[HN Gopher] Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you'll fail the test ___________________________________________________________________ Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you'll fail the test Author : pondsider Score : 54 points Date : 2021-12-28 18:25 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.wsj.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com) | tibbar wrote: | I passed one of the actuary exams (P) after college after taking | <$many> applied stats classes. I'm glad I did because it gave me | a very good intuition for conditional and bayesian probabilities. | I'm sure I wouldn't pass it if I took it right now, and I would | never want to study for the other exams, but I think this one was | a real win that taught transferable skills. | [deleted] | feoren wrote: | To be honest, everyone working in science, engineering, data | science, actuarial science, or really any numbers-heavy field | should be able to answer that first question by reasoning through | it. It may be slow, it may require drudging up some distant | memories from college, or it may even require a visit to | Wikipedia; but if you work with numbers and you can't do that | example problem, you owe it to your profession to brush up on | your statistics. People not understanding pretty basic statistics | like that is a major root cause of almost all the problems in | science today (p-hacking, etc.). Many, many statistics problems | (including the example) can be solved easily (again: not | necessarily quickly) by the basic technique of scribbling out a | rectangle or tree of possibilities and the probability of each. | omosubi wrote: | I feel very difficult exams should be commonplace. Everyone | should be held to very high standards. It's surprising how many | professions don't do this. For example, I've been to several | physical therapists who barely seemed to understand what was | wrong with me even after several visits. Each gave me what seemed | like the same standard routine that they give everyone with | <insert pain type here> problem. | ZephyrBlu wrote: | I think this is a terrible idea. Exams are terrible proxies for | ability to do the work. At best they seem like a measure of | intelligence, conscientiousness and maybe memory. | | What makes you think that a very difficult exam will improve | the ability of your PT? | hogFeast wrote: | Investment management is a classic example of this. CFA has a | low pass rate (it isn't that hard really, tens of thousands | of people do the exam in India and China so that impacts the | pass rate), most people do it but, ofc, the really useful | knowledge can't be tested...picking a stock isn't like | passing a exam. And worse, you get lots of people who pass | the exam, acquire false sense of confidence, and then make | mistakes (or don't ever move beyond the "parrot" level of | intelligence). | | I think maths is another one, as conventionally taught. I | hated maths at school because it was largely sitting down in | a room, doing the same thing over and over again like a | computer...quite reasonably, I asked myself whether this was | a productive use of my time. As an adult, I have taught | myself everything again, it was far more enjoyable and useful | because I actually took the time to understand the concepts | (and no, none of the stuff I did at school was useful, it was | just mindless computation). | | I don't necessarily think exams are a bad idea but they don't | produce knowledge, experience, or real expertise. They are | often misused (as is certification, I knew a guy who worked | as a fund manager and was a senior member of the CFA for | ethics and standards...he stole from employees regularly). | halpert wrote: | The body doesn't have a diagnostic port or log file. Even top- | tier doctors are wrong frequently. | topkai22 wrote: | The over use of occupational licensing has some well documented | negative effects, see | https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/OccupationalLicensing.h... | for some points about it. | | However, physical therapists already have an occupational | licensing exam. You could argue that it's not hard enough, as | it does have a high pass rate for those who have graduated from | a PT university program, but then you start drifting into "no | true Scotsman" territory. | omosubi wrote: | Yes this is true. I realize my comment had the wrong tenor in | that the actual exams matter less than just having rigorous | courses. Not everyone should be a doctor or a physical | therapist or a software engineer and it's common nowadays to | credential so that some institution can make money. | 908B64B197 wrote: | > The over use of occupational licensing has some well | documented negative effects | | That's because it's done wrong. | ryan93 wrote: | ! we just found the guy who knows how to do it right. What | a day for humanity! | anigbrowl wrote: | (include your proposal for improvement to get more positive | feedback) | dhosek wrote: | Some 17 years ago, I got my teaching credential. | | Two observations: | | 1. The test was ridiculously easy. Junior high-level math and | reading. And yet teacher candidates still failed it. | | 2. For K-12 teaching, the knowledge that was tested was pretty | much irrelevant for the job. What matters for more than being | able to find the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle | or to comprehend an expository paragraph (which is not to say | that these aren't useful skills) is the ability to manage a | classroom. Almost none of the teacher prep I had was geared | towards that single most important skill (which I, | unfortunately, was not so great at) and which is what will make | the difference between succeeding and failing in a K-12 | teaching career. | | I think this generalizes to other fields as well. Think about | all the tree-traversal BS we've all gone through in a software | engineer interview and how little that relates to the actual | work that we do and how the hard stuff is much less the | programming and more the learning the code base and business. | HWR_14 wrote: | Meanwhile, they often gate the requirements to even take the | test. It would be chaos (and bad for the law schools) if | someone were able to take the bar without a JD (some states | have just as lengthy apprenticeship periods replace that) or | otherwise prove professional ability acquired via non | traditional means. | dhosek wrote: | My grandfather got his architecture license without a college | degree (in the 1920s). He often related riding down to | Champagne, IL to take the exam in the rumble seat of a Model | T Ford with a couple college grads to take the exam. He | passed the exam and they both failed. | | I was somewhat surprised watching the Perry Mason series on | HBO last year when Perry Mason was sworn to the bar without | actually going to any sort of law school. Apparently that was | the norm until after World War II. | redis_mlc wrote: | riskneutral wrote: | This is 100% a submarine PR article [1] from the Society of | Actuaries. | | [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html | poteznykrolik wrote: | 20 years ago i had such hopes to run into that field but man am i | glad something else happened (2008) | npmisdown wrote: | So the answer to the question in the topic is (B) ~0.33 (can't | see the answer because of the paywall)? | | Doesn't seem to be a particularly tricky question unless I miss | something, just basic probability theory calcs. | dhosek wrote: | That was my answer as well: My reasoning: Let _x_ be the | probability of purchasing disability coverage, thus the | probability of purchasing collision is 2 _x_ from conditions b | and c, we know that 2 _x_ [?] _x_ = .15 so we can calculate the | probability of neither applying as 1-(2 _x_ + _x_ )+2 _x_ [?] | _x_ = .18 + .15 = .33 | | I can see the trap of forgetting to add 2 _x_ [?] _x_ in the | calculation (since we don 't want to double count the case | where they purchase both insurances). And choices d and e | follow from forgetting to subtract the probability of | purchasing either from 1 (and making the same mistake of not | removing the double count). I'm curious where the .48 | distractor comes from. Coming up with good distractors is the | secret to making a multiple choice test hard (students tend to | think that multiple choice will be easier than a fill in the | blank test, but they forget that with free answer exams, they | can still get partial credit where in a multiple choice test, | they'll lose all credit for a small mistake). | knodi123 wrote: | > with free answer exams, they can still get partial credit | | Rarely had a prof that had the patience for that, vs. a | simple red X. Not arguing, it's just my anecdote of | frustration. | [deleted] | Denvercoder9 wrote: | If the sample question is actually representative of the exam, | I'm surprised that people that actually study for this fail that | often. I haven't had any statistics education since high school, | and found it fairly straightforward to solve. | tfehring wrote: | It's an actual exam question from the first exam, but it's one | of the easier ones. IIRC the syllabus is something like 40% | discrete probability and combinatorics, 40% univariate | continuous probability, and 20% multivariate probability. But | it's not like WSJ is going to expect its readers to do tabular | integration in the margin. | | In general that exam is pretty representative of the syllabus | of my mid-level undergrad probability theory class. The failure | rate is somewhat inflated because students will walk right out | of their probability class into the exam thinking they can pass | without further studying. It's still harder than a typical | undergrad exam, but it's nowhere near the level of the Putnam | or whatever. | dc-programmer wrote: | Years ago, I looked at sample questions for the probability | exam, which most people take first. To get a passing score you | had to be able to quickly recall different probability | distributions and also you needed to have a pretty solid grasp | of the mechanics of things like double integration. Intro | calculus-based mathematical probability classes cover most of | the material, but passing the test requires mastery of at least | the applied side of math probability. | lordnacho wrote: | If it took a math professor over 3 years to do it, it sounds | tough. What is the reward? I consistently see actuarial science | as a top earning degree in certain papers, but there's not much | color on whether it's worthwhile. How many openings are there for | each person who passes, what are working conditions like? | pg_bot wrote: | I considered becoming an actuary after college (passed first | two exams on first try) but decided to become a software | engineer instead. You should expect to make six figures with a | near guarantee of employment for your entire career. The job | conditions are fairly standard for a white collar worker, but | you won't have crazy working hours like a lawyer or a banker. | | If you could take the tests in parallel the process would be a | lot quicker, but the tests are sequential (you typically need | to take 7 to be fully certified) and are only offered every 3-6 | months. I didn't think the first two exams were particularly | difficult, but did prep for about a month for each beforehand. | I would argue that time management was more important since you | had only a few questions but were on a strict clock. So if you | actually wanted to pass the test it was more important to find | shortcut methods to get to the correct answer quickly. | throwawaygh wrote: | _> How many openings are there for each person who passes_ | | Think of the SoA as a union, if that helps. | | _> what are working conditions like?_ | | It's a boring office job. | | The job is what it is. A safe and well-paid job that guarantees | you'll never be a pauper or a prince. Not dissimilar from | university teaching. | not-my-account wrote: | Is the answer to the question at the top 0.33? | | let pc = purchased_collision, pd = purchased_disability | | we have: | | 2 * P(pc) = P(pd) P(pc & pd) = 0.15 | | so | | P(pc) * P(pd) = 0.15 2 P(pc)^2 = 0.15 --> P(pc) = 0.274, P(pd) = | 0.548 | | So the probability of neither pc nor pd is | | !P(pc | pd) = 1 - P(pc) - P(pd) + P(pc & pd) = 0.328 ~= 0.33? | | The addition of P(pc & pd) was to take account of the double | counting of pc and pd. | | Please let me know if I've made a mistake! | ffwacom wrote: | I got the same. When do we start as actuaries? | ZephyrP wrote: | I got the same result as you, but in my mind the expression _" | twice as likely to purchase"_ could just as easily have meant | P(C) = 2 * P(D) / 1 + P(D) (yielding 0.35824) rather than 2 * | P(C) (yielding 0.32841). | ummonk wrote: | It is yes. | | Definitely need a calculator to be able to do sqrt(0.075) and | calculate the result. | | Though I was able to figure it out in my head without a | calculator by eliminating choice A and choice C (I tried pd=0.3 | and pd=0.2 to prove the answer had to be >0.28 and <0.48). | not-my-account wrote: | Ah clever! | [deleted] | d136o wrote: | In this [1] interview by Barry Ritholtz, Markel CEO essentially | told the origin story of an insurance giant. Basically a family | member was a lawmaker, passed a law that drivers of the newly | invented cars (maybe horse buggies?) must be insured. They | simultaneously started a company that sold insurance. Over time | they learned to make money from investing their customers | capital. | | It blew my mind at how candid he was about the fact that his | business exists due to regulatory mandates. Are there insurance | products that people are really satisfied with and trust will pay | out in case of event X? I feel like I'm self insuring when it | comes to car and healthcare at least. Title insurance when buying | a house also seemed like a total "legally required" joke. | | [1] https://ritholtz.com/2021/11/transcript-thomas-gayner/ | romwell wrote: | Side story about how satisfied people can be with the mandated | insurance. | | I was on coast-to-coast road trip when I got into an accident | in TX. Someone was trying to pass me on the left in a turning | lane, veered into the incoming lane, and then hit my vehicle's | front wheels from the back. | | The police ticketed the other driver, and told me that | insurance will surely take care of that on my side. "Wow, it's | worse than we thought", they said, looking at the footage from | the security camera. There were eyewitnesses too. | | Now, this was a $6K car (used Fiat 500) that I got specifically | for the road trip, intending to resell it in the future. I | didn't get comprehensive coverage for it, figuring that if I | damage it, welp, it's on me; and if someone else does -- that's | why we have mandated liability insurance, right? | | ...I got zero ($0.00, zlich, nada) from the other driver's | liability insurance. They informed me that their expertise | concluded that the accident was my fault, and, by law, _they | don 't have to abide by the police report_. | | That's to say, the only way to get any money from them is to | sue them, in TX. Figuring that the car is registered in | California, and the damage was about $3K, they decided to not | pay me anything at all. | | Because they can. | | Now, if I had comprehensive coverage, they'd be facing my | insurance company -- because one of those has to pay up. But | they're facing me, so I'm welcome to sue or get shafted (with a | nice side of gaslighting from the insurance agent, who was very | convincing about how I should trust their assessment). | | The whole thing is a scam. | gizmo686 wrote: | Whats the scam? The insurance company was hired to provide | insurance for the other driver. By all accounts they did so. | If the other driver had no insurance, your options would have | been the same: hope they pay out of good will, or sue them. | | The public policy motivation for liability insurance is to | protect the lawsuit route. If you sue an uninsured driver and | win, you might not be able to collect (getting blood from a | stone). But if they have liability insurance you can collect | on a judgement. | | You choose to drive with only liabilty insurance, and are | upset that insurance didn't cover an accident when you had no | liability. | extr wrote: | It sounds like you were just cheap, didn't want to purchase | comprehensive coverage, then that came back to bite you. This | sucks, but is hardly a scam. Even worse, it sounds like you | even understood what comprehensive coverage does (cover 1st | party physical damage regardless of situation), and | consciously chose not to buy it, assuming that anything that | would possibly happen to the vehicle would be someone else's | fault. Terrible assumption on a cross country road trip. You | would have been equally fucked if you hit a deer, spun out in | a rain storm and hit a median, popped a tire and ran into a | ditch, etc. | DennisP wrote: | I'm satisfied. I've never had any trouble getting either auto | or health insurance to pay out. | | As for title insurance, there's no way I'd buy a house for cash | without title insurance to make sure I'll actually own it, and | I don't blame the banks for insisting on the same. | throwawaygh wrote: | _> It blew my mind at how candid he was about the fact that his | business exists due to regulatory mandates._ | | This is extraordinarily well understood in the insurance | industry. They don't think of it as odd or a dirty secret, at | all. | | It's more surprising that he was so open about the naked | corruption/nepotism in the origin story. Apparently there's a | sector of society for whom that is also normal and acceptable. | | _> I feel like I'm self insuring when it comes to car and | healthcare at least._ | | This is not at all the case for car insurance! You may be self- | insuring the cost of your car, but are you also self-insuring | against a lawsuit for damage to the other guy's car? | | It's definitely more true than not for healthcare, though. | Health insurance is a pretty terrible product. | duckmysick wrote: | > Health insurance is a pretty terrible product. | | What's the alternative? | NikolaNovak wrote: | Agreed; but I don't see it as _necessarily_ nefarious (only | _probably_ nefarious:) | | In a lot of places, most people only wear seatbelt, wear a | helmet, don't drink and drive, etc due to laws/regulations | (and in others, they'll strongly actively fight these | initiatives). We are really _really REALLY_ bad, on average, | assessing personal risks. Regulation, in part at least, is us | as a society taking look at overall percentages and saying | "well let's not do _that_ ". | | There's a likely apocryphal story about sysadmin who was | fired after event he estimated had less than 10% chance of | happening, happened. Most of us assume that <50% means it | won't happen, >50% means it will happen. With most events | that insurance covers, most of us are _aaaaawful_ at | understanding it can ever happen to us... and we most | definitely over-estimate the gracefulness, self-awareness and | ownership we 'll exhibit if it _does_ help us. | sheriffofpaddys wrote: | tfehring wrote: | Disclosure: used to be an actuary at an insurance company. I | think the general rule is that your insurance will reliably | cover the things that it explicitly says it covers, but that | category may be narrower than you think, so you should read the | policy and figure out what your policy does and does not cover. | | For example, if you go to a doctor who's not in your health | insurer's network, you're probably not covered. In some states, | you can buy a "full coverage" (liability + comprehensive + | collision) policy with a liability limit of $10k, so if you hit | someone with your car and they have more than $10k in medical | bills they can sue you for the balance. Your provider network | and liability limit will both be spelled out explicitly in your | policy documents, and neither concept is really that | complicated, but if you don't know about them you could be in | for a nasty surprise. | | Of course, all of that creates a giant pain in the ass for | consumers, and that begs the question, why doesn't anyone just | make an insurance policy that covers _everything the | policyholder thinks is covered_? And the answer is that nobody | would buy it! It would be more expensive (usually _much_ more | expensive) than its competitors, and people are generally very | price-sensitive in their insurance purchases, and no one would | read the fine print to see what they 're actually getting for | their money. | | P.S. The rabbit hole of stupid insurance regulation runs deep. | Texas county mutuals are a fun example. Captive reinsurers are | another. | asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: | While corruption may have been the source of this particular | business, the fact that insurance is required by law is a good | thing. The counterfactual involves a bunch of uninsured | judgement proof drivers clogging the road and ruining everyone | else's day/life. The problem is already bad enough now when it | is illegal to do. | romwell wrote: | Hot take: if it's something that's universally a good thing | that should be _required_ of every driver, it should be | provided by the state and paid for with taxes / annual | registration fees. | | Otherwise, it's just an income-generating scheme for private | parties. | | Oh, and fun fact: the liability insurance isn't required to | pay up anything unless the covered driver _loses in court_. | They don 't have to follow that the police report says | regarding whose fault it is. | | How do I know? Got told that after getting into an accident | on a road trip. So much for a good thing. | wbl wrote: | Depends on the state. Some have no fault allocation systems | to avoid these lawsuits. | gurchik wrote: | > Are there insurance products that people are really satisfied | with and trust will pay out in case of event X? | | I've always been happy with renter's insurance and have paid it | since my first apartment in college. I pay $100/yr for a 50k | limit policy. Unlike car insurance I am not required to have | this, but I've always considered it to be worth it. | | I also pay for pet insurance. Again, not required to have it | but when I considered cancelling and self-insuring I filed a | claim and was immediately paid out hassle free. That convinced | me to keep it. | neonate wrote: | https://archive.is/0Eaav | stbtrax wrote: | From experience from a few close friends: Actuarial science is | always in the lists of top jobs but it's a terrible career. It's | quite limiting and doesn't pay particularly well. The companies | are all old and stagnant and the amount of time put in to | studying for exams is taxing. It'd be much better ROI to put that | time into studying for sw-eng roles. That is, unless you're | particularly interested in memorizing math formulas for insurance | calculations | riskneutral wrote: | > unless you're particularly interested in memorizing math | formulas for insurance calculations | | Note that the formulas in question are the opposite of | interesting formulas. They're just made-up regulatory rules | about how much capital an insurance company has to hold in | order to sell insurance. Everyone agrees that some amount of | capital needs to be held. Everyone, except maybe some of the | "actuarial scientists" themselves, understands that this isn't | a scientific endeavor like discovering the laws of General | Relativity, it is an arbitrary and convoluted "rule of thumb" | type of formula, but it's better than nothing because you | really do need to force insurance companies to hold some | minimum capital and you need some kind of standard formula to | calculate that capital in order for there to be a level playing | field between insurance companies. | | I think actuarial science undergrad students choose that career | because it is one of the safest choices for someone who is good | at math but has no interest in science or technology. They are | allured by the promise of steady employment and a $100,000 | salary, and vague visions of being a high paid "math AND | business expert" for a big insurance company where they will | get to make decisions involving large sums of money with | scientific precision using advanced mathematical concepts. | | By the time your young actuary has started working, they are | already too deep in to be able to change careers. They made the | "safe" choice, now they have to live with it. At first | everything seems new and exciting. But 10 years into it, they | have settled down roots and family somewhere in the middle of | Iowa (because that's where the insurance company is located), | knee deep into spreadsheets calculating "Solvency II" formulas | for "quarter end." They don't get to make any business | decisions, they barely understand how their employers' business | even really works, and their career has plateaued at a mediocre | level despite having spent 10 years writing all of the | available actuarial exams. Unfortunately, that is the only | employer of actuaries in town, so they are completely marooned. | They spend their free time learning the latest tips and tricks | about Excel VBA programming, watching the movie "About Schmidt" | repeatedly, and mistakenly envying their peers who work in | banking instead of insurance | Cogito wrote: | A small note, but actuaries do a lot more than capital | reserving, and even then the regulatory aspect (while | important) is not the only consideration. | | I am not an actuary, but I have done a lot of actuarial work | in a small insurance company, and the work included | | - pricing (are we under of over charging for this product?) | | - reinsurance (analysis so we can get a good price, as well | as making sure what we sell remains within our reinsurance | coverage) | | - portfolio monitoring (performance/profitability/etc) | | - risk aggregation (do we have too much exposure to a single | risk or type of risk) | | - loss forecasting (primarily for reserving, but also for a | 'true' indication of performance, as claims experience is | necessarily very laggy) | | - product development (for example, what does a travel | insurance product look like in a COVID world? What can we | reasonably offer and how do we assess the | pricing/reinsurance/risk appetite) | | Moreover, none of these tasks required nor employed any | memorised formulas. You either use a model someone else | built, or build one yourself, and then analyse and test as | much data as you can so that you can provide good advice. | Importantly you have to be able to show _exactly_ how you | produced that advice, and be ready to justify every single | choice you made while doing so. A large part of the actuarial | training seems to be ways of working and thinking that enable | this (at least this is my impression from the actuaries I | work with). | | There are actuaries who just calculate '"Solvency II" | formulas for "quarter end"', but there are also actuaries | developing advanced risk models for catastrophic weather | events using large data sets and machine learning, or | shutting down products because the market has shifted and | it's no longer viable. In every insurance company I've worked | at, actuaries are some of the most influential and respected | people there, and do very interesting work (along with some | really mind-numbing work!). | [deleted] | [deleted] | extr wrote: | This is a fantastic summary of everything actuarial science | can touch on. I started my career as a junior actuary at a | small insurance startup and was fortunate to be able to | meaningfully contribute to many of these areas because we | didn't have many senior actuaries on staff. It was a lot of | fun as a 23-24 year old to be involved in making such | important strategic decision making, it made me realize | that insurance companies are really fascinating financial | objects. | | There are definitely downsides as many are mentioning. As | you specialize your job does get more narrow and "boring" | (unless you climb the management ladder). Many major | insurance companies are not headquartered in interesting or | fun places to live. At some point I realized that life was | not for me, and transitioned my skillset to data | science/machine learning to give myself a more varied | career. | | But there are absolutely interesting problems to be solved | in the insurance space, particularly for people with strong | communication/business skills in addition to the | wherewithal needed to deal with the actual nuts and bolts | of the math and analysis. | francisofascii wrote: | Since the job is all about helping insurance companies manage | risk, someone who makes "safe" choices would be a good fit. | tschwimmer wrote: | Are you okay there? It got a little specific at the end. | riskneutral wrote: | Don't worry, I'm not an actuary. | smegsicle wrote: | > put that time into studying for sw-eng | | why not both? an environment of stagnant companies offering | jobs involving difficult calculations sounds ripe for | disruption- is it being strangled by regulation or something? | riskneutral wrote: | > why not both? an environment of stagnant companies offering | jobs involving difficult calculations sounds ripe for | disruption- is it being strangled by regulation or something? | | Those jobs only exist _because_ of regulation. The regulation | dictates that the insurance companies must do those | calculations and that the calculations must be done by a | specially ordained priesthood of actuaries who have passed a | bunch of random math and finance exams. That priesthood does | not want technological disruption, they like their | spreadsheets just fine, thank you. In recent years the | executives at the insurance companies went through a fad | where they decided they wanted to try out this whole | "disruption" and "innovation" thing, so they created various | kinds of "innovation" departments. Typically, when a company | does that, after a few years "innovation" becomes a four | letter word and they never talk about it again. In order to | climb the corporate ladder as an actuary, you have to focus | on the politics surrounding you and not on the terrible | technology surrounding you. | Spooky23 wrote: | I'm not an actuary, but worked earlier in my career for a | "chief innovation officer". Being young and dumb I feel for | it, and in truth we had an awesome team that did some | really cool stuff with lasting value. | | But once we had a few wins, the chief innovator guy got | promoted away, and he was the guy with political power. The | various fiefdoms goobled up the innovation budget like | thanksgiving turkey. The IT idiots "innovated" by buying | high capacity toner. The data center people bought new air | conditioners. | tfehring wrote: | I left the actuarial field for basically the reasons you | describe, but the characterization still strikes me as somewhat | unfair. Actuaries reliably make significantly above the median | US income right out of undergrad, and reliably double that | income within a decade, working 40 hours a week, without | needing to go to a target school or get an advanced degree. | That alone makes it a good career by most objective standards. | | Software engineering is sort of a trump card in that it looks | better than basically any other career on paper, but _everyone_ | can 't be a software engineer. And while the actuarial field | draws from a similar talent pool as software engineering, I | think most people who enjoy one wouldn't enjoy the other - the | former is much more of a business-y profession. I personally | find the work I do as a SWE way less interesting than the work | I did as an actuary, even though I'm not big on memorizing | formulas. | DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote: | A survey I saw said actuaries have high job satisfaction. I | had actuary and math colleagues in the risk dept (i was in | diff group) and they loved running risk sims, programming, | data visualization. In addition to high salary per hour, low | stress, no bro-grammer environment or ageism, or shiny new | web framework. | yukinon wrote: | This could be outdated information that I have, but don't | actuaries constantly need to study for their exams/certs? | Does that fall outside of the 40 hour/week range, or is that | done on work time? | tfehring wrote: | The exam process probably takes something like 2000-3000 | hours total, with roughly half done on company time. Exam | season is really stressful and can go significantly above | 40 hours/week between work and study time, but it doesn't | add up to a ton of time when you amortize it over a whole | career. | | There's also a career-long continuing education requirement | that typically boils down to 15 hours/year of seminars or | webcasts, all done on company time. | decafninja wrote: | You could argue that a lot of SWEs also have to constantly | study leetcode on their own, outside of working hours. | Especially if you are targeting many of the high paying | companies that would pay substantially more than an | actuary. | | Even if you are fortunate not to have to do leetcode (i.e. | frontend engineer interviews seem to diverge from leetcode | problems nowadays), you still have to extracurricularly | grind on coding in ways that you would typically not | encounter during your normal work. | nabla9 wrote: | I wonder how the difference looks like if you think over the | whole career. | Spooky23 wrote: | For better or worse, HN posters think the good times will be | rolling forever. | lumost wrote: | I suspect that SWE is becoming a bi-modal field. We often | talk about SWE salaries pushing mid-> high six figures, but | this is only true for experienced professionals working in | very successful companies benefiting from large stock | appreciations. | | If the stock market was falling/flat for a few years SWE comp | would not be as high. By definition, most SWEs will not work | at Netflix. The current situation of stable, well paying, and | public tech companies is unlikely to persist indefinitely. | tfehring wrote: | Yeah, that's a factor too. The actuaries had way better | salary trajectories than the programmers we worked with | when I was at an insurance company in the Midwest. | decafninja wrote: | I suspect the average US "Senior SWE" is lucky to retire | after decades of work having broken $200,000 compensation. | | For every 20-30-40something FAANG engineer making | $300-500k+, there are legions upon legions of SWEs working | at IT-as-a-cost-center non-tech companies making a fraction | of that amount. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-12-28 23:00 UTC)