Closer To The Ideal

Recent conversations with friends who have gone through medical school have me thinking about debt and education.

One of them ran up $120,000 of debt while becoming a nurse anesthesiologist. She graduated and got a job that pays $150,000, plus, after 3 years, $60,000 of education debt repayment (the debt repayment is not treated as income and therefore is tax free).

Another friend is running up a debt of $225,000 while becoming a doctor. When she graduates she will be making a bit more than her debt, plus she will be offered some education debt repayment.

I had another friend who ran up $150,000 in debt while going through medical school. Then she decided she hated being a doctor. She would have quit if it weren’t for the debt. But she was afraid of the debt, so she kept going. She eventually ran up a debt of $300,000 before she graduated. Then she graduated and got a job as a doctor that paid over $600,000. She had no serious problems with her debt.

For all 3 of these individuals, the debts made medical school an all-or-nothing gamble – once you are in, you need to stay in, and you must do well, otherwise you are ruined. They all ran up debts which they could not possibly repay except by finishing the program and then doing well in their medical careers. They had no other career options that could sustain the weight of such debt.

Once upon a time, the attitude of “I need to win or my whole life is ruined” was the province of gambling addicts. And once upon a time doctors were regarded as the most sober and solid citizens of the community. They still are, of course, for the most part, so I find it mildly ironic that so many of this generation of doctors will have to live with the rule “I need to win or my whole life is ruined”.

The problem is widespread:

When Michelle Bisutti, a 41-year-old family practitioner in Columbus, Ohio, finished medical school in 2003, her student-loan debt amounted to roughly $250,000. Since then, it has ballooned to $555,000.

It is the result of her deferring loan payments while she completed her residency, default charges and relentlessly compounding interest rates. Among the charges: a single $53,870 fee for when her loan was turned over to a collection agency.

“Maybe half of it was my fault because I didn’t look at the fine print,” Dr. Bisutti says. “But this is just outrageous now.”

To be sure, Dr. Bisutti’s case is extreme, and lenders say student-loan terms are clear and that they try to work with borrowers who get in trouble.

But as tuitions rise, many people are borrowing heavily to pay their bills. Some no doubt view it as “good debt,” because an education can lead to a higher salary. But in practice, student loans are one of the most toxic debts, requiring extreme consumer caution and, as Dr. Bisutti learned, responsibility.

Unlike other kinds of debt, student loans can be particularly hard to wriggle out of. Homeowners who can’t make their mortgage payments can hand over the keys to their house to their lender. Credit-card and even gambling debts can be discharged in bankruptcy. But ditching a student loan is virtually impossible, especially once a collection agency gets involved. Although lenders may trim payments, getting fees or principals waived seldom happens.

Sarah Lewis has this suggestion for freelancers:

Prove you can follow directions

This is first in the list because it’s the most important advice I can offer you. In my postings, I asked for three specific things:

1. A link to an online portfolio
2. An hourly rate with a tentative time estimate
3. Current availability

You would not believe how many people sent me “applications” without giving me that information.

Listen, if you aren’t willing to read and follow the instructions on a job post, stop wasting everyone’s time. If the instructions are too complicated or you can’t follow them for some reason, the job is probably not a good fit anyway, so you’re better off spending your time finding and applying for a job that works for you.

I’ve my own tip, about those applying to work: do not put anything on your resume that you won’t be able to defend in an interview.

I’ve written before about the stretch when we were desperate to hire people.  There were about 4 years, from the summer of 2004 to the summer of 2008, when anyone with any talent had more work than they could handle. During that time, we struggled with the question: should we hire inexperienced people and train them or should we hire talented people and pay them a lot? We often had to hire inexperienced people because all the experienced people were way too busy. And we learned that, even if we only paid the inexperienced people $10 an hour, they were very, very expensive. First, they took a lot of our time, and second, they made mistakes we then had to fix. For instance, it is difficult to tell a beginner what separates good quality HTML from poor HTML. Generally, they would write poor HTML, and then we would have to fix it.

For most of 2007, one of my main clients was monkeyclaus. After Darren Hoyt had gone back to working full time with Category4, we tried very hard to hire some additional people to help us out. The interviews were amazing. People would claim all kinds of things on their resume that they couldn’t defend when we met for an interview.

One woman said she knew Javascript. During the interview, I asked how well she knew Javascript. She said she’d taken a class in it during 1999 (that’s 8 years previous!). Could she write a single line of Javascript now? Um, no. But, uh, if she started working with it, she was sure it would come back quickly.

One fellow said he knew PHP and MySql. Turns out his experience consisted of a single small project he’d done for fun, at work. He was working as a tech support person at a local community college, and one of his main tasks was to help people when they forgot their passwords. So he wrote a tiny database program into which he could record usernames and passwords and email addresses. This consisted of about 6 screens. The PHP code was unbelievably primitive: he didn’t know what functions were, so when he wanted to break up his code into pieces, he put each routine into its own file, and then he would include that file when he wanted to trigger the code. And all the HTML was hard coded into the PHP. Awful. And the poor guy had no idea how much he still had to learn.

We spoke to a woman who said she knew Java, but had no Java projects that she could point us to, not even little demos on her laptop.

Many of the people we spoke to were just moving past the point of unconscious incompetence. They simply had no idea how they appeared to us.

We spoke to a lot of people who were clearly beginners, yet they claimed to know more technologies than I do. A typical list: Javascript, CSS, HTML, XHTML, RSS, Atom, Flash, ActionScript, Java, .Net, C, C++, Python, Perl, PHP, Linux, MySql, Oracle, Microsoft Server, Windows, Apache, IIS, Photoshop, FinalCut Pro, iMovies, Mac OS, and SOAP.

Wow. I mean wow. If you know all that, you can have my job. You clearly deserve it.

What a lot of beginners seem to do is they include on their resume stuff they were briefly exposed to during some class in college. So if, for one day, they got to write some SQL queries against a dummy database set up in Oracle, they then claimed that they knew Oracle. I think what this approach communicates, more than anything, is insecurity. I realize that it is tough to get one’s career started, but still, you might want to leave off the stuff that you’ve only had a day or two exposure to.

Many of the resumes set my expectations unreasonably high, so that then the actual interview was a disappointment. And when I felt like someone had lied on their resume, I tended to become a bit more aggressive in my questions. At one point Peter Agelasto (who was there for several interviews) said “Damn, Lawrence, I’m glad I don’t have to do an interview with you.”  But I would not have been so aggressive had the resume not set my expectations so much higher than what the  person could defend. An example: if you claim you are programmer, you should at least be able to define what the phrase “object oriented programming” means (bonus points if you tell me there are several definitions, and go on to explain why the partisans of each definition feel so strongly about the issue). If you’re working in PHP, then maybe you haven’t done OOP yourself, and that is fine, but if you’ve never even heard the phrase, then I will doubt if you are intellectually curious about the field that you are attempting to get a job in. At least for me, personally, a lack of curiosity would be a major negative factor.

Bottom line: don’t put anything on your resume that you won’t feel comfortable defending in an interview.

My friend gets her ass whooped.