine uptake, particularly in places like nursing homes.

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The notion of coding as “40 hours” doesn’t match my experience. I will add that some of the work done in a 60 hour week could probably be completed in 40 hours with better personal time management. But many tech companies have ongoing fires to fight, and it’s not usually a job you can put aside and forget for 16 hours, let alone go on an undisturbed vacation for a week.

I’m not saying it’s arduous work. I have always enjoyed programming. There are also probably companies that have more predictable hours. It just isn’t the first thing that would come to mind when recommending software as a career.

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A career path that is well compensated straight of college and has a potential for a near 95th percentile salary later on would certainly meet my definition of “high salary.”

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There are definitely companies that have more predictable hours. If you look at surveys of how long persons with the job title “software engineer” work, the median consistently is reported to be in the 40-50 hour per week range.

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Well, rotating on-calls, though they do not necessarily add up in average hours, can be disruptive. They also seem to be more the norm now than when I was getting started.

I agree it depends on the job, but salaries vary as well. Not everyone with the title “software engineer” is getting a high salary. Also, 50 hours/week is a long way from 40 hours/week.

The main area where I’d disagree is any suggestion that it’s a low stress job. If you love your work, you can do a lot of it, and in this case it does pay well. But if you hate programming or struggle with it, it is just better to find something else.

(And on that note, the number of people who consider it an improvement to “move up” to management suggests to me that maybe they didn’t really love all that coding after all.)

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As an example, a CS related salary survey is at Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019 . Median salaries were in the low 6 figures, with variation by job title. The median hours per week was 42-43 hours for job titles most similar to SW engineer. The only job title that had >45 hours per week was “Senior Executive/VP.” There are a variety of companies that are different for various reasons, but I think a median of a little over 40 hours per week is far more typical than extreme hours.

I also work in tech and regularly work with SW engineers. One thing that has changed recently is a good portion of employees are working from home, which can make the division between work and relaxing at home more blurry. For me personally, this has led to increased average hours, although for others it has led to decreased hours. I’d expect the net result would be a larger SD in hours worked among different employees, but have yet to see any specific numbers.

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Software developers / QA / etc. also may be more prone to working less-traditional hours, so it may seem like some were working outside of traditional “work hours” more, even if they did not work more than about 40 hours total per week. Working from home was already common before 2020, although only occasionally for most. But the COVID-19 switch to working from home all or most of the time may have caused “work hours” to be even less of 4 hour block - lunch - 4 hour block patterns that “work hours” traditionally were seen as when people commuted to the workplace daily.

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My point is that most nurses (those outside of maybe a few high-priced metros or certain specialties or in administration) top out well below the 95th percentile in comp.

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Nursing wages do vary significantly by region. For my state , which is also the state that the OP and her son live in (CA), the BLS lists an annual mean wage of $121k for the 307,000 RNs in 2020. This is not quite as high as the $138k mean annual salary listed for the 250,000 software developers in CA, but more than the listed mean salary for computer programmers, more than most fields of engineering, and well within the range that most would consider high salary. RNs was the highest salary occupation in CA that employed >250k persons and was nearly double the listed mean overall salary for CA full time workers.

I agree that many regions are substantially lower than CA. However, there are also many subspecialties of health related fields that are substantially higher than the overall average for RNs. In any case, my post said “Some Types of Nursing and Health Related Fields,” not all nurses in all regions of the United States.

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For my nearly PhD, now teaching, kid in the music field, health insurance is the main worry, not fame and fortune- especially if the ACA goes away.

There is a false idea here that those in dance, theater, music, art or film want to somehow make it big, make it into the elite. But, as an example, not every musician wants to play in an orchestra or be famous like Yo Yo Ma. Many will freelance, and participate in the gig economy, including those with jobs as adjuncts. In return for artistic freedom, my kid is actually avoiding the nearly corporate “elite” art and music worlds.

This thread was so depressing I came back to it today to express a little more positivity. There is a huge gray area between elite or bust where people can thrive.

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My impression is that many people who post here are upper middle class+ and, as such, worry that their kids won’t enjoy the same standard of living that they do – especially if their kids aren’t interested in STEM fields. There are a lot of ways to be self supporting and enjoy a good quality of life that don’t require a STEM background. Whether those will be “elite” jobs is another question. My personal observation is that those who enjoy the greatest material success have personal qualities that allow them to thrive regardless of what their background is.

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One of my other kids makes a lot of money in STEM and isn’t very happy. He may downgrade from his relatively “elite” career to live in the aforementioned gray area and do more kayaking :slight_smile:

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I think one issue is that there are different definitions of “elite”. Is it simply a top 5% salary? Or is it a “society-defining” job (whatever that means - perhaps something that others would remark on at a party or lead to you getting your name in the newspaper or being interviewed on TV?), which may or may not have a high salary?

For example a nurse or software engineer could well have a top 5% salary without doing anything to define society, and a ballet dancer could be a star performer but barely make more than a living wage. I think this thread originally started as a discussion more focused on the latter (careers where you need to be a star performer just to get regular paid employment), which now includes not just traditional superstar-oriented fields like the arts, music, acting, etc but other fields that weren’t always like that such as journalism and academia.

Nevertheless, that still leaves a vast array of non-STEM fields which are usually not “society-defining” but lead to steady though not necessarily highly paid employment. Some of those careers even have very significant rewards (and become “society defining”) if you are amongst the most talented and successful, for example if you end up as a senior executive in a company or government body. But that doesn’t make those jobs “elite or bust” unless you think that your kid won’t be able to have an adequate standard of living without a top 5% salary.

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If he currently makes elite levels of pay, but lives much less expensively, then he may be in one of these situations:

  1. He can take a significantly lower paying job that still provides the income needed to live.
  2. He may be building up significant savings and investments so that even if he takes a job that pays less than the income needed to live (or retires completely), the investment gains will provide sufficient money to live.
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Yup.

Having too little money makes people unhappy. Having a lot doesn’t necessarily make people happy. I think our family has kind of a Goldilocks approach :slight_smile:

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This is a good point. I don’t really expect my kids to share my financial success unless they’re lucky, as I was, to get into the right field at the right time. I went into computer science because it really excited me to get machines to do their magic for me, and that was at a time when they did very little unless you could program them yourself. Times are different now and my kids never shared the same passion though they were “exposed” to Scratch, Python programming, Lego robotics, Arduinos, etc. from an early age.

The “elite” side has been an issue for a long time. E.g., many people can write stories, but few can make any living at all as novelists. When I was finishing grad school, the prospect of getting a faculty position in CS was so competitive that I naturally switched to industry. In the late 90s dot com boom, that still had a wild west feel to it, but today, it’s more of a winnowing process with expectations of internships and so on. It’s absolutely nothing like the dispiriting process of becoming a doctor or law partner, but it’s not the free-for-all it once was.

On the “bust” side, the first post defined it as “someone who is or could be (merely) good at the job has little or no chance of making it a career.” What does “career” mean? Suppose you play the violin well enough to be hired in a string quartet for weddings? Is that “bust”? It might not pay enough to support a household by itself. Is it enough to contribute significantly? Even in that case, supply probably exceeds demand. But someone who has put their best years into it may still find it fulfilling to be remunerated to any extent for their passion instead of finding more reliable work in a field that interests them little.

My hope for my kids is not “top 5%” anything. I would like them to be able to have a job with health coverage (assuming that’s still how it’s mostly delivered in the US), be able to get a lease without expecting me to co-sign anything, and to be able to support a family if they so choose, not all of this immediately out of college, but after a few years of employment. I’d like them to be in a position of putting a down payment on a house in their 30s with money they’ve earned themselves (probably not in the Bay Area but somewhere). These should not be crazy goals, though they increasingly seem to be.

Ideally, I would like their college degree to enhance their employability in some way. That doesn’t mean I’d feel bad if they were working at a Starbucks for a few years, but even getting a job like that takes some gumption. Nobody hands it to you. It has always benefited me to be able to fall back on: whatever kind of personal impression I make, I have specific skills that I know somebody will pay me for.

“Bust” for me simply means that they get the degree, have no idea what to do with it, and come back to their parents for support. It’s an unpleasant situation all around, and I have seen even some highly educated people fall into it.

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