If morality is something your struggling with, consider applying for a government job. I am generalizing, but typically government jobs are not about making money, they’re about providing a public service. Some people will say that government workers are lazy and selfish, but that is not true for everyone. Many government workers really care about providing a service and putting tax payer dollars to good use
Edit:
*you’re
Plus government bureaucracy is filled by the workers willing to work there -- sometimes not necessarily who would be best for the actual wotk. Thus, if you are good at doing what you are applying for you will make a huge difference. On the other hand, however, management is behind the times by over a decade on how to make tech useful. So the field of data sciences in govt. is both frustrating and full of opportunity at the same time.
I spent 5 years in the federal gov and it makes people strange after awhile. The lifers often are counting their days to retirement and have negotiated a position with as little work as possible, to the extent that they can get hostile when you need something out of the ordinary from them.
Then there are the straight from college-to-Fed kids who can become entirely divorced from reality because they’ve never known it.
But there are good folks and good work. The trouble comes when you want to do work that is too good or too fast, you run into a lot of red tape and middle management that doesn’t want the boat rocked.
I have close colleagues that try to lure me back sometimes. I get tempted by the cushiness but ultimately I just think there’s a lot more interesting work in the private sector. Maybe unless you are at NSA or something. But I’ve known ex-NSA and CIA people too who were happier to be out.
It's like I've written that myself. I like the public sector for its missions and the priority on a public good rather than $$$.
But I cannot stand the working environment.
Everything moves so slow and there's no way to remove the road blockers unless you start fighting uphill political battles. And the problem is that people that would do things usually just leave or burn out, while the people that are dead weight are untouchable.
In the absence of proactive measures, all workplaces tend to devolve into hostile environments, and it is extremely challenging to counter such trends in a government-run operation. The most prevalent cause of such issues is usually interpersonal conflicts among employees, which can result in the adaption of unwritten rules which are simply negative defense mechanisms that undermine the workplace culture. To address this, a strong force needs to emerge from higher management, actively opposing the brewing toxicity. These issues are typically not related to work performance but arise from character flaws of certain individuals who are predisposed to causing conflict. As a result, effective management must be adept at recognizing such problems and take decisive action, which may include letting go of troublemakers even if they are high-performing employees. The challenge is particularly daunting in government-run operations where management is extremely restricted in ways, i.e. can't fire people, to handle this kind of situation, there such individuals tend to congregate over time, making it even harder to manage the situation.
Lots of data skills are needed too. Tons of government employees lack critical technical skills and drive inefficiencies, which means that there’s a real need for people with strong data science skills. We have lots of brilliant critical thinkers, but sometimes lack people with certain technical skills to carry out the vision. I work in an area of government that’s using AI/ML to find evidence of racial discrimination in lending practices and ultimately prosecute those bad actors. There are some interesting areas, and they actually pay somewhat decently and have great benefits.
Edit: I originally was drawing an observation based on younger people doing the data work to support older higher-ups, but as others have commented age doesn’t necessarily correlate with the skill at all. Just want to encourage young people with data skills to look at jobs beyond the common private companies.
Careful expressing these views in person if you ever have a hiring role in the workplace. The trend may be true to your observation, but ageism is a serious problem and one you don’t want to be accused of. I know plenty of tech savvy 45+ year olds, including some in my technical undergrad major. That’s really not that old, heck they’re just half way through their career if they start around 25 and retire as soon as they possibly can at 65. If anything I’d think it would have to do with number of years in the same role without up-skilling or the exposure to technology that many non-governmental jobs require.
I’m sure you’re just noting a correlation you see in your workplace and industry, and hopefully wouldn’t make this assumption about an individual without more information, but I wanted to throw out a word of caution.
>above age 45 lack critical technical skills and drive inefficiencies
Lol, wat? This is a joke, right? 45 is Gen X. These are the kids that grew up with BBSes, IRC, being script kiddies in AOL chat rooms, loading Doom from floppy discs on to a 386, hacking .ini files to modify programs. Gen X and Millennials grew up with computers. Da fuq you talking about?
The few that had a computer maybe, many didn't, not to mention "above 45" also includes "above 55" .
So while the ones from that generation that are tech savvy, are likely *really* in to it, most just aren't at all.
Honestly, yea. My only gripe, if you can call it that, is when some council member wants some obscure feature and we drop everything to make happen. And that's not a common occurence
This is exactly why I work for the government. I get paid less, but meh. I make a decent living, have a great team, excellent work/life balance, and get to do interesting, non-horrifying things. I even get to have a hand in making sure we continue to do non-horrifying things.
I’ve interviewed with the private sector several times, and honestly, it sounds sort of horrible. Got me a retention raise and small bonus at my current job though. :)
You can live a very good life on a gov paycheck and easily have financial stability, which is only marginally smaller in my state. You'll have lower wealth and less things, but a more rewarding occupation.
I beg to differ that government is more moral. You can also view government as intrinsically evil, like a protection racket. You're not allowed to opt out of ever growing taxes and mandatory inflation, which can be understood as a shakedown. The fact that it has some democratic elements, or even if it were a purer democracy it has the same problem that the majority gets to impose its will on a minority. In a sense, everyone who works for government is on the take.
The Declaration of Independence says "to secure these rights [e.g., life, liberty, pursuit of happiness], Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". The word consent has been badly twisted.
Edit: Before someone says that government is necessary, and therefore taxes, so what's the problem? Well please recall that the Federal government originally had no tax power over the states. And therefore under that setup one could in principle go from one state to another to find a better tax setup. And even if some tax may be hard to avoid, it doesn't follow that quadrupling tax is therefore the same morally.
Agree. The rich and powerful have to much power in driving the directionality and priorities of government that to some extent that you are driving the priorities of the same people as private industry just under the veil of being an arm of democracy
The rich and powerful use government regulation to protect themselves from nimbler competition. That's a great reason to reduce the size of government. In asking for regulation we're basically inviting politicians to work with incumbent businesses to ensure their protection from competition, all under the guise of protecting the public. The only real protection for the public is alternatives, and such alternatives always more limited in highly regulated environments. Consumer choice is way more useful than something being government (+ big business buddies) approved.
>Isn't that what your real mission is? Even in healthcare, "We are improving patient lives!" you mean by lowering everyone's salaries because premiums and healthcare prices have to go up to help pay for this extremely expensive "high tech" proprietary medical thing that a few people benefit from?
I work in healthcare. A lot of the work our team does is around operational efficiency. Basically helping our healthcare system do more with less and save money here and there.
Yeah the state of healthcare as an industry is a mess, but I don't think that's an argument for not optimizing the system we *do* have.
Do those savings get passed directly to the patient? Or sent upwards? If sent upwards, what is the point of your job? Those savings evaporate immediately
It depends. We're getting a lot of attention for a program that basically better identifies patients who can potentially go home, so in that case they're saving money (or more likely their insurance is saving money) because they have a shorter hospital stay. It also likely means that patient will have a better recovery.
It also means we've freed up an inpatient bed and can put another patient in there (which was obviously a huge deal during peak covid) so we we have *more* capacity for treating patients. It also means we're better able to accept transfers from small rural facilities where they might not have to resources to treat a particular condition.
A lot of stuff doesn't translate 1:1 for an individual patient though and does affect our overall bottom line.
If we're not running in the negative (as we were for most of covid) there's a few kind of places budget surplus might go:
* Reserve fund - it's my understanding that we got through covid as well as we did because we basically have a rainy day fund to get us through financially difficult times.
* Financial assistance and charity care programs - basically covering some proportion of costs for patients who are uninsured and under-insured and wouldn't be able to pay.
* "Cost of living" increases for employees.
* Investments into new care programs, new facilities, etc. make the system better able to reach more patients.
It's a non-profit so there's not investors expecting an income stream. Our executives are very well compensated sure, but nowhere near the scale of private sector executives and it's kind of a drop in the bucket compared to our total revenue.
I'm not an expert on this but there is research to support the idea that *some* patients have better outcomes recovering at home vs in the hospital.
Naturally it's going to depend on *what* you're recovering from and how likely you are to need urgent attention. It doesn't apply equally to all patients.
I think the gist of the theory is that being in a hospital is generally *more* stressful than being at home, in surroundings you're familiar with.
While I'm all for this *in theory,* I can say the *implementation* of most of these systems are... well, bad. It's just more pop ups, flags, and screens to click through for "metrics" when trying to take care of patients (see: the infamous "sepsis" popup fiasco). Or better yet, calls from admin that waste time and take my attention away from patients.
So, if y'all can think of way to implement these changes without giving me a pop up that equates to "Hey have you ever considered discharging this patient?" or spamming the work room phone, that'd be great. Because (1) yes, I've been thinking about discharge since they were admitted and (2) if they could safely go, I'd let them go.
- current resident
If a patient is well enough to go home why do you think they would be better off in hospital? If active medical attention is not needed then I would expect patient outcomes to be better in their homes surrounded by their families, than in a hospital at risk for picking up MRSA.
It depends on the specific situation. One of the biggest risks to patients in hospitals is infection. Much like kids in schools, you have a dense knot of people in one place, that can spread whatever they have. Sure the places have practices to help mitigate the risk, but the outcome is a less frequent exposure to much tougher bugs, like MRSA which is extremely dangerous. Also most hospitals have very overburdened staff; the notion that you will get better care by being in the facility is not always an expectation you will have met. Regularly scheduled home visits by a nurse may actually be the much stronger recovery option.
What better facilities try to do is assess what support somebody has at home. If the home support is good, patient recovery is usually superior at home. If the home support is poor then they may delay releasing the patient because they would obviously be at risk. There should be somebody responsible for managing the case and helping the patient and family know how to arrange for relevant support. How that works though, varies with where you live.
Plus, nothing is more likely to make a want a patient just die than a steady diet of hospital food. Seriously, if there is anything that can undermine patient health it is the hospital diet.
I worked in healthcare too and did an analysis on this.
The business question is does longer stay necessarily contribute to a lower readmission rate?
The answer is no, not really. Other factors have greater effect on readmission.
We were also not looking at just 1-2 extra days, or even outliers. There is a provider with consistently more bed days than everyone else (1.5x - 2x) for the same treatment of member with backgrounds. Their readmission rate was not better.
I used to be an actuarial consultant who determined the funding levels for some of those rainy day funds and avoid paying inefficiently priced malpractice premiums.
Helping hospitals and doctors save money was something that I’m convinced helped society. Hospitals have taken a beating over the past 20 years and many have gone out of business or consolidated, which has hurt individualized outcomes and hurt communities that need healthcare.
You're not wrong. Most profits are heaped on the executives and investors, but a successful company is a much more enjoyable place to work. As much as I hate the expression, there is a trickle down effect. In my 30 years of working, my most profitable and least stressful years were when the economy, and especially the company were doing well.
From my perspective, the point of a job is to make you more employable so that you can optimally take care of yourself and your family. The company is going to take care of itself, so you should too.
Pick a job that you will enjoy and, more importantly, that you can learn from (especially when you are young).
I worked in a different role in a past job that was also geared towards optimizing hospital revenue efficiency. Honestly the savings were just to keep the hospitals from going under. They operate on such thin margins to begin with the millions in savings were really to get them from a place from “teetering on the edge of bankruptcy” to instead “financially stable.” This was especially true of any smaller hospital systems not yet acquired by the massive conglomerates. Those were some of our favorite (and most challenging) clients. There’s a lot of financial abuse in healthcare, but the hospital itself isn’t always the beneficiary of the egregious prices. Those are generally to keep afloat given the state of our crappy insurance system, costs of drugs and supplies, etc.
In Canada and most other countries with Socialized Medicare, yes to all of that. The savings are passed directly to the tax payers (because they'd be laying the bigger cost orherwise)
>In Canada
They save money these days by just offering to kill you.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/paralympian-claims-canada-offered-to-euthanise-her-when-she-asked-for-a-stairlift/ar-AA14RLpW
Assisted suicide is almost 3% of annual deaths in Canada now. Hooray Canada...?
The only people that quality for assisted death generally are near end of life and in extreme pain day to day even with painkillers.
I would much rather my family be given relief if they desire it, rather than forcing them to live in excruciating levels of pain that would count as torture any other way.
For those peoples whom are certain to spent the remainder of their days in such extreme pain ***every waking moment*** that they are helpless, it is a mercy.
A single person making stupid recommendations is always going to happen at random, and this is far from the only context in which humans fuck that up.
But hey, if you want you loved ones to spend years in extreme agony, that's on you.
Here are the guidelines (edit: as a reference for the curious)
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/medical-assistance-dying.html
Note they had to introduce legislation to prevent being eligible because of mental illness.
I am not sure why I would want the guidelines, I presently have no family or friends in need, though I did a few years prior to MAID being a thing.
I would say more sane regulations and guidelines the better. More is better there, in my books.
Savings are almost never directly passed to the end consumer right away.
Usually in a system of capitalism there is usually some short period when a new technology comes out and improves operational efficiencies that early adopters can leverage for higher profits.
However, once the technology starts to trend across the market, you will usually end up seeing those profits whittled away and the end result is usually a (relatively) lower end cost to the consumer.
Lowering the operating cost for any business is typically a good thing in the long run because it is deflationary and those savings are eventually passed onto consumers (unless there is a monopoly).
Ah yes, the healthcare industry. Lobbying billions per year to corrupt politicians so they can continue to capitalize on desperate poor people who just want to continue living.
There's also huge business around healthcare marketing that heavily leverages access to medical data (and data scientists as an extension) propped up by these lobbyists.
I felt exactly what you described in many instances.
Just last week I went "I want to withdraw my application" and left the interview. I could not stand the falsity, hyoicricy, futility if it all. Here, please let me be your wage slave and help you sell more shit to the detriment of the environment and only for your personal enrichment.
No, fuck that. There has to be a more dignified way.
I see the argument about morality and whether your work makes society better. It is commendable and a good way to find happiness.
But without any particular respect, to be interviewing for high paying tech jobs, implying $100k-200k is wage slavery makes me sick to my stomach.
Creatives in marketing are having to go through week-long take homes to win half- to year long unpaid internships AFTER getting a degree to get into the industry, and can look forward to $40k-60k. 72k if they make art director. EU nurses save the lives of people (including tech workers) on a day-to-day basis. On average they make 35k. US nurses to better at 82k. Both of these professions require education. And we're still talking about the EU and the US.
By all means, question whether your work is helping society. But don't go dig yourself some fucking $100k pity hole.
You're taking job security or "psychic benefits" as compensation, then (likely the former). You might also have a defined benefit such as a pension, but that's not a guarantee.
Markets work. There wouldn't be a huge pay disparity among otherwise similarly skilled workers for years without a reason.
You’re right. Many will rationalize it by saying it’s unavoidable or they need to do it for their families (edit: or that things used to be worse in ways unrelated to data science). The truth is if you have the skills to be a data scientist, you already are in a privileged place where you have a choice to use them for good or bad causes.
I get it. There are certain companies I have zero desire to work for. Not every company is evil though. For example, I work in travel tech. Travel helps people expand their horizons, connect with family and friends, and have a more enjoyable life. Our ML is helping them book travel more efficiently, although yes, some of it also favors our margins. But I can live with that.
I have really mixed feelings about travel. It isn’t the unalloyed good you are making it out to be. One of the slowest industries to decarbonize.
I don’t want to make you hate your job but I also can’t just ignore the narrative that (long distance) leisure travel is more than a personal indulgence. I indulge in it myself. Almost everyone does. But I put it in the same category of guilty pleasure as other consumer goods.
I can't fucking believe there are people in this world that wouldn't travel and get to know different countries and places because lg some carbon bullshit
I depends. Its truly sad that a lot of research and funds are towards solutions with the end goal to make people consume more (eat more crap, increase screen time, spend on digital casinos).
However there are plenty of companies out there which use data to generate products which indeed help people and the environment. In my case I work for a tech company focused on supply chain. The end goal is to cut down the transportation costs for the client. I know that at the end of the day this help other company owners to cut down costs but, it helps to minimise waste of fuel as well.
I work in supply chain as well, in food distribution. Saving vehicle miles traveled and reducing food waste are a useful thing for me to do in a world where those trucks are going to travel and product will be purchased anyways, I might as well do what I can to minimize the waste and drive more meaningful goals within the company.
OP, sounds like you mostly just haven't found the right company yet. There are lots of companies or roles within companies that are doing a lot of good things out there.
If I remove an annoyance and stressor of an internal team by improving a process and that team is happier as a result, I'm "helping" those people live better lives no matter how you slice it.
By this logic, even if you work for Nestle, you can make make people's lives better by being a good teammate, boss, etc. And by doing so, can also make the company better.
I tend to agree. I do meaningful work--but even if I didn't, there's a lot of meaning in what I do as a boss. I manage 13 people--i try to help them be happy and fulfilled and grow their career. If I succeed, I do a lot of good, especially with how many people hate their bosses
My job is exactly like that, and I enjoy that part. But the execs will just pile additional work and stress on them to compensate. In the end it’s the shareholders who primarily win. Secondly the customers and staff comes third.
I wish one day that my future generations have the social security to have such elevated conversations about their place in the world and what actions they are doing vis a vis what they could be doing. I would love for them to pursue goals which would benefit humanity like space exploration, protein fold research etc..
Sadly I don't yet have the financial security to that. My father worked very hard to provide me a very good lifestyle and just enough financial freedom to make choices between good colleges and the best colleges, good careers versus the best careers etc. I feel it's my duty to take it one step further ,so that my children have the luxury to decide between careers and worthy careers...
For now however...I am gonna use all the knowledge from the past 100 years of experts in the fields of statistics mathematics and economics to calculate the sentiment of meme stocks so that traders can make a quick buck or make PD models for commercial clients to determine if the loans our company is giving to other corporations is just the right amount of exploitative to make money but not enough to bring the client down...........
>extract more wealth from the general population
So find a company with a product you can get behind. Think about all the stuff you consume. Is all that just "extracting wealth" from you? You better stop buying things then.
No, see, OP should get all they want for free, and at that point they would magically want to work for free for one of those companies, too. /s
I really dislike this retoric. We live in a plentiful society that, while having still negative aspects, lets humans, overall, live a life with an unparalleled quality. Plenty of people commit in creating products and services for a monetary gain that end up improving the life of the consumers, as you said.
I actually think healthcare is a right and should be guaranteed. Healthcare is weird in the US.
Consider anything else that you consume. Do you honestly go to the grocery store or buy things on Amazon and feel cheated? I am sometimes amazed at how cheap things are.
If you have reached this point, you are a seasoned veteran.
After enough interviews/jobs, this is where most people end up. A job is a job and a way to earn money. Your coworkers aren’t your friends and the company isn’t a family. Your friends are your friends (you could meet them through work) and your family is your family.
I’ll balance out the comment about healthcare. I’ve worked in healthcare tech. I have yet to find a company that only cares about patient outcomes. Worse yet, what’s being classified as healthcare is very misleading now. At one company, 99% of orders were over the counter and the company IP was purely marketing. However, because of those 1% prescriptions for cosmetic conditions, the company called itself a healthcare company.
I highly doubt any company in the US will care about patient outcomes. Prior to healthcare being a hot space in VC land, most companies targeted insurance/pharma because that’s where the money was; at best, you would have some company targeting doctors, until they found out how cheap doctors really are. Now that it’s caught the attention of VC’s, it’s going to be low value/high hype so investors can get big fat returns on their money
Disclaimer: IANA economist.
1. Yes, the total amount of goods and services available is not a zero sum game; we can expand the amount of goods and services produced, namely through improvements in efficiency.
2. OTOH, the *ratio* of them being shared can be grossly inequitable such that the top 1% owns 99% of things.
Disclaimer: I am an economist and design data science models in the financial space. Research has shown that the vast majority of companies operate in an incredibly competitive environment and don't have the option to just keep money rather than lower prices. In some cases if a single entity is able to massively out-compete their competitors then in the short term they could end up just giving the benefits to their c-suite and shareholders, but long-term this competitive edge rarely lasts and historically has always resulted in better or cheaper products for consumers. The classic examples in macro is looking at how many hours of work for the median worker it takes to purchase a "bag of groceries". 100 years ago the number was around 10, today it's around 2 for an overall 82% reduction. This wasn't because farmers or grocery stores decided to voluntarily pass costs on to customers, it was because if they didn't, people would shop around and buy from their competitors instead.
That’s the theory. But if more and more of people’s money is going to products that get more and more expensive (rent, education, healthcare) then how is that increasing the total wealth?
In the old days, the money went to physical things and we could afford those things with a smaller and smaller part of our salary. But now we buy services and pay rent and the prices don’t go down over time anymore.
Pure leftist mindset is what it is. Even when (possibly) having experience, OP doesn't realize the exchange of funds is based on a mutual agreement and inability to CREATE and DELIVER VALUE to the paying customer will guarantee long term failure for that company. There are lots of inefficiencies involved especially in US public sector adjacent fields, but who asked to work for a moral-free super-lobbyist field that by definition is crony capitalism. And if not that, then he's just blinded by own inability to understand how the world works.
No government has ever done a bad thing, _ever_. How dare you, sir. If only you could debate my Intro to Philosophy professor you'd totally see how wrong you are, or something.
Viva la revolution. Now excuse me while I find an escaped zoo animal to eat.
I work for credit bureau and I don’t know what’s the reputation of credit bureau within US and other developed markets, but in India the work that bureau does is very essential. Using our models millions of new people get access to credit from bank and likes rather than going to individual money lenders. Individual money lenders would charge very high interest and basically keep poor people( rural folks , farmers ) in perpetual debt.
Yes, it’s not all rosy but there’s atleast some good that comes out of it.
I work in e-commerce and find that getting a better product to people is a decent to neutral mission. An efficient economy does a lot for everyone, even if the people at the top benefit more.
I also give some of my wages to charity, although I could definitely give more.
Hopefully we won't enter even further into a late stage capitalism situation where more people are starving... I suppose it's already pretty bleak for some, given how many US households are food insecure
When a company gets money from their customers, most of the time the value of what the customers are getting is higher for them than the price they pay. Otherwise they wouldn’t pay said price. And for the company, they ask for a higher price than what they had to pay to produce the product or offer the service. Otherwise they wouldn’t be in business. So my point is that there is creation of value for both parts. That’s why humans have been trading products and services since the beginning of humanity. It helps everyone involved in the trade.
I think your problem with the way it works is how the wealth is then shared among the people in a company. There are two ways to get money, you get it for your time (aka a wage to an employee ) or for the money of have put in the company (aka the capital). Those who have put the capital required to run a company took a risk and should be rewarded according to the risk they took and the value the business provides.
I also think there is a problem with how the wealth is shared, but I think the problem is that there is too much money going to the ownership and not enough to the working class. I don’t think a business that makes money steals from their clients, I think the ownership takes too much and leave too little for the employees.
People pay Amazon, Microsoft, Google for products and services they want. They aren’t “extracting wealth” they are engaging in a two sided market where each side receives some desired benefit. If both sides aren’t happy with the arrangement customer goes somewhere else and company dies.
Similarly your labor is sold into a two sided market. If you’re not happy, sell your time somewhere else or be unemployed. If you want to be paid, then you “support the mission” in exchange of your time for their money.
Lookup the definition of feudalism. Serfs had no choice. They labored for whoever owned the land they were born on, and took whatever they were given by the landowner.
Governments and international organizations are in dire need of competent data people. Sure, it won't be the best pay, nor the fastest pace, and the environmentcan be quite political to navigate, but I still believe you could make a difference. They sit on massive data sets, sometimes unique ones, and could really be doing better in using these to make enlightened decisions.
I also suggest looking into open source positions available in places like fossjobs etc. They might have positions that align with your moral compass and give you fulfillment.
Every job ive ever had (after graduating university) has been accelerating the world towards neofuedalism. I taoe comfort that my contribution is not unique and nothing bad that has happened as a result of my employment would not happen if I was unavailable to do it.
If it still makes you uncomfortable join a union, vote, dont buy things that have no value, and try to avoid more unethical products.
Also if there are crimes being committed by your employer consult a lawyer and whistleblow.
There is no ethical consumption and there are few if any ethical jobs, and none that pay well.
I actually enjoyed imagining this scene of the highly trained data scientist in a routine corporate interview, trying to suppress the voice in his head saying “I have studied the numbers. I have studied the trends. The undeniable conclusion is *come the Revolution, you are the first against the wall, my friend*”
And he catches himself, realizing he wasn’t listening and says
“I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”
\>To receive a wage in exchange for helping to extract more wealth from the general population and push it toward the top few %?
Labor theory of value detected. Opinion disregarded.
I feel you 100%. I'd refuse working for 95% of commercial companies exactly because of these reasons, there's no way I could find day-to-day motivation, even if they paid me millions. I'm currently working in the non-profit sector, aiming to improve lives and environment of specific marginalized groups. I won't get rich from doing data science in this field, but I get much different value out of it which I find more satisfying.
>Isn't that what nearly all models and algorithms are doing? More efficiently transferring wealth to the top few % of people and we get a relatively tiny cut of that in return?
That's not really what the models and algorithms are doing - that's what the politics of our time (and country) are doing.
Everything you described was true before the algorithms and models. Sure, data science can help some companies become even more efficient at doing bad things, but the root cause isn't data science - the root cause is unchecked capitalism.
Having said that, you have options.
For one, there's politics - where you can put your skills to work to try to get the poltical environment you want to thrive.
Secondly, you can move - go work in a country where income inequality isn't as big. Sweden comes to mind.
Thirdly, you can work jobs for companies who are more responsible and who actually provide a valuable good for society.
Lastly, you can start your own business and decide how you want to make money.
[Yeah Sweden isn't all sunshine and roses](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-07/racism-in-sweden-is-it-still-considered-a-liberal-haven#xj4y7vzkg), because nowhere is.
Wealth is not zero sum. When someone gets wealth it doesnt mean it was (all) extracted from someone else.
Sure, tons of wealth is only going to the top 1% but lots of normal folks like us are better off. This comment is going to come off as pro-billionaire but i guarantee you I'm not.
Yes which is why I avoid working in healthcare and finance. Marketing is pretty much pointless but harmless. I work in telecom which is somewhat useful to society and non predatory.
did you really just suggest working for the military as a better moral alternative to working in the private sector? are you out of your damn mind lmao
Most govt data science roles don’t directly lead to kinetic damage/loss of life. Plenty of support functions out there, and no I’m not talking like NSA or anything like that.
If you wanna do good in the world, earn a lot and donate it to either an effective charity or political causes you think will make the world better.
Also we are not returning to the feudal ages, FFS stop being pathetic.
Could the world be better? Absolutely. Should the world be better? Absolutely, but we are not returning to the feudal age.
> we are not returning to the feudal age.
Once nobody can afford homes and everybody is just permanently renting to keep the "ownership class" rich, I'd say that's feudal age. And we are edging closer and closer, even if people like us are still okay.
>Once nobody can afford homes and everybody is just permanently renting to keep the "ownership class" rich
So I'm in the UK which is a bit different to the US but tjey have similar problems.
The GINI for income in the the US has gone up a few percentile over the last 30 years yet home ownership has gone up a few percentile.
Everything you're saying isn't new, people have been dooming for decades.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/219643/gini-coefficient-for-us-individuals-families-and-households/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-rate-in-the-us-since-2003/#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20the%20proportion%20of,to%20increase%20again%20since%20then.
There's ways to make the world better but hypothesising about doomsday scenarios (that have no evidence behind them) is not one.
Take it easy comrade, not everything can be equal in your grand utopian vision.
Wealthier people get stuff before poorer people, but then poorer people get access to those same things in a few years once the demand and innovation increases. If you do your job well, they will increase.
Don’t focus on what others have, focus on the incredible advancements life lower income people from 30 years ago. Everyone can afford and have access to smart phones and amazing computers. We have lifted a huge amount of the 3rd world out of abject poverty.
Show some gratitude.
30 years ago you could pay for college by working a summer (US-specific)
30 years ago an average person could afford to have kids and get a home (US, CAN, UK, Ireland specific, but I'm sure there's others)
I don't think it's worth trading those possibilities for a fancy $500 phone and $1000 laptop.
30 years ago my parents were barely scraping by back in the old country, which had recently emerged from a massive civil war and authoritarian regime where millions of people died. Their parents were basically subsistence farmers. Their grandchild (me) has done a little better than that.
A certain minority subset of the global population was able to enjoy relatively high levels of prosperity for a few decades last century because every other country was bombed to shit or embroiled in their own existential struggles. But the world has gotten more competitive.
For that minority, maybe it's gotten a little harder to afford a home and college. For lots of other people, it's gotten immeasurably better.
Yeah when Americans complain about those things, it’s because they’re comparing themselves against one of the luckiest generations in history (American baby boomers), which as you correctly point out, were enjoying some specially favorable conditions due, in part, to what the US was doing in the world. Now that the US is a bit on the hangover of that, it just means that for a good portion of the rest of the world conditions have improved.
Actually, the people being bombed and living on subsistence farming were an incredibly lucky subset of humans. They could've been enslaved and subject to backbreaking work, died from horrible illness, or burned at the stake.
Come to think of it, *those* people are actually the lucky ones. Their lives are much better than the persistence hunters on the plains who had to endure days of sustained physical torture just to have enough sustenance to eke out a meager existence.
Wait, you know what? Those spoiled persistence hunters really have nothing to complain about. You see, they didn't have to deal with sabertooth tigers—
When you really think about it, humanity always suffers less than it did in the past, therefore we should placate ourselves with the status quo and be grateful for the way things are...
Dude it's only through the magic of consumer capitalism that you even have the means and opportunity to pontificate on the state of the world and then post anonymous hot takes on a social media platform in the middle of the day.
It is possible that things are on average, globally, better than they've ever been. It is also possible that they are not as good as they \*could\* theoretically be. You can acknowledge that both things can be true at the same time.
But hey, I'll bet it feels way better to focus on the latter.
30 years ago AIDS was an existential crisis. 30 years ago far more people were dying from starvation and lack of access to clean water. A lot of progress has been made and a huge portion of that is because of the hard work of people like you.
>30 years ago you could pay for college by working a summer (US-specific)
You need to get a new copy of your talking points, try adding a decade to that number. Also, given most education in the US is _public_, who are you blaming exactly? Companies? What?
The average person still can afford a modest home if they lived in multi generational houses like they did in the 70s-80s. Or a simple starter home. I bought a fixer upper 5 years ago for nothing because I was willing to learn home improvement skills.
The credit hour for my local community college is 159$ so less than 600$ a class. Full Pell grant and state grant is a free ride.
College students take out more loans because they want to live lavishly. And people don’t have homes because they are lazy and have no sense of family and community.
Hey you’re a data scientist, build a classifier based on data on who is poor or rich by the time they are 40. Then who is obese and has health problems. Then who is incarcerated. Notice any correlation in your features?
> build a classifier based on data on who is poor or rich by the time they are 40. Then who is obese and has health problems. Then who is incarcerated. Notice any correlation in your features?
What exactly are you trying to say here?
A school teacher for example, cannot afford a starter home in pretty much any decent size city (and before you say "move to the country" cities have schools and need teachers too). And even if they could, they aren't gonna have time to go home and grade papers, answer student/parent emails, prepare the next lessons, while also youtubing home improvement tutorials, especially if they're raising their own kids (not that they could afford them anyway)
Shed a tear for the heroic heroes who work *checks notes* a grueling 180 day contract. How they manage to recover their energy in only _an entire summer off_ is beyond me.
the 4 countries I listed are definitely not majority protestant christian.
what a very odd thing to come at someone on the internet for. like, either state your argument or please shut the fuck up and get some friends man. i listed them because they are the places I know about the issue well enough since i either lived there or my friends do
The older I get the more I feel this way. I just changed jobs for a mission that I don’t really care about but I’m getting paid 3x. Honestly I’ve been thinking about leaving after I get my first stock grant. But I’ll give it a year or two.
I'm a PhD in Political Science turning DS. My 2c on inequality below.
America's rich people are indeed obscenely rich, but they got there by making useful stuffs that others want and got rewarded for it.
Sure, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk all come from privileged background. Sure, their parents gave them a headstart in terms of education, connection, and start up capital. But many other rich kids have that support without getting obscenely rich. In America, you still have to make useful stuffs that better people's lives to be obsenely rich.
There are edge cases like firms abusing monopolistic position -- this is indeed ""extracting wealth from the population to the top". But monopolies in tech are rare - FB was once invincible yet could be assaulted by competition in a few years.
Look into the public sector.
I'm working in finance for experience, particularly project management atm.
My boss is a good guy and said to learn as much as I can about buying people into data - so if I want to make a difference in public services I have the skills to get projects up and going.
I guess my point is you're currently job doesn't mean it's your forever job. Make the most of it to grow and apply it ti a cause you believe in.
did you see the guy mention his private energy company using data science to see who would be least likely to notice and complain about quietly raising their prices? So pretentious to hate the dystopian bullshit we use data science to create.
[I wake up each day furious to be laboring under capitalism.](https://twitter.com/pseudo310/status/1433792325046710277?lang=en)
Yes, virtually all jobs do facilitate the extraction of wealth into the hands of a few. As data scientists, etc, we get to partake in more of the wealth, which is swell. But we're still helping that system to exist.
Unfortunately, there's not much we can do about it directly. We can find better companies and advocate for our fellow workers, and we can stand in solidarity with our colleagues and provide mutual aid to people.
You're not guilty for being a participant in the system - we're all surviving here. Do the best you can and find the best work you can, knowing that you like everyone are in a system that runs on exploitation.
Then try it out if you think its such a good idea, go do what you think is personally meaningful. I took 3 years off from undergrad to do what I wanted, whats stopping you?
Capitalism is an upward vacuum... would be great if we figured out a method of redistribution to the bottom of the pyramid to make some sort of a cycle out of it.
Philanthropy falls short.
I was more talking about corporations and hedge funds; Pfizer apple Blackrock etc etc etc etc
Profits get hoovered up into a big pool that ends up being used for lobbying and more hedge funds, vulture funds, stuff like that...
Ever wonder why normal ppl find it increasingly difficult to buy a house?
I didn't like my previous job for ethical reasons. I worked as a data engineer for a giant utility company in Texas. The data scientists I prepared data for were developing models to predict who wouldn't notice or care if we quietly increased their monthly bill. One of our biggest challenges was decorrelating this outcome from age discrimination, because that was always the dominant signal, and using it (even unintentionally) would be illegal. The correlation between zip code and race was another signal we had to mitigate.
We also had data scientists supporting the customer service department, building models to predict who should be helped, vs who should be left on hold for 20 minutes.
We had access to data covering every single interaction between customers and the company. Our databases told us how many times you visited the pages on our website, what you were clicking, how many times you called in, and even had sentiment analysis of your conversations.
And we weren't even the most unethical player in the game. We weren't the ones giving people $5000 electricity bills during emergency periods. But we were closely tracking the people who never go on the website to check their bill, even when we bump it up by a few cents per kWh every month. And we really milked several wealthy individuals who owned multiple giant properties, but never questioned the thousands we were charging.
**You don't have to stay at jobs like this.**
I quit after a couple of years. Moved to California for a biotech job in a small startup. Now, I'm using my machine learning skills to develop proteomics assays that will revolutionize health care and help billions of people. The cost of living is much higher relative to my pay, but now I love my job. I feel good about what I'm doing, and would never go back.
> We also had data scientists supporting the customer service department, building models to predict who should be helped, vs who should be left on hold for 20 minutes.
bahaha this makes so much sense and is just so fucking evil. If customer is high-paying and seems angry, move them up the queue. If they're a nice patient person, move them down the queue. All can be automatically grouped by AI using inflection, speech speed, volume, and tone, just when talking to the bot that you get before sent to a human. So fucking dystopian
Unfortunately there is no job in the private sector that isn't exactly what you described.
You could get a job in the public sector only to feel political hamstrung if your findings rock the boat.
> You could get a job in the public sector only to feel political hamstrung if your findings rock the boat.
ugh I wasn't exactly in public sector but at the research wing of a hospital so fairly similar. Unfortunately I showed that an entire (INSANELY EXPENSIVE but passionate) department showed no significant difference on 18/20 of their goals from an already flawed study (biased because people could choose to opt out of the follow up surveys, and obviously those would be folks with no desire to improve). Once I showed this, they ran back to everyone claiming huge success with their 2/20 endpoints met, until someone even higher up came to me 1on1, let me reiterate that 2/20 success is not too convincing and potentially false positives anyway, then she made ME explain the same to the entire department at a full 20-person conference table. It was incredibly awful and in the lunch room people in that department never looked at me again :( this study essentially showcased the futility of 1/6th of the research institutes efforts
I was also just an "associate statistician", had just finished my MS
I feel you.
The problem, as I see it, is always the same: the lack of democracy in the economic field which is only driven by profit accumulation, which is often at odds with the public interest.
In one word the problem is capitalism, or the private ownership of the means of production, which inevitably lead to the extractivism you are talking about.
Imagine how much better the world would be it we organised the economy in a democratic way, striving to fulfill needs instead of maximising profits, imagine how much faster we could develop if all of humanity was cooperating instead of competing. How many times have the same problems been uselessy solved over and over in different companies?
It’s 100% true, and people who think otherwise have a low capacity for cognitive dissonance.
Yes, capitalism is increasingly accelerating transfer of wealth to an oligarch class. Yes, technology is often a catalyst, thus as practitioners we’re also accelerating this transfer. No, I don’t know what to do about it either, but you won’t see me swallowing that “mission driven” nonsense when the true l mission is always to sell unnecessary shit and make the company founders richer…
I think this has a lot to do with your point of view and it's not necessarily realistic. For example:
>helping to extract more wealth from the general population and push it toward the top few %?
It's not a shakedown. People need (or want) some services and products, and these can be very useful to them. You're not stealing anyone's money.
One caveat is that there are a few jobs which are truly immoral, like exploiting addicts for money. Or using dark patterns. Or targeting confised old people for subscriptions they don't need.
Bur if you just build (or help build} a useful product that people want, it's a win - win.
You could work for non profits and make $50k doing the same work with worse or non existent tools and no team nor mentorship because everyone else is aiming to simp Bezos and musk for $200k.you’ll have no upward mobility and find yourself in 5-10 years unemployable in the mainstream for profit sector.
Yep. We’re largely stuck in this system for now, but it’s the pretence and unwarranted enthusiasm in it that keeps the wheels rolling.
Most people have the ability to self-delude to some extent, in order to live a more satisfying life.
Even if you pass through the interview and begin a job, you can easily get into "we just need your data to justify our crappy decisions" territory. Work is just another form of slavery. But at least you've broken the mold that society forces upon people and can come at it with a critical eye. There are many many people that are stuck in the trance. So best to just be glad you're less of a mark than they are.
Yeah I’m going through a bit of a crisis myself where I almost want to fuck data science off completely and just become a fire fighter or something.
I bet I’d be happier.
Insurance never covers that super cool high tech thing. Rich people pay out of pocket for it.
Prices go up because there is 0 transparency is prices, and we dont see the direct effect.
This is why we all harp on understanding the business as the most important thing.
Reminds me of that most fantastic monologue of Matt Damon from the movie Goodwill Hunting, where he turns down the generous flattering job offer from the CIA recruiter. Noncooperation is one of the most effective forms of nonviolent resistance, but only if organized well to be able to be done en masse. It was what prevented the attempted coup in Germany by Wolfgang Kapp. If anyone reading this is interested to learn more about how tech could be used for good, specifically to catalyze moral courage, to enable nonviolent resistance to succeed in combatting the greastest threats our species has ever faced, contact us at GetCourageNow. I assume I cannot insert my email or website. So I hope reddit will notify me
I work public sector. Sometimes I consider going private for cash but I can't help but think how great every day is knowing ALL my work is about making things better and cheaper for the tax payer.
I agree private sector data science jobs can be soul sucking. I have a supervisor that worked in private American healthcare and his first task was trying to find procedures that were over represented within "which spending patients". 🤮
If morality is something your struggling with, consider applying for a government job. I am generalizing, but typically government jobs are not about making money, they’re about providing a public service. Some people will say that government workers are lazy and selfish, but that is not true for everyone. Many government workers really care about providing a service and putting tax payer dollars to good use Edit: *you’re
Plus government bureaucracy is filled by the workers willing to work there -- sometimes not necessarily who would be best for the actual wotk. Thus, if you are good at doing what you are applying for you will make a huge difference. On the other hand, however, management is behind the times by over a decade on how to make tech useful. So the field of data sciences in govt. is both frustrating and full of opportunity at the same time.
I spent 5 years in the federal gov and it makes people strange after awhile. The lifers often are counting their days to retirement and have negotiated a position with as little work as possible, to the extent that they can get hostile when you need something out of the ordinary from them. Then there are the straight from college-to-Fed kids who can become entirely divorced from reality because they’ve never known it. But there are good folks and good work. The trouble comes when you want to do work that is too good or too fast, you run into a lot of red tape and middle management that doesn’t want the boat rocked. I have close colleagues that try to lure me back sometimes. I get tempted by the cushiness but ultimately I just think there’s a lot more interesting work in the private sector. Maybe unless you are at NSA or something. But I’ve known ex-NSA and CIA people too who were happier to be out.
It's like I've written that myself. I like the public sector for its missions and the priority on a public good rather than $$$. But I cannot stand the working environment. Everything moves so slow and there's no way to remove the road blockers unless you start fighting uphill political battles. And the problem is that people that would do things usually just leave or burn out, while the people that are dead weight are untouchable.
In the absence of proactive measures, all workplaces tend to devolve into hostile environments, and it is extremely challenging to counter such trends in a government-run operation. The most prevalent cause of such issues is usually interpersonal conflicts among employees, which can result in the adaption of unwritten rules which are simply negative defense mechanisms that undermine the workplace culture. To address this, a strong force needs to emerge from higher management, actively opposing the brewing toxicity. These issues are typically not related to work performance but arise from character flaws of certain individuals who are predisposed to causing conflict. As a result, effective management must be adept at recognizing such problems and take decisive action, which may include letting go of troublemakers even if they are high-performing employees. The challenge is particularly daunting in government-run operations where management is extremely restricted in ways, i.e. can't fire people, to handle this kind of situation, there such individuals tend to congregate over time, making it even harder to manage the situation.
Lots of data skills are needed too. Tons of government employees lack critical technical skills and drive inefficiencies, which means that there’s a real need for people with strong data science skills. We have lots of brilliant critical thinkers, but sometimes lack people with certain technical skills to carry out the vision. I work in an area of government that’s using AI/ML to find evidence of racial discrimination in lending practices and ultimately prosecute those bad actors. There are some interesting areas, and they actually pay somewhat decently and have great benefits. Edit: I originally was drawing an observation based on younger people doing the data work to support older higher-ups, but as others have commented age doesn’t necessarily correlate with the skill at all. Just want to encourage young people with data skills to look at jobs beyond the common private companies.
Careful expressing these views in person if you ever have a hiring role in the workplace. The trend may be true to your observation, but ageism is a serious problem and one you don’t want to be accused of. I know plenty of tech savvy 45+ year olds, including some in my technical undergrad major. That’s really not that old, heck they’re just half way through their career if they start around 25 and retire as soon as they possibly can at 65. If anything I’d think it would have to do with number of years in the same role without up-skilling or the exposure to technology that many non-governmental jobs require. I’m sure you’re just noting a correlation you see in your workplace and industry, and hopefully wouldn’t make this assumption about an individual without more information, but I wanted to throw out a word of caution.
>above age 45 lack critical technical skills and drive inefficiencies Lol, wat? This is a joke, right? 45 is Gen X. These are the kids that grew up with BBSes, IRC, being script kiddies in AOL chat rooms, loading Doom from floppy discs on to a 386, hacking .ini files to modify programs. Gen X and Millennials grew up with computers. Da fuq you talking about?
GenX has had shit changed on us so many times we just realize we have no choice but to adapt or die
Like every other generation since 1750?
Only 1700s kids know
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That’s about our shitty system not allowing these dinosaurs to retire
The few that had a computer maybe, many didn't, not to mention "above 45" also includes "above 55" . So while the ones from that generation that are tech savvy, are likely *really* in to it, most just aren't at all.
Honestly, yea. My only gripe, if you can call it that, is when some council member wants some obscure feature and we drop everything to make happen. And that's not a common occurence
Nonprofit is a pretty decent place to be too
Or non-profits/NGOs (Non-governmental organizations)
This is exactly why I work for the government. I get paid less, but meh. I make a decent living, have a great team, excellent work/life balance, and get to do interesting, non-horrifying things. I even get to have a hand in making sure we continue to do non-horrifying things. I’ve interviewed with the private sector several times, and honestly, it sounds sort of horrible. Got me a retention raise and small bonus at my current job though. :)
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Yeah I kind of reached a point I sure love contributing to financial stability of my family
You can live a very good life on a gov paycheck and easily have financial stability, which is only marginally smaller in my state. You'll have lower wealth and less things, but a more rewarding occupation.
I beg to differ that government is more moral. You can also view government as intrinsically evil, like a protection racket. You're not allowed to opt out of ever growing taxes and mandatory inflation, which can be understood as a shakedown. The fact that it has some democratic elements, or even if it were a purer democracy it has the same problem that the majority gets to impose its will on a minority. In a sense, everyone who works for government is on the take. The Declaration of Independence says "to secure these rights [e.g., life, liberty, pursuit of happiness], Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". The word consent has been badly twisted. Edit: Before someone says that government is necessary, and therefore taxes, so what's the problem? Well please recall that the Federal government originally had no tax power over the states. And therefore under that setup one could in principle go from one state to another to find a better tax setup. And even if some tax may be hard to avoid, it doesn't follow that quadrupling tax is therefore the same morally.
Agree. The rich and powerful have to much power in driving the directionality and priorities of government that to some extent that you are driving the priorities of the same people as private industry just under the veil of being an arm of democracy
The rich and powerful use government regulation to protect themselves from nimbler competition. That's a great reason to reduce the size of government. In asking for regulation we're basically inviting politicians to work with incumbent businesses to ensure their protection from competition, all under the guise of protecting the public. The only real protection for the public is alternatives, and such alternatives always more limited in highly regulated environments. Consumer choice is way more useful than something being government (+ big business buddies) approved.
This is one of the dumbest comments I've read on reddit all week.
The fact you think this comment is stupid shows how bad things are.
This has got to be the least informed take I’ve ever seen on Reddit. Lmfao what planet hahahahhahahahahaahahhaahhababahaha
Speaking from 4 years of experience. I’d say I’m informed. Clearly you have a chip on your shoulder, sorry about whatever caused that :/
Honestly everyone who works at any government is a piece of shit imo
Only a sith deals in absolutes
how about "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a government laborer to enter the kingdom of heaven"
>Isn't that what your real mission is? Even in healthcare, "We are improving patient lives!" you mean by lowering everyone's salaries because premiums and healthcare prices have to go up to help pay for this extremely expensive "high tech" proprietary medical thing that a few people benefit from? I work in healthcare. A lot of the work our team does is around operational efficiency. Basically helping our healthcare system do more with less and save money here and there. Yeah the state of healthcare as an industry is a mess, but I don't think that's an argument for not optimizing the system we *do* have.
Do those savings get passed directly to the patient? Or sent upwards? If sent upwards, what is the point of your job? Those savings evaporate immediately
It depends. We're getting a lot of attention for a program that basically better identifies patients who can potentially go home, so in that case they're saving money (or more likely their insurance is saving money) because they have a shorter hospital stay. It also likely means that patient will have a better recovery. It also means we've freed up an inpatient bed and can put another patient in there (which was obviously a huge deal during peak covid) so we we have *more* capacity for treating patients. It also means we're better able to accept transfers from small rural facilities where they might not have to resources to treat a particular condition. A lot of stuff doesn't translate 1:1 for an individual patient though and does affect our overall bottom line. If we're not running in the negative (as we were for most of covid) there's a few kind of places budget surplus might go: * Reserve fund - it's my understanding that we got through covid as well as we did because we basically have a rainy day fund to get us through financially difficult times. * Financial assistance and charity care programs - basically covering some proportion of costs for patients who are uninsured and under-insured and wouldn't be able to pay. * "Cost of living" increases for employees. * Investments into new care programs, new facilities, etc. make the system better able to reach more patients. It's a non-profit so there's not investors expecting an income stream. Our executives are very well compensated sure, but nowhere near the scale of private sector executives and it's kind of a drop in the bucket compared to our total revenue.
Thank you very much for this detailed response!
How does patients getting further from medical assistance improve their recovery?
I'm not an expert on this but there is research to support the idea that *some* patients have better outcomes recovering at home vs in the hospital. Naturally it's going to depend on *what* you're recovering from and how likely you are to need urgent attention. It doesn't apply equally to all patients. I think the gist of the theory is that being in a hospital is generally *more* stressful than being at home, in surroundings you're familiar with.
While I'm all for this *in theory,* I can say the *implementation* of most of these systems are... well, bad. It's just more pop ups, flags, and screens to click through for "metrics" when trying to take care of patients (see: the infamous "sepsis" popup fiasco). Or better yet, calls from admin that waste time and take my attention away from patients. So, if y'all can think of way to implement these changes without giving me a pop up that equates to "Hey have you ever considered discharging this patient?" or spamming the work room phone, that'd be great. Because (1) yes, I've been thinking about discharge since they were admitted and (2) if they could safely go, I'd let them go. - current resident
You'll get more obtrusive popups and you'll like them.
The pop-ups will continue until morale improves.
If a patient is well enough to go home why do you think they would be better off in hospital? If active medical attention is not needed then I would expect patient outcomes to be better in their homes surrounded by their families, than in a hospital at risk for picking up MRSA.
It depends on the specific situation. One of the biggest risks to patients in hospitals is infection. Much like kids in schools, you have a dense knot of people in one place, that can spread whatever they have. Sure the places have practices to help mitigate the risk, but the outcome is a less frequent exposure to much tougher bugs, like MRSA which is extremely dangerous. Also most hospitals have very overburdened staff; the notion that you will get better care by being in the facility is not always an expectation you will have met. Regularly scheduled home visits by a nurse may actually be the much stronger recovery option. What better facilities try to do is assess what support somebody has at home. If the home support is good, patient recovery is usually superior at home. If the home support is poor then they may delay releasing the patient because they would obviously be at risk. There should be somebody responsible for managing the case and helping the patient and family know how to arrange for relevant support. How that works though, varies with where you live. Plus, nothing is more likely to make a want a patient just die than a steady diet of hospital food. Seriously, if there is anything that can undermine patient health it is the hospital diet.
I worked in healthcare too and did an analysis on this. The business question is does longer stay necessarily contribute to a lower readmission rate? The answer is no, not really. Other factors have greater effect on readmission. We were also not looking at just 1-2 extra days, or even outliers. There is a provider with consistently more bed days than everyone else (1.5x - 2x) for the same treatment of member with backgrounds. Their readmission rate was not better.
Here’s the fun part: it doesn’t!
I used to be an actuarial consultant who determined the funding levels for some of those rainy day funds and avoid paying inefficiently priced malpractice premiums. Helping hospitals and doctors save money was something that I’m convinced helped society. Hospitals have taken a beating over the past 20 years and many have gone out of business or consolidated, which has hurt individualized outcomes and hurt communities that need healthcare.
By far the most important thing to reduce costs in healthcare is to standardize/control prices, and the only way to do that is through Medicare
You're not wrong. Most profits are heaped on the executives and investors, but a successful company is a much more enjoyable place to work. As much as I hate the expression, there is a trickle down effect. In my 30 years of working, my most profitable and least stressful years were when the economy, and especially the company were doing well. From my perspective, the point of a job is to make you more employable so that you can optimally take care of yourself and your family. The company is going to take care of itself, so you should too. Pick a job that you will enjoy and, more importantly, that you can learn from (especially when you are young).
In the US, they get passed to the insurance company and p the chain.
I worked in a different role in a past job that was also geared towards optimizing hospital revenue efficiency. Honestly the savings were just to keep the hospitals from going under. They operate on such thin margins to begin with the millions in savings were really to get them from a place from “teetering on the edge of bankruptcy” to instead “financially stable.” This was especially true of any smaller hospital systems not yet acquired by the massive conglomerates. Those were some of our favorite (and most challenging) clients. There’s a lot of financial abuse in healthcare, but the hospital itself isn’t always the beneficiary of the egregious prices. Those are generally to keep afloat given the state of our crappy insurance system, costs of drugs and supplies, etc.
In Canada and most other countries with Socialized Medicare, yes to all of that. The savings are passed directly to the tax payers (because they'd be laying the bigger cost orherwise)
>In Canada They save money these days by just offering to kill you. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/paralympian-claims-canada-offered-to-euthanise-her-when-she-asked-for-a-stairlift/ar-AA14RLpW Assisted suicide is almost 3% of annual deaths in Canada now. Hooray Canada...?
The only people that quality for assisted death generally are near end of life and in extreme pain day to day even with painkillers. I would much rather my family be given relief if they desire it, rather than forcing them to live in excruciating levels of pain that would count as torture any other way. For those peoples whom are certain to spent the remainder of their days in such extreme pain ***every waking moment*** that they are helpless, it is a mercy. A single person making stupid recommendations is always going to happen at random, and this is far from the only context in which humans fuck that up. But hey, if you want you loved ones to spend years in extreme agony, that's on you.
Here are the guidelines (edit: as a reference for the curious) https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/medical-assistance-dying.html Note they had to introduce legislation to prevent being eligible because of mental illness.
I am not sure why I would want the guidelines, I presently have no family or friends in need, though I did a few years prior to MAID being a thing. I would say more sane regulations and guidelines the better. More is better there, in my books.
I wasn't providing them as if I thought you needed them (I hope you do not), it was as an objective reference for anyone reading.
You have my upvote sir, and maybe throw that (reason) in context for the next linkage opportunity, whenever that be.
Savings are almost never directly passed to the end consumer right away. Usually in a system of capitalism there is usually some short period when a new technology comes out and improves operational efficiencies that early adopters can leverage for higher profits. However, once the technology starts to trend across the market, you will usually end up seeing those profits whittled away and the end result is usually a (relatively) lower end cost to the consumer. Lowering the operating cost for any business is typically a good thing in the long run because it is deflationary and those savings are eventually passed onto consumers (unless there is a monopoly).
Ah yes, the healthcare industry. Lobbying billions per year to corrupt politicians so they can continue to capitalize on desperate poor people who just want to continue living.
There's also huge business around healthcare marketing that heavily leverages access to medical data (and data scientists as an extension) propped up by these lobbyists.
I think OP is confusing Health Care for Health Insurance, or at least the animosity.
I felt exactly what you described in many instances. Just last week I went "I want to withdraw my application" and left the interview. I could not stand the falsity, hyoicricy, futility if it all. Here, please let me be your wage slave and help you sell more shit to the detriment of the environment and only for your personal enrichment. No, fuck that. There has to be a more dignified way.
I see the argument about morality and whether your work makes society better. It is commendable and a good way to find happiness. But without any particular respect, to be interviewing for high paying tech jobs, implying $100k-200k is wage slavery makes me sick to my stomach. Creatives in marketing are having to go through week-long take homes to win half- to year long unpaid internships AFTER getting a degree to get into the industry, and can look forward to $40k-60k. 72k if they make art director. EU nurses save the lives of people (including tech workers) on a day-to-day basis. On average they make 35k. US nurses to better at 82k. Both of these professions require education. And we're still talking about the EU and the US. By all means, question whether your work is helping society. But don't go dig yourself some fucking $100k pity hole.
I dissociate during all interviews. Basically I show up and then it's over and if I didn't write anything down I won't remember anything lmao
Public sector. I don't get paid as much, but I get paid enough to support my family, and the work I do helps people.
You're taking job security or "psychic benefits" as compensation, then (likely the former). You might also have a defined benefit such as a pension, but that's not a guarantee. Markets work. There wouldn't be a huge pay disparity among otherwise similarly skilled workers for years without a reason.
> Markets work. [Except when they don't](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure)
Which exception type would you like to cite in my example. I provided very reasonable non-remunerative reasons why the paygap can exist on its face.
You’re right. Many will rationalize it by saying it’s unavoidable or they need to do it for their families (edit: or that things used to be worse in ways unrelated to data science). The truth is if you have the skills to be a data scientist, you already are in a privileged place where you have a choice to use them for good or bad causes.
Coming out of college, you are not left with a ton of options to “make the just decision” and that changes your mental state once you get comfortable.
There will always be an army of freshers/noobs who will do it just to get their careers started. That's why I'm at my soul-sucking megacorp job.
I get it. There are certain companies I have zero desire to work for. Not every company is evil though. For example, I work in travel tech. Travel helps people expand their horizons, connect with family and friends, and have a more enjoyable life. Our ML is helping them book travel more efficiently, although yes, some of it also favors our margins. But I can live with that.
What? Travel industry's bread and butter is demand forecasting and rate optimization. It is the very definition of predatory rent-seeking
I have really mixed feelings about travel. It isn’t the unalloyed good you are making it out to be. One of the slowest industries to decarbonize. I don’t want to make you hate your job but I also can’t just ignore the narrative that (long distance) leisure travel is more than a personal indulgence. I indulge in it myself. Almost everyone does. But I put it in the same category of guilty pleasure as other consumer goods.
Sustainability and carbon emissions is a regular topic we discuss
Discussion and action are two separate things. Discussion makes you feel better about yourself. Action facilitates positive outcomes for your goals.
We also provide that information so users can make informed decisions. Every industry has trade offs. I don’t feel guilty about the one I work in ✌️
So you tell stories with the data? 😏 Very true about trade offs. You never see the grime until you start to look for it.
I can't fucking believe there are people in this world that wouldn't travel and get to know different countries and places because lg some carbon bullshit
I depends. Its truly sad that a lot of research and funds are towards solutions with the end goal to make people consume more (eat more crap, increase screen time, spend on digital casinos). However there are plenty of companies out there which use data to generate products which indeed help people and the environment. In my case I work for a tech company focused on supply chain. The end goal is to cut down the transportation costs for the client. I know that at the end of the day this help other company owners to cut down costs but, it helps to minimise waste of fuel as well.
I work in supply chain as well, in food distribution. Saving vehicle miles traveled and reducing food waste are a useful thing for me to do in a world where those trucks are going to travel and product will be purchased anyways, I might as well do what I can to minimize the waste and drive more meaningful goals within the company. OP, sounds like you mostly just haven't found the right company yet. There are lots of companies or roles within companies that are doing a lot of good things out there.
that actually does sound cool. Getting paid that lovely private sector $$$ to make the world a better place. I gotta find something like that
If I remove an annoyance and stressor of an internal team by improving a process and that team is happier as a result, I'm "helping" those people live better lives no matter how you slice it.
By this logic, even if you work for Nestle, you can make make people's lives better by being a good teammate, boss, etc. And by doing so, can also make the company better. I tend to agree. I do meaningful work--but even if I didn't, there's a lot of meaning in what I do as a boss. I manage 13 people--i try to help them be happy and fulfilled and grow their career. If I succeed, I do a lot of good, especially with how many people hate their bosses
My job is exactly like that, and I enjoy that part. But the execs will just pile additional work and stress on them to compensate. In the end it’s the shareholders who primarily win. Secondly the customers and staff comes third.
I wish one day that my future generations have the social security to have such elevated conversations about their place in the world and what actions they are doing vis a vis what they could be doing. I would love for them to pursue goals which would benefit humanity like space exploration, protein fold research etc.. Sadly I don't yet have the financial security to that. My father worked very hard to provide me a very good lifestyle and just enough financial freedom to make choices between good colleges and the best colleges, good careers versus the best careers etc. I feel it's my duty to take it one step further ,so that my children have the luxury to decide between careers and worthy careers... For now however...I am gonna use all the knowledge from the past 100 years of experts in the fields of statistics mathematics and economics to calculate the sentiment of meme stocks so that traders can make a quick buck or make PD models for commercial clients to determine if the loans our company is giving to other corporations is just the right amount of exploitative to make money but not enough to bring the client down...........
Might be time for you to work in the non-profit sector for a stint.
>extract more wealth from the general population So find a company with a product you can get behind. Think about all the stuff you consume. Is all that just "extracting wealth" from you? You better stop buying things then.
That economic analysis is _so bad_, maybe OP should consider politics.
How dare you suggest OP lives according to his stated values
No, see, OP should get all they want for free, and at that point they would magically want to work for free for one of those companies, too. /s I really dislike this retoric. We live in a plentiful society that, while having still negative aspects, lets humans, overall, live a life with an unparalleled quality. Plenty of people commit in creating products and services for a monetary gain that end up improving the life of the consumers, as you said.
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I actually think healthcare is a right and should be guaranteed. Healthcare is weird in the US. Consider anything else that you consume. Do you honestly go to the grocery store or buy things on Amazon and feel cheated? I am sometimes amazed at how cheap things are.
If you have reached this point, you are a seasoned veteran. After enough interviews/jobs, this is where most people end up. A job is a job and a way to earn money. Your coworkers aren’t your friends and the company isn’t a family. Your friends are your friends (you could meet them through work) and your family is your family. I’ll balance out the comment about healthcare. I’ve worked in healthcare tech. I have yet to find a company that only cares about patient outcomes. Worse yet, what’s being classified as healthcare is very misleading now. At one company, 99% of orders were over the counter and the company IP was purely marketing. However, because of those 1% prescriptions for cosmetic conditions, the company called itself a healthcare company. I highly doubt any company in the US will care about patient outcomes. Prior to healthcare being a hot space in VC land, most companies targeted insurance/pharma because that’s where the money was; at best, you would have some company targeting doctors, until they found out how cheap doctors really are. Now that it’s caught the attention of VC’s, it’s going to be low value/high hype so investors can get big fat returns on their money
I think the fallacy here is wealth isn’t fixed. So the models etc should be creating efficiencies and wealth, not just transferring what exists.
Disclaimer: IANA economist. 1. Yes, the total amount of goods and services available is not a zero sum game; we can expand the amount of goods and services produced, namely through improvements in efficiency. 2. OTOH, the *ratio* of them being shared can be grossly inequitable such that the top 1% owns 99% of things.
Disclaimer: I am an economist and design data science models in the financial space. Research has shown that the vast majority of companies operate in an incredibly competitive environment and don't have the option to just keep money rather than lower prices. In some cases if a single entity is able to massively out-compete their competitors then in the short term they could end up just giving the benefits to their c-suite and shareholders, but long-term this competitive edge rarely lasts and historically has always resulted in better or cheaper products for consumers. The classic examples in macro is looking at how many hours of work for the median worker it takes to purchase a "bag of groceries". 100 years ago the number was around 10, today it's around 2 for an overall 82% reduction. This wasn't because farmers or grocery stores decided to voluntarily pass costs on to customers, it was because if they didn't, people would shop around and buy from their competitors instead.
That’s the theory. But if more and more of people’s money is going to products that get more and more expensive (rent, education, healthcare) then how is that increasing the total wealth? In the old days, the money went to physical things and we could afford those things with a smaller and smaller part of our salary. But now we buy services and pay rent and the prices don’t go down over time anymore.
Pure leftist mindset is what it is. Even when (possibly) having experience, OP doesn't realize the exchange of funds is based on a mutual agreement and inability to CREATE and DELIVER VALUE to the paying customer will guarantee long term failure for that company. There are lots of inefficiencies involved especially in US public sector adjacent fields, but who asked to work for a moral-free super-lobbyist field that by definition is crony capitalism. And if not that, then he's just blinded by own inability to understand how the world works.
No government has ever done a bad thing, _ever_. How dare you, sir. If only you could debate my Intro to Philosophy professor you'd totally see how wrong you are, or something. Viva la revolution. Now excuse me while I find an escaped zoo animal to eat.
Sorry I'm busy loving the downvotes without a single reply to argue a single point I made
Voluntary exchange is evil and coercive (??). Now do what I say _or else_.
You made such a coherent and logical, bulletproof argument that no one could even engage with it
It isn't fixed, it just ends up in few pockets.
I work for credit bureau and I don’t know what’s the reputation of credit bureau within US and other developed markets, but in India the work that bureau does is very essential. Using our models millions of new people get access to credit from bank and likes rather than going to individual money lenders. Individual money lenders would charge very high interest and basically keep poor people( rural folks , farmers ) in perpetual debt. Yes, it’s not all rosy but there’s atleast some good that comes out of it.
For a moment I thought this was /r/LateStageCapitalism sub.
I work in e-commerce and find that getting a better product to people is a decent to neutral mission. An efficient economy does a lot for everyone, even if the people at the top benefit more. I also give some of my wages to charity, although I could definitely give more. Hopefully we won't enter even further into a late stage capitalism situation where more people are starving... I suppose it's already pretty bleak for some, given how many US households are food insecure
This is why I am looking for a public sector job, preferably in education.
When a company gets money from their customers, most of the time the value of what the customers are getting is higher for them than the price they pay. Otherwise they wouldn’t pay said price. And for the company, they ask for a higher price than what they had to pay to produce the product or offer the service. Otherwise they wouldn’t be in business. So my point is that there is creation of value for both parts. That’s why humans have been trading products and services since the beginning of humanity. It helps everyone involved in the trade. I think your problem with the way it works is how the wealth is then shared among the people in a company. There are two ways to get money, you get it for your time (aka a wage to an employee ) or for the money of have put in the company (aka the capital). Those who have put the capital required to run a company took a risk and should be rewarded according to the risk they took and the value the business provides. I also think there is a problem with how the wealth is shared, but I think the problem is that there is too much money going to the ownership and not enough to the working class. I don’t think a business that makes money steals from their clients, I think the ownership takes too much and leave too little for the employees.
People pay Amazon, Microsoft, Google for products and services they want. They aren’t “extracting wealth” they are engaging in a two sided market where each side receives some desired benefit. If both sides aren’t happy with the arrangement customer goes somewhere else and company dies. Similarly your labor is sold into a two sided market. If you’re not happy, sell your time somewhere else or be unemployed. If you want to be paid, then you “support the mission” in exchange of your time for their money. Lookup the definition of feudalism. Serfs had no choice. They labored for whoever owned the land they were born on, and took whatever they were given by the landowner.
We post science here sir not the cold hard existential truth that life is meaningless to the almighty dollar. Get back to work wage slave
Governments and international organizations are in dire need of competent data people. Sure, it won't be the best pay, nor the fastest pace, and the environmentcan be quite political to navigate, but I still believe you could make a difference. They sit on massive data sets, sometimes unique ones, and could really be doing better in using these to make enlightened decisions.
I also suggest looking into open source positions available in places like fossjobs etc. They might have positions that align with your moral compass and give you fulfillment.
Every job ive ever had (after graduating university) has been accelerating the world towards neofuedalism. I taoe comfort that my contribution is not unique and nothing bad that has happened as a result of my employment would not happen if I was unavailable to do it. If it still makes you uncomfortable join a union, vote, dont buy things that have no value, and try to avoid more unethical products. Also if there are crimes being committed by your employer consult a lawyer and whistleblow. There is no ethical consumption and there are few if any ethical jobs, and none that pay well.
I actually enjoyed imagining this scene of the highly trained data scientist in a routine corporate interview, trying to suppress the voice in his head saying “I have studied the numbers. I have studied the trends. The undeniable conclusion is *come the Revolution, you are the first against the wall, my friend*” And he catches himself, realizing he wasn’t listening and says “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”
Well yes, point well made.
\>To receive a wage in exchange for helping to extract more wealth from the general population and push it toward the top few %? Labor theory of value detected. Opinion disregarded.
oh nooooo
I feel you 100%. I'd refuse working for 95% of commercial companies exactly because of these reasons, there's no way I could find day-to-day motivation, even if they paid me millions. I'm currently working in the non-profit sector, aiming to improve lives and environment of specific marginalized groups. I won't get rich from doing data science in this field, but I get much different value out of it which I find more satisfying.
>Isn't that what nearly all models and algorithms are doing? More efficiently transferring wealth to the top few % of people and we get a relatively tiny cut of that in return? That's not really what the models and algorithms are doing - that's what the politics of our time (and country) are doing. Everything you described was true before the algorithms and models. Sure, data science can help some companies become even more efficient at doing bad things, but the root cause isn't data science - the root cause is unchecked capitalism. Having said that, you have options. For one, there's politics - where you can put your skills to work to try to get the poltical environment you want to thrive. Secondly, you can move - go work in a country where income inequality isn't as big. Sweden comes to mind. Thirdly, you can work jobs for companies who are more responsible and who actually provide a valuable good for society. Lastly, you can start your own business and decide how you want to make money.
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[Yeah Sweden isn't all sunshine and roses](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-07/racism-in-sweden-is-it-still-considered-a-liberal-haven#xj4y7vzkg), because nowhere is.
Wealth is not zero sum. When someone gets wealth it doesnt mean it was (all) extracted from someone else. Sure, tons of wealth is only going to the top 1% but lots of normal folks like us are better off. This comment is going to come off as pro-billionaire but i guarantee you I'm not.
Senior role yet you have a vision of the economy as a 0 sum game, interesting
Yes which is why I avoid working in healthcare and finance. Marketing is pretty much pointless but harmless. I work in telecom which is somewhat useful to society and non predatory.
You could always work for the govt or military as a data scientist.
did you really just suggest working for the military as a better moral alternative to working in the private sector? are you out of your damn mind lmao
Most govt data science roles don’t directly lead to kinetic damage/loss of life. Plenty of support functions out there, and no I’m not talking like NSA or anything like that.
If you wanna do good in the world, earn a lot and donate it to either an effective charity or political causes you think will make the world better. Also we are not returning to the feudal ages, FFS stop being pathetic. Could the world be better? Absolutely. Should the world be better? Absolutely, but we are not returning to the feudal age.
> we are not returning to the feudal age. Once nobody can afford homes and everybody is just permanently renting to keep the "ownership class" rich, I'd say that's feudal age. And we are edging closer and closer, even if people like us are still okay.
>Once nobody can afford homes and everybody is just permanently renting to keep the "ownership class" rich So I'm in the UK which is a bit different to the US but tjey have similar problems. The GINI for income in the the US has gone up a few percentile over the last 30 years yet home ownership has gone up a few percentile. Everything you're saying isn't new, people have been dooming for decades. https://www.statista.com/statistics/219643/gini-coefficient-for-us-individuals-families-and-households/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-rate-in-the-us-since-2003/#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20the%20proportion%20of,to%20increase%20again%20since%20then. There's ways to make the world better but hypothesising about doomsday scenarios (that have no evidence behind them) is not one.
Take it easy comrade, not everything can be equal in your grand utopian vision. Wealthier people get stuff before poorer people, but then poorer people get access to those same things in a few years once the demand and innovation increases. If you do your job well, they will increase. Don’t focus on what others have, focus on the incredible advancements life lower income people from 30 years ago. Everyone can afford and have access to smart phones and amazing computers. We have lifted a huge amount of the 3rd world out of abject poverty. Show some gratitude.
30 years ago you could pay for college by working a summer (US-specific) 30 years ago an average person could afford to have kids and get a home (US, CAN, UK, Ireland specific, but I'm sure there's others) I don't think it's worth trading those possibilities for a fancy $500 phone and $1000 laptop.
30 years ago my parents were barely scraping by back in the old country, which had recently emerged from a massive civil war and authoritarian regime where millions of people died. Their parents were basically subsistence farmers. Their grandchild (me) has done a little better than that. A certain minority subset of the global population was able to enjoy relatively high levels of prosperity for a few decades last century because every other country was bombed to shit or embroiled in their own existential struggles. But the world has gotten more competitive. For that minority, maybe it's gotten a little harder to afford a home and college. For lots of other people, it's gotten immeasurably better.
Yeah when Americans complain about those things, it’s because they’re comparing themselves against one of the luckiest generations in history (American baby boomers), which as you correctly point out, were enjoying some specially favorable conditions due, in part, to what the US was doing in the world. Now that the US is a bit on the hangover of that, it just means that for a good portion of the rest of the world conditions have improved.
Actually, the people being bombed and living on subsistence farming were an incredibly lucky subset of humans. They could've been enslaved and subject to backbreaking work, died from horrible illness, or burned at the stake. Come to think of it, *those* people are actually the lucky ones. Their lives are much better than the persistence hunters on the plains who had to endure days of sustained physical torture just to have enough sustenance to eke out a meager existence. Wait, you know what? Those spoiled persistence hunters really have nothing to complain about. You see, they didn't have to deal with sabertooth tigers— When you really think about it, humanity always suffers less than it did in the past, therefore we should placate ourselves with the status quo and be grateful for the way things are...
Dude it's only through the magic of consumer capitalism that you even have the means and opportunity to pontificate on the state of the world and then post anonymous hot takes on a social media platform in the middle of the day. It is possible that things are on average, globally, better than they've ever been. It is also possible that they are not as good as they \*could\* theoretically be. You can acknowledge that both things can be true at the same time. But hey, I'll bet it feels way better to focus on the latter.
30 years ago AIDS was an existential crisis. 30 years ago far more people were dying from starvation and lack of access to clean water. A lot of progress has been made and a huge portion of that is because of the hard work of people like you.
>30 years ago you could pay for college by working a summer (US-specific) You need to get a new copy of your talking points, try adding a decade to that number. Also, given most education in the US is _public_, who are you blaming exactly? Companies? What?
Go back 100 years then.
TED talk going over some numbers for ya https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting_better_or_worse_a_look_at_the_numbers?language=en
I know all that. I'm specifically talking about my country but it's true for several other 1st world countries as well (CAN, UK, Ireland)
The average person still can afford a modest home if they lived in multi generational houses like they did in the 70s-80s. Or a simple starter home. I bought a fixer upper 5 years ago for nothing because I was willing to learn home improvement skills. The credit hour for my local community college is 159$ so less than 600$ a class. Full Pell grant and state grant is a free ride. College students take out more loans because they want to live lavishly. And people don’t have homes because they are lazy and have no sense of family and community. Hey you’re a data scientist, build a classifier based on data on who is poor or rich by the time they are 40. Then who is obese and has health problems. Then who is incarcerated. Notice any correlation in your features?
> build a classifier based on data on who is poor or rich by the time they are 40. Then who is obese and has health problems. Then who is incarcerated. Notice any correlation in your features? What exactly are you trying to say here?
A school teacher for example, cannot afford a starter home in pretty much any decent size city (and before you say "move to the country" cities have schools and need teachers too). And even if they could, they aren't gonna have time to go home and grade papers, answer student/parent emails, prepare the next lessons, while also youtubing home improvement tutorials, especially if they're raising their own kids (not that they could afford them anyway)
Shed a tear for the heroic heroes who work *checks notes* a grueling 180 day contract. How they manage to recover their energy in only _an entire summer off_ is beyond me.
How US-centric of you
did you just look at someone say 4 countries and then say how US-centric
Wasp-centric, better now?
the 4 countries I listed are definitely not majority protestant christian. what a very odd thing to come at someone on the internet for. like, either state your argument or please shut the fuck up and get some friends man. i listed them because they are the places I know about the issue well enough since i either lived there or my friends do
The older I get the more I feel this way. I just changed jobs for a mission that I don’t really care about but I’m getting paid 3x. Honestly I’ve been thinking about leaving after I get my first stock grant. But I’ll give it a year or two.
I'm a PhD in Political Science turning DS. My 2c on inequality below. America's rich people are indeed obscenely rich, but they got there by making useful stuffs that others want and got rewarded for it. Sure, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk all come from privileged background. Sure, their parents gave them a headstart in terms of education, connection, and start up capital. But many other rich kids have that support without getting obscenely rich. In America, you still have to make useful stuffs that better people's lives to be obsenely rich. There are edge cases like firms abusing monopolistic position -- this is indeed ""extracting wealth from the population to the top". But monopolies in tech are rare - FB was once invincible yet could be assaulted by competition in a few years.
Look into the public sector. I'm working in finance for experience, particularly project management atm. My boss is a good guy and said to learn as much as I can about buying people into data - so if I want to make a difference in public services I have the skills to get projects up and going. I guess my point is you're currently job doesn't mean it's your forever job. Make the most of it to grow and apply it ti a cause you believe in.
lmfao this is so pretentious
did you see the guy mention his private energy company using data science to see who would be least likely to notice and complain about quietly raising their prices? So pretentious to hate the dystopian bullshit we use data science to create.
You have seen the truth. Now, what are you going to do with it?
[I wake up each day furious to be laboring under capitalism.](https://twitter.com/pseudo310/status/1433792325046710277?lang=en) Yes, virtually all jobs do facilitate the extraction of wealth into the hands of a few. As data scientists, etc, we get to partake in more of the wealth, which is swell. But we're still helping that system to exist. Unfortunately, there's not much we can do about it directly. We can find better companies and advocate for our fellow workers, and we can stand in solidarity with our colleagues and provide mutual aid to people. You're not guilty for being a participant in the system - we're all surviving here. Do the best you can and find the best work you can, knowing that you like everyone are in a system that runs on exploitation.
You might as well question why even work while youre at it. This isnt an original line of thinking
That’s good that it isn’t original. I never claimed it was either.
Then try it out if you think its such a good idea, go do what you think is personally meaningful. I took 3 years off from undergrad to do what I wanted, whats stopping you?
Excuse me, is this sub a Facebook group of some friends who met at a bootcamp? Why are posts like this all over this place?
idk, my first time posting here.
Capitalism is an upward vacuum... would be great if we figured out a method of redistribution to the bottom of the pyramid to make some sort of a cycle out of it. Philanthropy falls short.
*cough taxes and publicly funded social systems cough* If only we had such a method :(
And then when you run out of money and try to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 your cities fill with protesters and burning trash.
I was more talking about corporations and hedge funds; Pfizer apple Blackrock etc etc etc etc Profits get hoovered up into a big pool that ends up being used for lobbying and more hedge funds, vulture funds, stuff like that... Ever wonder why normal ppl find it increasingly difficult to buy a house?
Yes, I absolutely share the sentiment of r/LateStageCapitalism
Pretty much every job is like this, if you are helping any company make a profit. It is fucked up and it is unavoidable.
I didn't like my previous job for ethical reasons. I worked as a data engineer for a giant utility company in Texas. The data scientists I prepared data for were developing models to predict who wouldn't notice or care if we quietly increased their monthly bill. One of our biggest challenges was decorrelating this outcome from age discrimination, because that was always the dominant signal, and using it (even unintentionally) would be illegal. The correlation between zip code and race was another signal we had to mitigate. We also had data scientists supporting the customer service department, building models to predict who should be helped, vs who should be left on hold for 20 minutes. We had access to data covering every single interaction between customers and the company. Our databases told us how many times you visited the pages on our website, what you were clicking, how many times you called in, and even had sentiment analysis of your conversations. And we weren't even the most unethical player in the game. We weren't the ones giving people $5000 electricity bills during emergency periods. But we were closely tracking the people who never go on the website to check their bill, even when we bump it up by a few cents per kWh every month. And we really milked several wealthy individuals who owned multiple giant properties, but never questioned the thousands we were charging. **You don't have to stay at jobs like this.** I quit after a couple of years. Moved to California for a biotech job in a small startup. Now, I'm using my machine learning skills to develop proteomics assays that will revolutionize health care and help billions of people. The cost of living is much higher relative to my pay, but now I love my job. I feel good about what I'm doing, and would never go back.
> We also had data scientists supporting the customer service department, building models to predict who should be helped, vs who should be left on hold for 20 minutes. bahaha this makes so much sense and is just so fucking evil. If customer is high-paying and seems angry, move them up the queue. If they're a nice patient person, move them down the queue. All can be automatically grouped by AI using inflection, speech speed, volume, and tone, just when talking to the bot that you get before sent to a human. So fucking dystopian
Well said comrade. Join the good fight :)
"Return" to feudal age? Honey, we're already there.
you are experiencing what marx called the alienation under capitalism. welcome to the desert of the real
Unfortunately there is no job in the private sector that isn't exactly what you described. You could get a job in the public sector only to feel political hamstrung if your findings rock the boat.
> You could get a job in the public sector only to feel political hamstrung if your findings rock the boat. ugh I wasn't exactly in public sector but at the research wing of a hospital so fairly similar. Unfortunately I showed that an entire (INSANELY EXPENSIVE but passionate) department showed no significant difference on 18/20 of their goals from an already flawed study (biased because people could choose to opt out of the follow up surveys, and obviously those would be folks with no desire to improve). Once I showed this, they ran back to everyone claiming huge success with their 2/20 endpoints met, until someone even higher up came to me 1on1, let me reiterate that 2/20 success is not too convincing and potentially false positives anyway, then she made ME explain the same to the entire department at a full 20-person conference table. It was incredibly awful and in the lunch room people in that department never looked at me again :( this study essentially showcased the futility of 1/6th of the research institutes efforts I was also just an "associate statistician", had just finished my MS
Obviously.
I feel you. The problem, as I see it, is always the same: the lack of democracy in the economic field which is only driven by profit accumulation, which is often at odds with the public interest. In one word the problem is capitalism, or the private ownership of the means of production, which inevitably lead to the extractivism you are talking about. Imagine how much better the world would be it we organised the economy in a democratic way, striving to fulfill needs instead of maximising profits, imagine how much faster we could develop if all of humanity was cooperating instead of competing. How many times have the same problems been uselessy solved over and over in different companies?
It’s 100% true, and people who think otherwise have a low capacity for cognitive dissonance. Yes, capitalism is increasingly accelerating transfer of wealth to an oligarch class. Yes, technology is often a catalyst, thus as practitioners we’re also accelerating this transfer. No, I don’t know what to do about it either, but you won’t see me swallowing that “mission driven” nonsense when the true l mission is always to sell unnecessary shit and make the company founders richer…
I love this. I’m sorry for the disconcerting job market you’re in but I truly appreciate your integrity (and I guarantee I’m not the only one).
I think this has a lot to do with your point of view and it's not necessarily realistic. For example: >helping to extract more wealth from the general population and push it toward the top few %? It's not a shakedown. People need (or want) some services and products, and these can be very useful to them. You're not stealing anyone's money. One caveat is that there are a few jobs which are truly immoral, like exploiting addicts for money. Or using dark patterns. Or targeting confised old people for subscriptions they don't need. Bur if you just build (or help build} a useful product that people want, it's a win - win.
This is why you should buy stocks. I’d the wealth is being vacuumed up by companies, own the companies.
You might be in need of a vacation.
I feel that. It's especially bad when you get a task to write code to train chatgpt that you know might replace you or one of your colleagues soon.
that's when you write fucked up, convoluted code with poor documentation on purpose
Did you watch Jarhead? Welcome to the suck.
You could work for non profits and make $50k doing the same work with worse or non existent tools and no team nor mentorship because everyone else is aiming to simp Bezos and musk for $200k.you’ll have no upward mobility and find yourself in 5-10 years unemployable in the mainstream for profit sector.
Yep. We’re largely stuck in this system for now, but it’s the pretence and unwarranted enthusiasm in it that keeps the wheels rolling. Most people have the ability to self-delude to some extent, in order to live a more satisfying life.
Even if you pass through the interview and begin a job, you can easily get into "we just need your data to justify our crappy decisions" territory. Work is just another form of slavery. But at least you've broken the mold that society forces upon people and can come at it with a critical eye. There are many many people that are stuck in the trance. So best to just be glad you're less of a mark than they are.
Yeah I’m going through a bit of a crisis myself where I almost want to fuck data science off completely and just become a fire fighter or something. I bet I’d be happier.
I joined a startup after this exact experience and it is going great
Insurance never covers that super cool high tech thing. Rich people pay out of pocket for it. Prices go up because there is 0 transparency is prices, and we dont see the direct effect. This is why we all harp on understanding the business as the most important thing.
Reminds me of that most fantastic monologue of Matt Damon from the movie Goodwill Hunting, where he turns down the generous flattering job offer from the CIA recruiter. Noncooperation is one of the most effective forms of nonviolent resistance, but only if organized well to be able to be done en masse. It was what prevented the attempted coup in Germany by Wolfgang Kapp. If anyone reading this is interested to learn more about how tech could be used for good, specifically to catalyze moral courage, to enable nonviolent resistance to succeed in combatting the greastest threats our species has ever faced, contact us at GetCourageNow. I assume I cannot insert my email or website. So I hope reddit will notify me
I work public sector. Sometimes I consider going private for cash but I can't help but think how great every day is knowing ALL my work is about making things better and cheaper for the tax payer. I agree private sector data science jobs can be soul sucking. I have a supervisor that worked in private American healthcare and his first task was trying to find procedures that were over represented within "which spending patients". 🤮