Update on son’s job search

In MS > PhD I posted

I have once again seen that in engineering fields, a Master of Science is a more valuable degree than a Doctor of Philosophy.  My son (who just finished his M.S .in computer science) has been on the job market for a few weeks and has just gotten his first job offer.  The salary is larger than the salary offered to a new engineering faculty member at UCSC who has a Ph.D. and 3 or 4 years of postdoc training (in fairness, his is a 12-month salary offer while the faculty member’s is a 9-month salary, which could be supplemented another 22% if the faculty member gets grants to fund it).

For that matter, his starting salary would be over three-quarters of my salary as a full professor with a Ph.D. in computer science and 37 years of experience.  It is easy to see why academia has a hard time hanging onto engineering faculty, when industry is willing to pay so much more for shorter hours.

I’ve no idea whether my son will accept the job offer. He has had serious interviews at 4 companies, so may be getting more offers soon—he is down in Santa Barbara for a 2-day interview right now.

As it turned out, my son got three job offers in the past week, each more lucrative than the one before.  He had to make his decision yesterday, which was rather stressful for him, as each of the job offers had its own strong points. One was in San Francisco, near enough to BART, MUNI, and Caltrain that he could live anywhere is a large area and commute to work by public transit (they even pay a commuter allowance). The one that paid the most was in Santa Clara, which has a huge concentration of tech firms, but is a bit short on housing for the tech workers—he would have had to do a long bike commute or taken the light rail for about 45 minutes from Mountain View or San Jose.  The company with the widest variety of different contracts and clients and probably the most stability was in Santa Barbara, where he could get housing in walking distance of the office.

All the job offers paid more than  enough for him to live on, even if he joins the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) crowd and saves half his income for early retirement. They all had decent benefits (health, dental, 401k, stock grants/options, … ), though the details varied.

This was a difficult decision for him—choosing between three highly paid jobs that were well suited to his interests (first-world problems, right?).

In the end he went with the lowest offer, not the highest, because it seemed to be the most exciting work and the best location—the job is near transit in San Francisco, and he is thinking of living in Berkeley.  It was also the smallest company, being a 40-person startup, so he will probably get a variety of different tasks and relatively rapid promotion.  The stock options could become either extremely valuable or worthless, depending what happens to the company in the next two or three years. Berkeley seems to have a few community theater groups, which means he may be able to continue acting, even as he works his day job.

Running hiatus

I am going to stop running for a few weeks and reassess my goals.  What triggered this change was my annual physical, where I got some of my various aches diagnosed.  There were three main outcomes:

• It is worth trying ezetimibe in addition to my current rosuvastatin to see if that controls my cholesterol better—it is probably less of a risk than increasing the statin dose.  Interestingly, my insurance requires prior authorization for ezetimibe (a $9/month generic), which makes no sense at all.  I’ll probably be paying for the prescription without insurance, since the full price will be less than the insurance co-pay would be.  (They don’t pay for the $6/month rosuvastatin either.)
• My elbow injury is probably tennis elbow (lateral epicondylitis), for which I’ve been prescribed stretching and strengthening exercises.  I’ll also start wearing one of the tennis-elbow braces that wraps around the forearm.  I’ve had elbow inflammation before (due mainly to bad keyboarding posture), so I know more or less what to do about it.
• The ache in my hip that I’ve had since last August is osteoarthritis, as I suspected (confirmed by X-ray). This is bad luck, but not unusually bad luck—the incidence of hip arthritis among men my age is about 12%, if I’m reading the literature correctly.  Experts seem to disagree about whether running is safe for people with hip arthritis, but even those who recommend running agree that one needs to change to low-impact running styles and do other exercises to stretch and strengthen muscles to avoid further injury to the joint.  Almost all recommend working with a sports medicine specialist and physical therapist trained in running and arthritis to determine exactly what is reasonable.  I’ll probably be doing that when I have some spare time (this summer?).

I was just feeling good about having done a 5km run last weekend, albeit at a slow pace (8:35 mile pace), and now it looks like I won’t be increasing my distance to 15km this summer as I had planned.  I may never run a marathon—I should have tried 20 years ago, when my body was better able to tolerate abuse and recover from it.

Thinking about charity

As I enter what university-development people optimistically call the “wealth-distributing years”, I’ve been thinking about increasing the amount I give to charity.  Currently, the amount I give is modest (about 2.5% of gross household income), but I’ve determined that I now have more than enough retirement savings and income, and my son is finished with college, so I can up my giving substantially, without much risk of running out of money in my lifetime.

My wife and I will be discussing who we want to give to and at what level over the summer (when we time to think about something other than work).  I mentioned my intention to up my level of giving to charity to my son,  and we had a discussion about the philosophy of charity. He suggested a long reading list that has shaped his own approach to charity (he plans to be more generous than me, initially giving 10% of his gross income to charity).

Here is what my son sent me:

Here are some of the essays that shaped my views on charity and philosophy. I don’t expect you to fully agree with them (I certainly don’t), but most of the arguments that I was making are derived from these essays. If you’re only going to read a few, they are organized in roughly decreasing order of importance.

A series on the basic principles of effective altruism (though with a weird writing style):

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZzefKQwAtMo5yp99/circular-altruism

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpDnRCeef2CLEFeKM/money-the-unit-of-caring

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3p3CYauiX8oLjmwRF/purchase-fuzzies-and-utilons-separately

A good FAQ about giving, specifically giving 10% of income:

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/frequently-asked-questions/

About political activism and what it means to be a good person:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/

About animal welfare and local giving:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/04/a-series-of-unprincipled-exceptions/

About existential risk:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/12/stop-adding-zeroes/

About political giving:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/22/beware-systemic-change/

About classifying good and bad:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/16/the-economic-perspective-on-moral-standards/

About spreading donations over multiple charities:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/04/ozy-vs-scott-on-charity-baskets/

Anecdotes about the weirder aspects of the movement:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/16/fear-and-loathing-at-effective-altruism-global-2017/

And, finally, some feel-good news:

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2015/12/bednets-have-prevented-450-million-cases-of-malaria/

I don’t have time right now to read everything here—certainly not and think about it carefully, which is what I need to do—so I’m putting the list up on my blog so that I can find it again easily.  I’ve not started on the reading yet.

I expect to write future blog posts as I work my way through the list.  I suspect that I’ll find things that I agree with, things that sound good but I’m not convinced by, and things I disagree with.  I’ll probably be asking readers for help thinking about the things I’m not convinced by or that I disagree with.

MS > PhD

I have once again seen that in engineering fields, a Master of Science is a more valuable degree than a Doctor of Philosophy.  My son (who just finished his M.S .in computer science) has been on the job market for a few weeks and has just gotten his first job offer.  The salary is larger than the salary offered to a new engineering faculty member at UCSC who has a Ph.D. and 3 or 4 years of postdoc training (in fairness, his is a 12-month salary offer while the faculty member’s is a 9-month salary, which could be supplemented another 22% if the faculty member gets grants to fund it).

For that matter, his starting salary would be over three-quarters of my salary as a full professor with a Ph.D. in computer science and 37 years of experience.  It is easy to see why academia has a hard time hanging onto engineering faculty, when industry is willing to pay so much more for shorter hours.

I’ve no idea whether my son will accept the job offer. He has had serious interviews at 4 companies, so may be getting more offers soon—he is down in Santa Barbara for a 2-day interview right now.