[HN Gopher] Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you'll fail the test
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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.
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