One of the things that I did while here in Los Angeles was check up on the fates of recent MIT graduates to see how their scientific and technical educations are panning out. Here are the vital stats for one fellow:
- Age: 23
- Occupation: Selling mortgages to people with poor credit records who are buying houses worth $700,000 to $1 million
- Income: Over $150,000 per year (commission-based)
- Boss: High school graduate; never attended college.
- Colleagues: Mostly high school graduates.
- Rent: $2300 per month for great 2BR apartment (shared)
- Social Life: Meeting frisky young ladies (2X/week)
- Dream: Break into the entertainment industry
I attended a taping of Last Call with Carson Daly in Burbank. The “Audience Coordinator,” (a.k.a. Usher) was a young male college student. He said college was a waste of time toward his goal of making it in entertainment.
I wish I could start over. I’m a 47 yo “individual contributor” in the tech field and I know my days are very numbered. I hope that kid is saving at least a third of his gross. And I wish him good luck in the entertainment field, because tech is dead (if you want a fun, rewarding and stable career).
tech is dead? …maybe she is just a sleeping beauty ready to be awaken.
digital life is just beggining and pervasive computing is already taking us away just in the thought of the emerging possibilities.
…even awaken, tech is also too mysterious and scary to become Narcissus
Nah, tech ain’t dead, but I do not believe it will be the multi-generation career path the automobile industry was.All of my kids are fairly competent with computers (at least as good as most support techs I deal with), but they are very clear that they do not want to do it for a living.As a platform, ubiquitous computing will continue to be huge. Sure, it would be nice to attract a million eyebalss (is that dated?) and get paid for developing original content or fronting for a bunch of great writers, but even a realtor, loan agent, sales manager, etc… will need to have a real ‘feel’ for the technology to get ahead.
if he applied his MIT technical skills and automated or improved the process he could conceivably make 10x that. what’s the difference between the 150k+ from sales at a mortgage broker vs. the salary+stock from some tech company?
DC: The difference between $150k+ and what a fresh MIT grad would earn from some tech company is around $75k/year. On a per-hour basis, of course, the mortgage work would come out to more than 2X. You’re right that if he applied his MIT technical skills and started a company like Google, he could conceivably make $billions and have a Boeing 767 as his personal aircraft. Of course, it might be better to plan a career as a movie star instead. His personal wealth would be limited only to the hundreds of $millions, in all likelihood, but he would get invited to a lot of fun parties.
Folks: Incidentally, I’m not sure why the commenters are most interested in this guy’s income. That was one of only eight statistics that I cited to summarize how he is living. On the job part, I thought the most ironic part was that his boss had so much less formal education (2nd most ironic part is that his entire four-year investment in MIT has thus far proved to be of no career value, since his employer is perfectly happy to hire high school grads for the same job). On the life part, I thought the two-new-girls-a-week was worthy of some discussion.
I also think it is interesting that a mortgage company can afford to pay so much for originating mortgages. You’d think that the Internet would have squashed the margins and commissions down almost to nothing. If we really are to be a society where most of us spend most of our time selling and reselling the same scraps of land to each other, you’d think that we would get good enough at it that the transaction costs would be lower.
Finally, there is the question of what happens to investors in $1 million mortgages when the people who are moving into the houses don’t tend to pay their bills.
Phil, the internet has not squashed down profit margins yet because people (even surprisingly in the tech saavy DC area) don’t fully utilize it. I can’t tell you how many people of recent recollection have negotiated a car price in person. There is virtually no need to do that. Getting a car priced out on the net is easy work compared to the face time some consumers bother with to obtain a lesser bargain that could have been had if they let their fingers do the walking.
As far as the social life, it is an intriguing statistic, but too vague to invite comments. Who are these women, how does he meet them, what do they do, why exactly 2x per week…?
K: I didn’t think I would need to draw a picture to illustrate how a newly acquainted young man and young woman would entertain themselves in L.A. Let’s just say that no solving of differential equations are involved and therefore the MIT education isn’t being worked too hard. One could argue that the concentration of attractive and agreeable young women is one of L.A.’s best assets and that not taking advantage of the situation would be like living in Paris and never visiting the Louvre.
my ex-gf done the same thing; studied biology for 5 years in the best college in Boston and prepared herself for med-school. drove me nuts with the damn biology and even wrote a few papers accepted at conferences. at the end she sent all this to hell and went to morgage selling. same 2x biz; aparently concentration of attractive and agreeable young & not so young guys is one of Boston’s best assets….
Regarding career choice, engineering is one of the most boring things possible. You know it, and they know it – I can’t count the times I mumbled something instead of saying I’m doing a PhD in comp sci because otherwise bye bye girl.
For me, computer science has been nice until now, it IS boring but otoh so easy so you can do it and keep on with your social life. Now things are getting more complex, the prospect of a job in IT is so terrifying that even though I am a very lazy person AND i have a phd in the area i’m looking at something – anything – else to do. Yes, media is nice. Yes, if I where to choose a career now, I would definitely do something in that direction.
Tech is not dead. It is going back to the people it rightfully belongs to – the ones who can spend months on designing a better bolt. The brilliant people are over it, and on to other things.
Phil: need I remind you that differential equations are ideal for modelling heat and liquid transfer dynamics? Not to speak of rigid body motion…
“On the job part, I thought the most ironic part was that his boss had so much less formal education”
How ironic is this really? Does formal education only expand ones’ mind? Or does it allow like-minded people to closely interact, feed of each other, network together, and connect each other to excellent career opportunities? A college grad will have choices. Choices a non-gad may not have.
While you can discuss, at length, each stat, Age 23, and Income $150,000+ /yr. really stand out.
“2nd most ironic part is that his entire four-year investment in MIT has thus far proved to be of no career value, since his employer is perfectly happy to hire high school grads for the same job”
A similar parallel to the days when Starbucks used to insist on a college degree to steam milk and place a mug under a spout.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the time value of money and career. Real Estate is “hot” right now; it seems as though many of the people who were shaken out of “tech” transitioned into that industry. I happen to think it is a bubble, and just like tech circa 1999, it won’t keep going “up” indefinitely. I remember a lot of people spitting HTML tags for lots of money who don’t really have much to go on nowadays.
So, it appears that the question about the MIT education depends on whether a person is looking at a 2 year time horizon or a 30 year one. Assume someone rides a bubble, is unemployed, and then jumps to the next bubble, over and over. The first question is what the chances are in the “get rich quick” industries that rise and fall. The second question is how much the downtime costs during the dry spells.
The high school graduate as a boss as well as high school graduate coworkers also intrigues me. There is more to an education than just dollar figures and I’m somewhat surprised that a person from MIT wouldn’t want the sort of colleagues that he had in university – perspective, ability to discuss issues, multi-disciplinary, and so on. Culture, to be blunt. I don’t think a university education is a prerequisite for this but, from experience, I think it is almost always the exception that a person with little formal education in a bandwagon industry might be interested in something like philosophy.
Maybe it’s a pipe dream but I wish I’d gone to MIT for the supercomputers, graduate students, conversations, ideas, and architecture. The ROI would have been at the back of my mind, and I’m sure I’d have done just fine.
As someone with industrial engineering degree and a business masters on cis (from Cuny) who works in the entertainment industry (music royalties) I was rather surprised by his dream.
who makes $150,000 in the music industry??
Incase it’s directly proportional with salary, If I made what he was making then I’d be meeting frisky ladies in the amount of 10x/week… Not just young ones though. That’s poor taste.
David,
Many (degreed) engineers would define “culture” as “Reading Heinlein/Star Trek at a strip club,” and can’t afford opera tickets.
Personally, the ability take gorgeous starlets to highbrow cultural events is more attractive to me than discussing the conjugation of Klingon verbs with a pot-bellied programmer with crumbs in his beard and a moderate case of body odor. But whatever turns you on, I guess.
Philip,
I am happy that your contact in SoCal is doing great economically and socially. However, I have to question the purely mercenarial approach to life and career that he has taken. First, not all people are capable of commission-based selling. Of those that are, many would detest this occupation actively. I would speculate that among MIT tech graduates and tech geeks in general, where introverts probably predominate, these percentages are even lower. So: if your friend is an extrovert who is happy in his current line of business, I question the wisdom of his major/college choice. If he is a more “normal” introverted engineer/scientist type, he made the conscious choice of trading an occupation suitable to his personality type for high income and social opportunities. Nothing wrong with this choice…
I’m not surprised that someone who spent years of hard work and probably lots of borrowed money getting a degree is in a big hurry to get a job that pays and stop living like a monk. The giddiness of spending all day getting paid to do work instead of paying to do work takes a while to wear off, and I imagine that the charms of women attracted to money takes a while too.
Anyway, how smart is it to enroll in an extremely expensive engineering school in the middle of a huge tech crash (enrolled in 2001 or 2002?) and a larger trend of high technology labor outsourcing? Some folks I know saw the grim tech labor market as a sign that it was a good time to go back to school, but not as a means to jump right back onto the same rollercoaster that just dumped them off and left them feeling sick. Maybe when the housing bubble bursts and the get-rich-quick job hoppers can’t find any more rubes, he’ll have to go get a real day job as a techie while telling everybody that he’s really an actor. That’s what folks do in Hollywood, right? 🙂
1) mtg brokers hire when rates are going down and fire when rates are going up. He has a lot of risk involved. the number of people involved is roughly proportional to the mortgage origination index.
2) being a _good_ mortgage broker actually does save the client a _ton_ of money. it is actually a constrained but fuzzy optimization problem; an MIT grad may well be more creative and better able to solve this problem than someone else.
>> Finally, there is the question of what happens to investors in $1 million mortgages when the people who are moving into the houses don’t tend to pay their bills.
As it turns out, the government bails them out. I wonder how this guy is doing nowadays since the sub-prime lending bubble has burst. 🙁