4/4/2026 at 3:30:29 PM
Bertelsmann (the owner of Random House) is a for-profit corporation just like Palantir (a defense contractor), but the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally goodNo? The employees of Random House don't need to be paid as much because the supply of qualified candidates for those roles greatly exceeds the demand. There are lots of causes of that imbalance and most of them have nothing to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. It's also hard to get a job in the abusive video game development industry!
by tptacek
4/4/2026 at 3:46:55 PM
Where does the supply come from? You could still argue that people choose this as a career when they have the choice of better-paid ones, increasing the supply of people with the smarts and training needed by the publishers.I don't know if that's what's happening, but it might work towards TFA's point.
by dxdm
4/4/2026 at 7:46:28 PM
It probably has to do with the fact that we condition children and adolescents to consider white-collar jobs as more noble than blue-collar jobs, then we tell them that to get a good white-collar job, they need a degree... and then we make STEM degrees hard by subjecting students to more math than most people realistically need. So we have a lot of frontend developers who know calculus and an oversupply of people with humanities degrees.With that degree, you're generally pushed toward jobs in journalism, publishing, graphic design, teaching, administrative functions, and so on. Most of these pay relatively little.
by chromacity
4/4/2026 at 8:54:29 PM
Calculus is required for English degrees in other countries. Heck a lot of countries require some amount of calculus just to graduate high school.Same goes for the basics of statistics. A basic understanding of statistics is a requirement for any college degree in many countries, and for good reasons. Stats comes up all the damn time. From proper A/B testing, to marketing, to understanding public health emergencies, to making informed medical decisions.
by com2kid
4/5/2026 at 1:56:36 AM
I understand the value of statistics. But calculus? I say this, as someone who took 6 semesters of calculus in college.by aworks
4/5/2026 at 4:56:43 AM
6 semesters seems like... a lot? IIRC getting a math undergrad at my Uni didn't require that many classes of calc.I think calc 1 and 2 are extremely valuable. The concept of rate of change is fundamental to so many things in life, and understanding "area under the curve" is essential to understanding how many ideas are communicated, including lots of graphs in physics, chemistry, and economics.
Beyond that I feel calculus starts getting into specific applications and is less generally applicable to the populace at large.
by com2kid
4/5/2026 at 2:24:59 PM
6 quarters, not 6 semesters!Decades later, I wish I had more linear algebra.
by aworks
4/4/2026 at 7:47:46 PM
Publishing : standard English major career track :: Gaming : standard CS major career track.It's not much more complicated than that.
by tptacek
4/4/2026 at 10:40:55 PM
I don't think it's a matter of more 'noble', simply a more comfortable option if it's available to you. It has historically paid better and taken a lower toll on your body. The former is now less true, but the latter is still a big issue.by rcxdude
4/4/2026 at 8:13:50 PM
It's a shame that calculus isn't required by every college degree. Just because I'm not integrating functions during my normal work, doesn't mean I don't benefit from understanding the fundamental principles.by x3n0ph3n3
4/4/2026 at 8:29:14 PM
Yes, totally. I was about to undero surgery but found out the doctor didn't even know about Laplace transforms. He small-mindedly spent his formative years learning anatomy, never benefitting from the knowledge of frequency-domain derivatives. I dodged that bullet by storming out.by chromacity
4/4/2026 at 8:56:28 PM
You joke, but if you talked to a doctor of radiology odds are they at least took a class covering Fourier Transforms.by com2kid
4/4/2026 at 8:57:51 PM
Would you say the same about learning Christianity: maybe not directly useful for your job, however it is rather foundational to much of English society.by robocat
4/4/2026 at 10:44:03 PM
Yeah! I've found that learning the foundations of religions is a great way to inoculate people from worst aspects of those ideas.by x3n0ph3n3
4/4/2026 at 10:14:16 PM
The number of people with humanities degrees who also could successfully obtain a rigorous CS or engineering degree is not very large.I suggest you revisit your hypothesis with a little less bias.
by bpt3
4/5/2026 at 6:04:32 PM
The reverse is also true.My current hypothesis is that as AI forces software development down less and less deterministic pathways, I suspect that the value of a basic CS degree will diminish relative to humanities training. Comfort with ambiguity, an ability to construct a workable "theory of mind", and to construct unambiguous natural-language prompts will become more relevant than grokking standard algorithms.
by eszed
4/6/2026 at 12:39:31 PM
The reverse most certainly is not true, and even if it were it wouldn't matter.Humanities advocates have been hoping for the demise of valuable STEM degrees for at least the last 30 years. It's not happening for many reasons, of them being: All the skills you listed are also taught in an engineering and rigorous CS curriculum, plus those degrees provide validation that the individual is intelligent and determined enough to complete coursework that most people cannot.
by bpt3
4/6/2026 at 1:52:12 PM
I dunno, man. The difficulty (and resentment of having to even take them) most STEM majors had in my college-level writing classes causes me to doubt that, as does the general reaction on this board to any kind of problem / domain with irreducible ambiguity. But look, I'm not talking about the top ~10%, or whatever: the really smart kids can adapt to whatever gets thrown at them[0]. I'm doubtful that a 50th-percentile or below CS degree / student will retain the value that they've recently had - and given what I read on here about the present job market for new grads on here, that's maybe already happening.Anyway, I had to pick one, my money'd be on philosophy degrees rising in value: they're already sought out by financial firms. Have you seen the sort of analytical / symbolic reasoning they do?
[0] In fact, in case you didn't know, rigorous humanities programs and research involve an awful lot of statistics and coding, even though the dinosaurs that run the MLA and most English departments aren't able to handle it.
by eszed
4/6/2026 at 2:24:05 PM
> I dunno, man. The difficulty (and resentment of having to even take them) most STEM majors had in my college-level writing classes causes me to doubt that, as does the general reaction on this board to any kind of problem / domain with irreducible ambiguity.I don't think most STEM majors would be outstanding English Literature (or whatever humanities program you prefer) majors, but I do think they could manage to obtain a degree. Very, very few humanities majors could get an engineering degree.
And yes, the writing classes they force engineers to take are largely pointless and not enjoyable. Everyone with a degree got through them though, and I have to imagine the percentage of STEM students who washed out on that and not organic chemistry, compiler design, differential equations, etc. is extremely small (it was 0 out of the hundreds of people I knew at my school).
> But look, I'm not talking about the top ~10%, or whatever: the really smart kids can adapt to whatever gets thrown at them[0].
Sure. Very few of these kids are going into publishing, because they'll have more lucrative options and will pursue them.
> I'm doubtful that a 50th-percentile or below CS degree / student will retain the value that they've recently had - and given what I read on here about the present job market for new grads on here, that's maybe already happening.
That may be, but they're still in better shape than a 50% percentile humanities degree holder, who also is having the value of their skillset eroded by AI.
> Anyway, I had to pick one, my money'd be on philosophy degrees rising in value: they're already sought out by financial firms. Have you seen the sort of analytical / symbolic reasoning they do?
Lol, they are not "sought out" in any sense of the word. Philosophy majors at top tier schools are sought out because everyone at the school is sought out, not because they majored in philosophy.
And yes, I took a number of philosophy classes in college as an undergrad because they were easy (have you seen the analytical/symbolic reasoning required of EE or CS majors? It's a lot more difficult that what is required of philosophy majors).
by bpt3
4/7/2026 at 1:27:31 AM
> [50th percentile CS grads] are still in better shape than a 50% percentile humanities degree holder, who also is having the value of their skillset eroded by AI.That's the crux of it, and right now it appears to me that the ability to write unambiguous natural language prompts - in a variety of contexts, not specifically heavy-duty dev work - is going to be increasingly valuable. The 50th percentile english / philosophy grad is better at that than the 50th percentile CS major - while, at the same time, the bottom rungs of the developer ladder appear to have been kicked out.
I'm trying very hard not to make this into a "who's smarter?" question. That's a well-trodden and pointless argument, particularly if money is going to be the measuring stick. Besides, if that's where we're going, the finance bros and C-suite win, and do either of us think they're the geniuses in the room?
But, we'll see. We're living in Interesting Times.
by eszed
4/4/2026 at 10:12:40 PM
Most people don't have the "choice" of being an engineer or software developer currently.To be blunt, it's much easier for the majority of the population to get an English degree or some other generic liberal arts degree and therefore be qualified for an entry level job in the publishing industry.
I'm sure someone somewhere is giving up a highly lucrative job to roll the dice on the next great American novel, but it's not a meaningful number.
by bpt3
4/4/2026 at 4:06:44 PM
The specific analogy doesn't hold but the sentiment does.Instead of using Palantir, working at the FSF, the Linux Foundation, etc. It's not that they don't make good money, it's that it's often a fraction of what could be made at a comparable for profit company.
I think the video game industry is an apt comparison. The pay is often not very good with the motivation being, for many people, prestige based, in some form or another. I suspect there are analogies in the game industry and publishing 50-100 years ago.
by abetusk
4/4/2026 at 4:21:53 PM
Wouldn’t the supply of labor for a role or company increase if what the company do, books or video games, is associated to what most people see as good, therefore, they are more willing to build their long term skill sets in?That perceived associated goodness is what caused the increase in qualified candidates in the first place?
by claw-el
4/4/2026 at 8:56:02 PM
Technically yes, but it isn't just goodness. There are plenty of dirty jobs that do good and thus few people want it. The logical extreme is being a martyr - no pay and death but regarded as ultimate good.by Nasrudith
4/4/2026 at 10:47:07 PM
Being a farmhand is arguably one of the most goodness jobs. You are feeding everyone else with your labour... Somehow it is not very well paid or very popular job.by Ekaros
4/4/2026 at 3:49:14 PM
Some of it has to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. A lot of those jobs involve holding people's hands, "emotional labor", like nursing and teaching. These jobs are seen as something people (women, mostly) should do because they like being carers, rather than for the money. These jobs end up being paid less than they are really worth, especially since they often involve many hours without compensation.That's hardly the only factor here. In the end it's really about the fact that we appear to have an infinite appetite for blowing people up. ($1.5 trillion, next year, a full 50% increase at a time when we're supposedly needing to cut back.)
But don't discount the thumb on the scale against jobs like these. It's a persistent problem in many industries -- so pervasive that it just looks natural.
by jfengel
4/4/2026 at 4:03:24 PM
Nursing and teaching are surprisingly well-compensated fields with lots of job security and relatively straightforward entrance requirements. It's also true that both fields are valorized, but plumbing isn't and has the same dynamics. These arguments are all overdetermined.by tptacek
4/4/2026 at 11:30:10 PM
This depends wildly on the country, but in many, public school teachers are criminally underpaid.Nursing is also a hard job where the paycheck is nowhere near what doctors can earn.
by decimalenough
4/6/2026 at 1:08:30 AM
Very few professions in the world earn anywhere near what doctors can earn.by tptacek
4/4/2026 at 4:42:36 PM
That may be true elsewhere, but not in the USby beedeebeedee
4/4/2026 at 11:19:51 PM
Not hugely so. Teaching isn't paid megabucks but that's partly because it's a market for lemons - it's hard to tell a good one from a bad one (and people don't even agree in what it means to be educated, are facts or "critical thinking" more important, how about discipline vs temporary comfort) so there's no high paid super stars.There is a stereotype that teachers are low paid. Somewhat .... but there's a slight premium on doing meaningful work.
The whole premise that women are paid far less is kind of wrong anyway (or at best another outdated stereotype).
Childless men and women make about the same amount.
Women with children work fewer hours and share finances with men who work more hours, and apparently this is an injustice.
by wisty
4/5/2026 at 12:03:43 AM
Outside of low-population rural school districts, the idea that teachers are poorly paid --- at least for the last 30 years or so --- comes from people not understanding the value of a defined-benefit pension plan (and, if you want to go that far, that people don't understand the interplay between an annual salary and a huge number of days off work).by tptacek
4/5/2026 at 9:37:22 PM
I think the holdiays are offset by the nature of the job - even the lasiest teachers actually have to show up and work, they don't just type "camera issue" in a WFH meeting then watch Netflix (or do something just as pointless and lazy in a face to face meeting).If you're comparing teachers to nurses, sure nurses tend to have more pay but more hours and harder work. But most jobs that you can do with a BA in English (or any other degree that isn't either extremely competitive like medicine, or in a really high demand field right now), teachers get (at least) similar pay, for a similar amount of work (albeit compressed into the school calender). Especially if you consider benefits, as you point out.
by wisty
4/5/2026 at 11:43:56 PM
I think it's wild that the basis for comparison you have here is remote software developers in meetings. You know that everybody who works retail, manufacturing, hospitality, warehouses, and construction has to show up and work the same way, too?Yes: the kinds of people commenting on HN have it easier than just about anybody in the work force. That doesn't make us a reasonable bar for assessing the attractiveness of a job. Would you rather work as a teacher or a truck driver?
by tptacek
4/4/2026 at 4:58:26 PM
Could you be more specific? I don't know what you're referring to.by tptacek
4/4/2026 at 7:31:01 PM
Almost certain OP is referring to the fact that nurses and teachers are not well-paid or respected in the US, which I'd like to note as well. Despite this, Public Health as a pseudo-STEM major nearly ranks with STEM fields in general for majors seen as "workplace-ready."Maybe there are too many English majors (I honestly think the supply of careers is too low). But I think the "supply is greater than the demand" is possibly now more an explanatory argument for unemployment rates for Engineering and PT and other such quiescent majors. Certainly there are plenty of Ed majors for a field whose workers fled at pace earlier this decade.
Let's assume I'm teaching 25 or so Engl majors right now in a class with publishing as its central focus (hypothetically) at a state school. The students would neither be able to define "small press" nor name the big 5 - even the ones who just came back from AWP. The linked piece, I think, correctly names the romanticized vision of publishing that is divorced from understandings of the cost of living in NYC. I don't also think that college majors are actually all that itchy to get into editorial, whether or not they're all and every single one applying for the same pool of jobs.
by mold_aid
4/4/2026 at 7:37:42 PM
If the claim is "nurses and teachers are poorly paid in the US", that claim is broadly false. K-12 teachers in major metro areas in the US have surprisingly generous comp packages: well above area median take-home salary with predictable ladders, very good benefits, and defined-benefit pension plans.There are school districts where teachers are poorly compensated, but they aren't the norm over the population as a whole. Teachers are generally well-compensated.
Nursing, I don't know where to start.
by tptacek
4/4/2026 at 7:48:43 PM
Folks may talk past each other on this.Some people may say that nurses and teachers ARE NOT well-paid because those workers deserve to be paid more than they are.
Some people may say that nurses and teachers ARE well-paid because they are generally paid more than median wage.
As for some dry facts, median wages:
Registered Nurse $93,600
Public School Teacher $64,000
Private School Teacher $57,600
All U.S. Occupations $49,500
by djoldman
4/4/2026 at 7:53:10 PM
Complexifiers for teaching: K12 cash comp in major population centers (CPS, SFUSD, Philly, MSP, &c) is sharply higher than that median, and, more importantly, teachers get a huge amount of non-cash comp. Can't say enough how valuable a defined-benefit pension is. All-in comp for a lot of rank-and-file K12 teachers in major metros is competitive with software development (in those regions; obviously excluding SFUSD).by tptacek
4/4/2026 at 8:05:31 PM
Oh for sure. Many people are surprised to learn how much more public teachers make than private teachers :)A ton of details that medians aren't showing.
I was just mentioning why folks may be on different sides here. We should at least be talking about the same thing.
If it's a "they deserve" conversation, that's very different than others.
by djoldman
4/4/2026 at 8:07:21 PM
I think people can reasonably go back and forth about whether they should be more compensated, but I don't think there's a reasonable conversation to have about teaching not being a well-compensated career path. I know this surprises a lot of people.(My mom is a retired CPS teacher.)
by tptacek
4/4/2026 at 8:20:07 PM
I assume the CTU came up a lot at the dinner table, haha.Shrug clearly teachers are paid more than the median wage. There isn't much to argue there.
Modeling wage/salary is pretty straightforward for the majority of jobs (weighted by number of people working the job). There really aren't too many surprises.
Monopoly/Oligopoly union power, licensing, labor supply, regulatory/compliance restrictions/barriers, and product/service output value are pretty much most of it?
by djoldman
4/4/2026 at 8:58:48 PM
Hell if I know. This thread is based on a claim that people go into nursing and teaching out of altruism, and not for compensation. I'm pretty sure that's not true. Both are well-compensated, safe paths to a comfortable lifestyle and, especially for teaching, to a secure retirement.No teacher is going to tell you they're not altruistic, and that they're in it for the money. They see themselves as doing good, and I agree that they are. But that's not what drives entrance into those fields.
by tptacek
4/4/2026 at 8:24:05 PM
Many teachers need a masters degree, which is much less true of the average worker.by hoppyhoppy2
4/4/2026 at 9:05:00 PM
Nah, that argument isn't going to get us anywhere: big school districts actually have incentive plans to get teachers masters degrees. New teachers don't need them, the district will reimburse some amount of tuition, and set you up with tuition discounts at partner universities. Once you have the masters, you get a significant pay bump. The masters situation with K12 education is a benefit more than it is a cost.by tptacek
4/5/2026 at 12:49:18 AM
>that claim is broadly false.No, sorry, no, it is not "broadly false." K-12 salaries enter at average 40k often with a requirement to enter a graduate program within five years. I don't see that teachers in most states have received substantial increases in salary over any considerable period. They are underpaid.
Compensation rates are not "surprisingly good" (surprisingly?). Both groups merit much higher compensation. Your subjective consideration of "well-compensated" may differ from mine and fair enough, but I find generally one's position is more an index of their political beliefs (or sentiments towards unions in general) than any objective standard of what is "surprising" ("a retirement plan? In this economy?).
by mold_aid
4/5/2026 at 12:53:45 AM
You can just pick a city and Google median/mean salary for their school district to see that this isn't true. For what it's worth, the median cash compensation salary in my own high school district is six figures.The smirking "a retirement plan" comment you made leaves out the important bit: it's a defined-benefit plan. The point isn't that teachers shouldn't have defined-benefit pensions. The point is that those pensions are extremely valuable, and not at all a market-rate perk in the broader economy.
It's easy to win an argument with a straw man saying "teachers are overcompensated". It'll be harder for you to contend with the argument I'm actually making.
by tptacek
4/5/2026 at 1:46:16 AM
I'm not sure what argument you are making, but the opinion you expressed initially was:>Nursing and teaching are surprisingly well-compensated fields
To which somebody else said:
Not in the US!
And no, they aren't. And they're not "valorized." If salaries are surprising ito you, and if you say that doesn't mean "teachers are overcompensated," ok!, but I'm not sure where the argument with this straw man occurred. I know what the median salaries and general entry salaries for teachers are for my city, because I work with them (though not a k-12 teacher myself), I understand the debt calculations they have to make to continue, and I do not think they are well-paid.
But I did take your advice to google it and now I would say that teachers' incomes are described as "comparatively low" or "lagging behind cost increases" or "not keeping up with the rate of inflation" because in the results I see phrases like that quite a bit. So I wouldn't say that "surprisingly well-compensated" is actually true, and that "poorly paid" is "broadly false." In one relavant case I read "the 'benefits advantage' is not sufficiently large to offset the growing wage penalty for teachers."
by mold_aid
4/5/2026 at 2:00:03 AM
"People enter the profession of teaching for reasons other than altruism".In a given metro, you can simply look up the median income, then look up the median teacher's income --- it'll be higher, and that's before benefits.
I think it's good we compensate teachers well. I think it's bad that people don't understand how valuable defined-benefit pensions are, because they are an enormous component of state income taxes and, especially, property taxes --- property taxes are regressive, and promote a cycle of housing exclusion in areas of opportunity. If you think a defined-benefit pension is akin to a 401K, or that a private sector employee could reasonably expect to get one, I'd suggest you maybe read up a bit.
by tptacek
4/4/2026 at 9:04:34 PM
> well above area median take-home salaryFor someone with masters-level education and years of experience?
by gopher_space
4/4/2026 at 11:11:32 PM
No.by tptacek