Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mrguyorama 1204 days ago
A lot of popular youtube content creators have english or literature degrees actually. It's almost like being really good at writing for a given audience, and being able to write stuff that will be interpreted as genuine and good is a useful tool that we really should be using more.

Any technical degree that doesn't include some sort of technical writing class is deficient IMO, and degree programs that get closer to needing to work with other people more than math should have stronger writing classes as well. So many adult americans can't read at a highschool level. It's an essential skill, and has been since society first developed written language.

1 comments

The problem is those are pyramid fields. In OPs example almost anyone with a physiotherapy degree is doing well economically; probably not wealthy unless they open their own chain of clinics but that's going into business major territory not physio anyway.

Pyramid fields are those like pro football quarterback or famous youtube personality where a handful of people with world wide famous names make 99.9% of the income in that field, and almost everyone else working in the pyramid is at minimum wage or volunteer income status.

As a concrete example of a pyramid field, the 1900th best football player in the USA is a wealthy NFL pro ball player, but the 2000th best football player in the USA is probably selling used cars right now, maybe coaching, maybe unemployed. On the other hand essentially 100% of physio degree holders are doing physio and not getting rich but not getting poor. I'm sure the number of men willing to play pro football somewhat exceeds 2000... there's over 73000 NCAA college football players right now so I would guess that the "20K or so" who graduate this year would all love to get pro ball salaries, but the entire pyramid is less than 2K total, so even if 10% of pro players retire each year that would be 100 applicants for every paid position, everyone else can become a barista.