16 ms·

Americans don’t need more degrees, they need training

264 points by sylvainkalache 9y ago

jseliger 9y ago
A useful point and one I make in this essay on boosting apprenticeships: http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boosting-apprenticeships/ http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boost.... The "College for all, all the time and everywhere" mantra needs to end. College is great but is not a panacea.
eksemplar 9y ago
I agree to some extend, but for a lot of jobs the degree is your skill. I employ a lot of low level coders who are trained to do what we want them to do. Haven't had trouble finding those. What I do have trouble finding is someone with the theoretical knowledge on how to utilize machine learning patterns, which design patterns, paradigms, techs and libraries we should use and why and so on.
- nubbins 9y ago
  Wouldn't the low level people given enough time and perhaps mentorship eventually become the second type? It sounds like it could be the same person at different times in their career, or are you saying they'll never get there?
  - m_mueller 9y ago
    In my experience, once people are trained to think about the hammer (some programming paradigm/language/library), rather than the table (the underlying theoretical problem to solve), it's very hard to unlearn. They become superb at weilding a hammer, hitting the nails at a perfect 90 degree angle every time, and are very proud about that fact. But start asking them about the statics of the table, whether we could maybe make one with half the nails that can bear the same forces, and they'll simply get annoyed about your utterly impractical attitude.
    - pacaro 9y ago
      Hmmmm I have a degree, but not in a closely related field. My first job out of college was very much an apprenticeship for me, making the transition from having been a kid who could program, to being an employee who could write software that existed in a wider context. I left that job 20 years ago, mostly because my opportunity for growth was limited, and am now a Principal Engineer at Amazon, and am a little past the hammer/nail stage. Having presented myself as a counter example, I do have some observations. One of the "leadership principles" at Amazon is "Learn and be curious". It feels like this has been lacking in your experience, while it is everyone's responsibility to look out for themselves, it is a particular responsibility of more senior folks to provide guidance and mentoring to help avoid these traps.
      - m_mueller 9y ago
        Maybe my point wasn't entirely clear. I actually think that an out-of-field degree may rather help than hurt, because you have an additional perspective - especially if it's a degree based in math. I definitely see your point about leadership though - university is just one thing, the right guidance at the first longer term job is certainly essential, and something I didn't yet have the luck to see. To sum up, I didn't mean to say that a degree is what you need, rather that people training only in tool usage often backfires later on, and doesn't necessarily help to get at the underlying fundamentals.
    - examancer 9y ago
      This has not been my experience at all. I have watched many developers progress from being coders ("hammers") to being thoughtful architects who have no trouble seeing the forest through the trees and re-imagining problems from first principles. Of course people will try to lean on the skills they already have when tasked with solving a problem. This is completely orthogonal to whether they have any trouble adding to their skills. The former is often the correct response to solving an immediate problem as quickly as possible, while the later is something that happens over a longer period of time and many projects. Your assertion that people get stuck in this "hammer" mindset and have a harder time learning once there does not match my observations at all. From my experience the people who see a brick wall between these two skills fall into two categories. I don't know if you fall into either of these, but it would not surprise me. 1. People on the "architect" side of the wall who want to justify their feeling of superiority, their higher salaries, or their enterprise's highly regimented hierarchy that separates the two. 2. People on the "hammer" side of the wall who suffer from imposter syndrome and seeking to justify their sense of inadequacy. Both are incorrect. There is no wall. In fact, between those two skills is a well worn and wide road that most developers move along throughout their career. Many don't complete the journey to your (or my) ideal of "software enlightenment", but most make progress, and being trained as a "hammer" doesn't stall the progress, it helps. Also worth reflecting that software is still relatively new and we really don't know what we're doing. We're all making it up as we go along for the most part, so let's not be so quick to prejudge the capabilities of our peers. All of our enlightened architecture may seem pretty foolish a century from now, or even a year from now.
- deepnotderp 9y ago
  While I definitely agree to some extent, I'd just like to note that those things can be learned without the need for a degree. In fact, many people with degrees in those areas skirt by and never actually develop a deep grasp or understanding of the material. Not saying this is true for everyone, but I'm just pointing out that a degree is no guarantee.
- happy-go-lucky 9y ago
  There’re people that have CS degrees but can’t code. After learning the syntax of a language, anyone can write simple programs, and with some experience and dedication some can even write well-crafted code that others can use. What matters is one’s approach to problem solving and this is learnable and you get better at it as and when you work on such stuff as machine learning, and if you’ve adaptability that’s an advantage.
  - nradov 9y ago
    A CS degree isn't intended to teach students how to code. What did you expect?
- watwut 9y ago
  > What I do have trouble finding is someone with the theoretical knowledge on how to utilize machine learning patterns, which design patterns, paradigms, techs and libraries we should use and why and so on. All that is learnable. I have seen people with good background in math and basic coding ability pull that off reasonably fast.
- thirdsun 9y ago
  > What I do have trouble finding is someone with the theoretical knowledge on how to utilize machine learning patterns, which design patterns, paradigms, techs and libraries we should use and why and so on. As someone who is much more comfortable with learning the principles and ideas behind tech and considering its pros and cons, that's surprising to me. Being fluent and confident in the details, minutiae, syntax, very specific tasks within those topics feels much harder to achieve.
deleted 9y ago
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acscott 9y ago
No evidence to support the thesis. No special personal perspective to share the secret sauce. The unfilled job number of 6 million is an interesting data point. I'll give them that. But a job does not equal having a good life. In short, the only data point to take away from this is waste of time. Am I being harsh? Not as harsh as un-empathic, presumptive declarative what people in America need (by the way you need to provide evidence and support to make claims like this at least).
panic 9y ago
You could make the same argument from the worker's perspective. Companies don't need to hire graduates, they need to offer training for their employees! Why are we focused on what people should do when companies are the ones setting the bar?
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Puritanical work ethic America can't shake off combined with an arrogant expectation of rugged individualism.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Which, it turns out, emerged from ... a political speech by Herbert Hoover in 1928. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rugged+individualism&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Crugged%20individualism%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rugged+individ...
- prostoalex 9y ago
  The skills need to be non-transferable to other places, otherwise the company is just paying to supply their competitors with a better-trained workforce.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    They employer has ways of making it more attractive to work at their company. More pay, nicer workplace, more freedom... But besides that, many people tend to develop loyality when they started as an apprentice and the employer gives the impression that they offer a stable job for life. That system works reasonably well here in Germany and, from what I hear, in Japan.
    - pferde 9y ago
      To be fair, in Japan it tends to be more about people being discouraged to leave, lest they be branded for life as disloyal, and therefore not employable by any other big company.
Kenji 9y ago
>Companies, especially in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) industries, are shifting their recruiting process from “where did you study?” to “what can you do?”. But are they really? Go look at job openings. You will find more often than not 'X degree required' (or at least recommended). If you don't have a degree, your application will often go straight into the trash, before the question "what can you do?" is asked.
- ju-st 9y ago
  Two recruiters from Switzerland recently told me that the only things that matters is your study programme (should fit the one given in job opening) and your degree (B.Sc/M.Sc). Salary is non negotiable for entry level jobs. "What can you do" or whatever you did while in college increases only the chances of getting hired. But having basic programming skills is usually already enough to get an offer.
  - julien421 9y ago
    > Salary is non negotiable for entry level jobs I can assure you that our students (Holberton) do negotiate their entry-level jobs. The majority successfully do so :) > the only things that matters is your study programme and your degree When we started we had no track record whatsoever. Our first students found internships but also jobs everywhere including both completely unknown and super cool startup and very high-profile companies such as NASA, Apple etc... they were all selected on what they could do and not on a degree (we are not accredited) nor the school itself (we had no track record) Today we atart to have a very good reputation so the problem is different, our atudents don't have to fight anymore, companies come to them. But for the first students it was very clear that ppl didn't care about degrees or "where do you come from".
- collyw 9y ago
  More like "have you used hyped-new-tech-v-0.6.1" because there is no way you can learn it on the job.
- autotune 9y ago
  That's for people that have to look at job openings. Without a degree and experience alone using open source tools and freely available resources, I am getting more recruiters spamming my LinkedIn than I care to sort through or respond to about 90 percent of the time.
Animats 9y ago
This is from the operator of a coding school. They have an interesting payment plan. "There is no upfront cost to join Holberton school. We only charge 17% of your internship earnings and 17% of your salary over 3 years once you find a job." That's more interesting than anything in the article. The school takes the financial risk on students not getting a job. This is the reverse of most for-profit education, which relies on loans and doesn't guarantee a job. I wonder how this is working out for Holberton School.
- shoo 9y ago
  in some ways this is similar to the australian university funding system where loans to cover education are managed by government - not the private sector - there is no interest beyond inflation, and repayments are taken automatically out of salary after your income exceeds a certain threshold. i would imagine that Holberton School is much more focused on only accepting candidates for training where there is a good probability that the person will end up in the workforce afterwards. unlike perhaps some things one can study at university, or people who are studying but aren't thinking about a career in the workforce.
  - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
    They're also incentivized to provide a high quality program and have their grads land high paying jobs. Essentially they're invested in their students success in a way most educational programs aren't.
  - learc83 9y ago
    The US loan system works almost the exact same way. Federal loans (90% of student loans) are paid directly by the government, and come with income based repayment plans capped at 10% of disposable income.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  My first reaction was that 17%x3 seems like it's on the high side. But then I read Sylvain's (who I've met a few times over the years back when he was at LNKD) profile and saw that Holberton is a 2 year program, which is something like 8x as long as any other "coding school" (I refrain from using "bootcamp" since a 2 year school is clearly not a bootcamp) that I can think of. That puts an even more interesting twists on how their financials work out.
WheelsAtLarge 9y ago
Yes, this is very true. Most companies aren't going to keep you long enough to spend lots of money to train you. In the old days you expected to be at the same company until you retired. These days you're lucky if you are there for five. Training should really start at the high school level. It's a disgrace that most students graduate from 12+ years of school without the training to get a good job but they can attend a codecamp for 1 year and get a starting job as a coder. It's no wonder we have a large number of workers that feel the american dream is slipping away. They never learned the skills they need to survive and thrive in our current economic system. What's even sadder is that leaders are not focusing in this part of the problem but instead in silliness like who uses what bathroom. Things need to change.
- prawn 9y ago
  Should apply this thinking to things like personal finance/budgeting. You can do Accounting at high school level and walk away with very little practical knowledge that applies directly to getting by in real life.
- csydas 9y ago
  Well, one of the potential pitfalls with practical skills only is that you end up with a lot of skill-based workers without a strong understanding of what it is they're actually doing. Most Tech stuff is a healthy mixture of theory and practical skills, often changing on a day to day basis for any given tech job. Dealing with clients who have little theoretical knowledge about the infrastructure they're maintaining is incredibly difficult as they just don't have the background to understand why there are performance issues, or why an error happens, and so on, simply because they weren't really trained to understand it, they were trained "You click this to do X, this to do Y". I am not suggesting everyone needs to be an expert in everything, but a lot of modern IT infrastructure teeters on the precipice of a complete disaster; they're the IT equivalent of "Knows enough to to damage" type users in an end-user setting, and the software is specifically set up to accommodate such users. This isn't necessarily bad; easy to use software for running mission critical software is great for everyone, but there are a lot of skills where you really need to know more than "Click this to do X" to be successful and tenable. As an aside regarding your comment on leadership focus, people can handle multiple problems at once. It's a bit strange to write off someone else's problem as silliness just because it doesn't directly affect you.
Aoyagi 9y ago
I heard that most American degrees are, in terms of knowledge and whatnot, worth a high school diploma from some European countries. Any truth to that at all?
- skgoa 9y ago
  The german realschulabschluss is similar to an american hs diploma. Students on the track towards university will add the abitur on top of this, which is similar in depth and difficulty to an undergraduate degree at an american comunity college. Which is why Germany doesn't have pre-med, pre-law etc.
- tbrake 9y ago
  No.
- muninn_ 9y ago
  Nope. This is nonsense.
PeterStuer 9y ago
Jobs are for machines, life is for people. How many of the 'jobs' realy contribute to a better world? You can't blame people wanting them regardless as we tied in their whole right to live with 'employment'. I'd say especially Americans could do with a broad scientific and cultural renaissance style education.
- token_throwaway 9y ago
  That's sweet and all but the rest of us have to pay rent
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    There are ~23 empty homes for every homeless person in the US[1]. For those of us living in the US, have you ever wondered why we have "housing crises" and such high rents when we have such an absurdly high surplus of empty homes? [1]https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/22336 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/22336
    - lazerpants 9y ago
      From your source: So the answer is NO; 24 is a rather gross exaggeration of the number of homes available for sale/rent. Gotta read the source, not just cite it.
      - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
        Ditto my friend, which is why I used the word "empty" (meaning vacant) rather than "available for sale/rent". 13785000 / 610042 = 22.6 24 empty houses for each homeless American (assuming only the USA) seems like a reasonable estimate, especially since the meme is older than 3 Feb 2012.
    - randomdata 9y ago
      The problem is those empty homes aren't located where you want to live. Among cities in the US, Flint, Michigan has the highest home vacancy rate. Coinciding with that surplus, the median rent is more than a couple of hundred dollars per month below the national median. If someone is feeling like there is a housing crisis in some part of the country, the obvious solution is to move to Flint, or another community with a similar surplus of housing and cheap rent. However, there is probably a good reason why they haven't already done so. They've done the math and have realized that while rent may be higher, that higher rent has much greater value (access to better jobs, lifestyle, environment, etc.) and is actually worth every penny.
rbanffy 9y ago
Can critical thinking and debate skills be taught? Throw in some geopolitics and I can support the idea...
jliptzin 9y ago
Education in this country needs to be totally reformed. High school is basically day care in most places. No reason the average 4 year degree cannot be completed at ages 14-18. Then if people want to get a masters they can go ahead, but it shouldn't be expected like going off to college is.
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
  Idk about you,maybe you won the Putnam, but when I was 15-20 my brain was still working on getting fiber down for the last mile of the prefrontal cortex. The bandwidth required to really grok calculus (or even write a coherent essay on the metaphors of The Great Gatsby) would have been a bit untenable. Don't get me wrong, I would have loved to have been given these types of challenges at a younger age, if only to be forced to learn time management skills sooner. However the intuitive understanding of something like the mechanism by which integrals work would have been lacking, and resulted in an employee that lacked the ability to use the lesson taught by that particular type of abstraction in a diverse and creative way.
  - BearGoesChirp 9y ago
    > I was 15-20 my brain was still working on getting fiber down for the last mile of the prefrontal cortex. From what research I've read, that is happening later than 15-20. Its more in the early to mid 20s.
    - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
      That was the implication I was trying to make, I apparently failed in that regard.
- crispyambulance 9y ago
  While I am sure that some exceptional people can complete a 4 year university degree by age 18, there is no basis to say that's even remotely possible for the norm. For many complex and intertwined reasons (not all of which have to do with school) high schools are, in many places, failing to teach many students the fundamentals in mathematics, reading and writing. I think that this new emphasis on training programs misses the fact that many students will simply be unprepared unless they first learn what they were supposed to learn in high school.
PaulHoule 9y ago
Job training has been universally popular among US politicians for a long time, but the evidence that it helps people find work is weak. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_Technical_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_Technical_Institute
- zanny 9y ago
  A lot of this is because nobody wants to be honest. A huge portion of "vacant" jobs are companies that maintain listings for 10 year fully stack veterans while offering $60k a year salary. Unreasonable to anyone, but the point is to dangle the carrot in case you can get super lucky and nab talent at well below market rate. It doesn't cost you anything to keep the offer on the market. They are a great excuse to complain about vacancies, though. If there were real demand, truly authentic honest demand for work, that wasn't a known fleeting thing, humans adapt. Human history is nothing if not the demonstration that people migrate towards opportunity. It might be considered on the order of days or generations, but people will do it. So don't sit around complaining about nobody wanting to move somewhere where the salary is "competitive" but you have rigged the externalities like taxes and property ownership so far against civilians your bafflement that nobody wants to go where the "jobs" are is dastardly.
dpflan 9y ago
There is a New York Times article today (6/28/17) about the idea of skills vs. degrees. > https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/technology/tech-jobs-skills-college-degree.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/technology/tech-jobs-skil...
mezuzi 9y ago
Prestigious training in Trump University would close that gap forever!!!
- sctb 9y ago
  Please don't post like this on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
wcummings 9y ago
I cringe when I hear about plans for "tuition-free" 4-year college. I went to a fancy private high school, with a bunch of kids who graduated and went to fancy private universities. From what I can tell, it's done very little for them. The people who aren't working in tech or finance are literally on food stamps, extending their time in college, doing something like Teach for America, or working retail jobs. With 4-year degrees. As if that weren't agitating enough, universities seem to relish their role in "not providing job training" and being "not a vocational school" and "producing well-rounded students". The government shouldn't be footing the bill to send people to these schools (through subsidized loans or other mechanisms), which for most students are glorified daycare centers for young adults who don't want to join the workforce yet. It's a huge waste of money, as the current levels of student loan debt attests to. I don't know all the details here but an apprenticeship program seems like a step in the right direction. The federal government should forgive student loans (lay the cost on the universities)
- zanny 9y ago
  Problem is the university lobby is now massive. Tons of free money, using the only non-dischargable debt there is. The flaws in education are the flaws in politics at large - too much corruption that is too detached from the suffering of the commons. All major structural social issues trace back to a broken incentives structure and an absence of transparency and accountability at all levels that produce policy. Of course, that means changing the framework of that decision making, which is constitutional. And the established structure is wholly intentional, it is not just some mistake the people just need to "wake up and realize is wrong, and then we can all fix it". There are antagonists who prosper under the establishment, who now wield controlling influence in all spheres. The question for humanity in the 21st century looks to be how to fix that kind of structural misalignment of incentives towards the will of power.
remotehack 9y ago
When I was in High School, I went to 2 years of Vocational School at the same time and took advanced studies for college so I'd have something to fall back on one way or the other.
- Taylor_OD 9y ago
  What vocational trade?
  - remotehack 9y ago
    Industrial and Residential Electricity. We learned mainly residential but our instructor wanted us to be prepared for industrial as well. In the end, I was accepted to a small college but didn't want to work a FT job and attend college so I went into the Navy instead, into the AEF (Advanced Electronics Field).
- madengr 9y ago
  Ditto. I had two years of VoTech (1/2 day) electronics, which I'd say was the equivalent of an AA degree. It made EE easier as I could focus on the math & physics in the first year instead of electronics. Unfortunately they scrapped that program in the early 90's as they shifted everyone into an academic track.
msluyter 9y ago
"There was a time when most people could make a career out of a skill, or stay within the same type of job, but workers today constantly need to adapt. They must become lifelong learners: Teach a student one skill and you got him one job; teach a student to learn and you got him lifetime employment." It's far from clear to me that any beyond a small percentage of people generally, but perhaps Americans in particular, have the capacity to become lifelong learners. Not saying folks are stupid -- the problem isn't a lack of raw cognitive capacity, IMHO. What actually makes someone a lifelong learner? Curiosity. If you don't _want_ to learn, it's going to be very difficult to do so, except perhaps while under the gun for short periods of time. And, unfortunately, our education system seems ideally tailored for stamping out children's natural curiosity. If that sounds overly pessimistic, I'd welcome a demonstration to the contrary. I feel that the answer is basically "let's fix our education system," which I -- again, perhaps overly pessimistically -- believe to be politically impossible.
- KGIII 9y ago
  I kinda disagree. It is a long story. I will skip a lot and make it as brief as I can. I used to own my own company. It has long since been sold and I am retired. We modeled traffic and I helped bring traffic modeling to the computer age. This was way back in the dark ages of the early 1990s, when you actually had to work to find people who could write good code. You also had to pay them a goodly amount of money. One of the things I offered was to help with continued education. For example, we had one lady who was a secretary and she wanted to learn to code. So, we sent her to school part time, on our dime, and she eventually found a home in QA. When we began to provision services in other areas, besides vehicular modeling for municipalities, I sent people to get the training they felt they needed. I'd even go with them, if I had time and it would benefit me. I love Defcon, and have gone even after retiring. We'd get a local university to do some research and then poach the folks who stood out - and help them complete their education. Quite a few acted on this and I have to say we benefited greatly from this. I don't have exact numbers but it was well over a third. So, in my experience, they want the education. In my experience, they can be educated. Maybe try offering to pay for it, if you're in a position to make that choice? Cover their total costs - including ensuring they can afford the time. In my case, there weren't exactly a whole lot of traffic engineers. We had to make them, and we did.
DiNovi 9y ago
These articles for the most part live off of an imagined past. It wasn't hard to train someone to work an assembly line, which used to be all you needed to do. Skilled employment such as plumbing electrical had and still have apprenticeships...
lcfcjs 9y ago
IMO we need to teach coding, I have a 7-year old daughter who I've taught plain HTML and its incredible how interested and willing to learn she is. My younger brother whose 22 couldn't care less about it.

A useful point and one I make in this essay on boosting apprenticeships: http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boosting-apprenticeships/ http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boost.... The "College for all, all the time and everywhere" mantra needs to end. College is great but is not a panacea.

eksemplar 9y ago

I agree to some extend, but for a lot of jobs the degree is your skill. I employ a lot of low level coders who are trained to do what we want them to do. Haven't had trouble finding those. What I do have trouble finding is someone with the theoretical knowledge on how to utilize machine learning patterns, which design patterns, paradigms, techs and libraries we should use and why and so on.

nubbins 9y ago
Wouldn't the low level people given enough time and perhaps mentorship eventually become the second type? It sounds like it could be the same person at different times in their career, or are you saying they'll never get there?
- m_mueller 9y ago
  In my experience, once people are trained to think about the hammer (some programming paradigm/language/library), rather than the table (the underlying theoretical problem to solve), it's very hard to unlearn. They become superb at weilding a hammer, hitting the nails at a perfect 90 degree angle every time, and are very proud about that fact. But start asking them about the statics of the table, whether we could maybe make one with half the nails that can bear the same forces, and they'll simply get annoyed about your utterly impractical attitude.
  - pacaro 9y ago
    Hmmmm I have a degree, but not in a closely related field. My first job out of college was very much an apprenticeship for me, making the transition from having been a kid who could program, to being an employee who could write software that existed in a wider context. I left that job 20 years ago, mostly because my opportunity for growth was limited, and am now a Principal Engineer at Amazon, and am a little past the hammer/nail stage. Having presented myself as a counter example, I do have some observations. One of the "leadership principles" at Amazon is "Learn and be curious". It feels like this has been lacking in your experience, while it is everyone's responsibility to look out for themselves, it is a particular responsibility of more senior folks to provide guidance and mentoring to help avoid these traps.
    - m_mueller 9y ago
      Maybe my point wasn't entirely clear. I actually think that an out-of-field degree may rather help than hurt, because you have an additional perspective - especially if it's a degree based in math. I definitely see your point about leadership though - university is just one thing, the right guidance at the first longer term job is certainly essential, and something I didn't yet have the luck to see. To sum up, I didn't mean to say that a degree is what you need, rather that people training only in tool usage often backfires later on, and doesn't necessarily help to get at the underlying fundamentals.
  - examancer 9y ago
    This has not been my experience at all. I have watched many developers progress from being coders ("hammers") to being thoughtful architects who have no trouble seeing the forest through the trees and re-imagining problems from first principles. Of course people will try to lean on the skills they already have when tasked with solving a problem. This is completely orthogonal to whether they have any trouble adding to their skills. The former is often the correct response to solving an immediate problem as quickly as possible, while the later is something that happens over a longer period of time and many projects. Your assertion that people get stuck in this "hammer" mindset and have a harder time learning once there does not match my observations at all. From my experience the people who see a brick wall between these two skills fall into two categories. I don't know if you fall into either of these, but it would not surprise me. 1. People on the "architect" side of the wall who want to justify their feeling of superiority, their higher salaries, or their enterprise's highly regimented hierarchy that separates the two. 2. People on the "hammer" side of the wall who suffer from imposter syndrome and seeking to justify their sense of inadequacy. Both are incorrect. There is no wall. In fact, between those two skills is a well worn and wide road that most developers move along throughout their career. Many don't complete the journey to your (or my) ideal of "software enlightenment", but most make progress, and being trained as a "hammer" doesn't stall the progress, it helps. Also worth reflecting that software is still relatively new and we really don't know what we're doing. We're all making it up as we go along for the most part, so let's not be so quick to prejudge the capabilities of our peers. All of our enlightened architecture may seem pretty foolish a century from now, or even a year from now.
deepnotderp 9y ago
While I definitely agree to some extent, I'd just like to note that those things can be learned without the need for a degree. In fact, many people with degrees in those areas skirt by and never actually develop a deep grasp or understanding of the material. Not saying this is true for everyone, but I'm just pointing out that a degree is no guarantee.
happy-go-lucky 9y ago
There’re people that have CS degrees but can’t code. After learning the syntax of a language, anyone can write simple programs, and with some experience and dedication some can even write well-crafted code that others can use. What matters is one’s approach to problem solving and this is learnable and you get better at it as and when you work on such stuff as machine learning, and if you’ve adaptability that’s an advantage.
- nradov 9y ago
  A CS degree isn't intended to teach students how to code. What did you expect?
watwut 9y ago
> What I do have trouble finding is someone with the theoretical knowledge on how to utilize machine learning patterns, which design patterns, paradigms, techs and libraries we should use and why and so on. All that is learnable. I have seen people with good background in math and basic coding ability pull that off reasonably fast.
thirdsun 9y ago
> What I do have trouble finding is someone with the theoretical knowledge on how to utilize machine learning patterns, which design patterns, paradigms, techs and libraries we should use and why and so on. As someone who is much more comfortable with learning the principles and ideas behind tech and considering its pros and cons, that's surprising to me. Being fluent and confident in the details, minutiae, syntax, very specific tasks within those topics feels much harder to achieve.

deleted 9y ago

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acscott 9y ago

No evidence to support the thesis. No special personal perspective to share the secret sauce. The unfilled job number of 6 million is an interesting data point. I'll give them that. But a job does not equal having a good life. In short, the only data point to take away from this is waste of time. Am I being harsh? Not as harsh as un-empathic, presumptive declarative what people in America need (by the way you need to provide evidence and support to make claims like this at least).

panic 9y ago

You could make the same argument from the worker's perspective. Companies don't need to hire graduates, they need to offer training for their employees! Why are we focused on what people should do when companies are the ones setting the bar?

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Puritanical work ethic America can't shake off combined with an arrogant expectation of rugged individualism.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Which, it turns out, emerged from ... a political speech by Herbert Hoover in 1928. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rugged+individualism&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Crugged%20individualism%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rugged+individ...
prostoalex 9y ago
The skills need to be non-transferable to other places, otherwise the company is just paying to supply their competitors with a better-trained workforce.
- adrianN 9y ago
  They employer has ways of making it more attractive to work at their company. More pay, nicer workplace, more freedom... But besides that, many people tend to develop loyality when they started as an apprentice and the employer gives the impression that they offer a stable job for life. That system works reasonably well here in Germany and, from what I hear, in Japan.
  - pferde 9y ago
    To be fair, in Japan it tends to be more about people being discouraged to leave, lest they be branded for life as disloyal, and therefore not employable by any other big company.

Kenji 9y ago

>Companies, especially in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) industries, are shifting their recruiting process from “where did you study?” to “what can you do?”. But are they really? Go look at job openings. You will find more often than not 'X degree required' (or at least recommended). If you don't have a degree, your application will often go straight into the trash, before the question "what can you do?" is asked.

ju-st 9y ago
Two recruiters from Switzerland recently told me that the only things that matters is your study programme (should fit the one given in job opening) and your degree (B.Sc/M.Sc). Salary is non negotiable for entry level jobs. "What can you do" or whatever you did while in college increases only the chances of getting hired. But having basic programming skills is usually already enough to get an offer.
- julien421 9y ago
  > Salary is non negotiable for entry level jobs I can assure you that our students (Holberton) do negotiate their entry-level jobs. The majority successfully do so :) > the only things that matters is your study programme and your degree When we started we had no track record whatsoever. Our first students found internships but also jobs everywhere including both completely unknown and super cool startup and very high-profile companies such as NASA, Apple etc... they were all selected on what they could do and not on a degree (we are not accredited) nor the school itself (we had no track record) Today we atart to have a very good reputation so the problem is different, our atudents don't have to fight anymore, companies come to them. But for the first students it was very clear that ppl didn't care about degrees or "where do you come from".
collyw 9y ago
More like "have you used hyped-new-tech-v-0.6.1" because there is no way you can learn it on the job.
autotune 9y ago
That's for people that have to look at job openings. Without a degree and experience alone using open source tools and freely available resources, I am getting more recruiters spamming my LinkedIn than I care to sort through or respond to about 90 percent of the time.

Animats 9y ago

This is from the operator of a coding school. They have an interesting payment plan. "There is no upfront cost to join Holberton school. We only charge 17% of your internship earnings and 17% of your salary over 3 years once you find a job." That's more interesting than anything in the article. The school takes the financial risk on students not getting a job. This is the reverse of most for-profit education, which relies on loans and doesn't guarantee a job. I wonder how this is working out for Holberton School.

shoo 9y ago
in some ways this is similar to the australian university funding system where loans to cover education are managed by government - not the private sector - there is no interest beyond inflation, and repayments are taken automatically out of salary after your income exceeds a certain threshold. i would imagine that Holberton School is much more focused on only accepting candidates for training where there is a good probability that the person will end up in the workforce afterwards. unlike perhaps some things one can study at university, or people who are studying but aren't thinking about a career in the workforce.
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
  They're also incentivized to provide a high quality program and have their grads land high paying jobs. Essentially they're invested in their students success in a way most educational programs aren't.
- learc83 9y ago
  The US loan system works almost the exact same way. Federal loans (90% of student loans) are paid directly by the government, and come with income based repayment plans capped at 10% of disposable income.
hkmurakami 9y ago
My first reaction was that 17%x3 seems like it's on the high side. But then I read Sylvain's (who I've met a few times over the years back when he was at LNKD) profile and saw that Holberton is a 2 year program, which is something like 8x as long as any other "coding school" (I refrain from using "bootcamp" since a 2 year school is clearly not a bootcamp) that I can think of. That puts an even more interesting twists on how their financials work out.

WheelsAtLarge 9y ago

Yes, this is very true. Most companies aren't going to keep you long enough to spend lots of money to train you. In the old days you expected to be at the same company until you retired. These days you're lucky if you are there for five. Training should really start at the high school level. It's a disgrace that most students graduate from 12+ years of school without the training to get a good job but they can attend a codecamp for 1 year and get a starting job as a coder. It's no wonder we have a large number of workers that feel the american dream is slipping away. They never learned the skills they need to survive and thrive in our current economic system. What's even sadder is that leaders are not focusing in this part of the problem but instead in silliness like who uses what bathroom. Things need to change.

prawn 9y ago
Should apply this thinking to things like personal finance/budgeting. You can do Accounting at high school level and walk away with very little practical knowledge that applies directly to getting by in real life.
csydas 9y ago
Well, one of the potential pitfalls with practical skills only is that you end up with a lot of skill-based workers without a strong understanding of what it is they're actually doing. Most Tech stuff is a healthy mixture of theory and practical skills, often changing on a day to day basis for any given tech job. Dealing with clients who have little theoretical knowledge about the infrastructure they're maintaining is incredibly difficult as they just don't have the background to understand why there are performance issues, or why an error happens, and so on, simply because they weren't really trained to understand it, they were trained "You click this to do X, this to do Y". I am not suggesting everyone needs to be an expert in everything, but a lot of modern IT infrastructure teeters on the precipice of a complete disaster; they're the IT equivalent of "Knows enough to to damage" type users in an end-user setting, and the software is specifically set up to accommodate such users. This isn't necessarily bad; easy to use software for running mission critical software is great for everyone, but there are a lot of skills where you really need to know more than "Click this to do X" to be successful and tenable. As an aside regarding your comment on leadership focus, people can handle multiple problems at once. It's a bit strange to write off someone else's problem as silliness just because it doesn't directly affect you.

Aoyagi 9y ago

I heard that most American degrees are, in terms of knowledge and whatnot, worth a high school diploma from some European countries. Any truth to that at all?

skgoa 9y ago
The german realschulabschluss is similar to an american hs diploma. Students on the track towards university will add the abitur on top of this, which is similar in depth and difficulty to an undergraduate degree at an american comunity college. Which is why Germany doesn't have pre-med, pre-law etc.
tbrake 9y ago
No.
muninn_ 9y ago
Nope. This is nonsense.

PeterStuer 9y ago

Jobs are for machines, life is for people. How many of the 'jobs' realy contribute to a better world? You can't blame people wanting them regardless as we tied in their whole right to live with 'employment'. I'd say especially Americans could do with a broad scientific and cultural renaissance style education.

token_throwaway 9y ago
That's sweet and all but the rest of us have to pay rent
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  There are ~23 empty homes for every homeless person in the US[1]. For those of us living in the US, have you ever wondered why we have "housing crises" and such high rents when we have such an absurdly high surplus of empty homes? [1]https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/22336 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/22336
  - lazerpants 9y ago
    From your source: So the answer is NO; 24 is a rather gross exaggeration of the number of homes available for sale/rent. Gotta read the source, not just cite it.
    - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
      Ditto my friend, which is why I used the word "empty" (meaning vacant) rather than "available for sale/rent". 13785000 / 610042 = 22.6 24 empty houses for each homeless American (assuming only the USA) seems like a reasonable estimate, especially since the meme is older than 3 Feb 2012.
  - randomdata 9y ago
    The problem is those empty homes aren't located where you want to live. Among cities in the US, Flint, Michigan has the highest home vacancy rate. Coinciding with that surplus, the median rent is more than a couple of hundred dollars per month below the national median. If someone is feeling like there is a housing crisis in some part of the country, the obvious solution is to move to Flint, or another community with a similar surplus of housing and cheap rent. However, there is probably a good reason why they haven't already done so. They've done the math and have realized that while rent may be higher, that higher rent has much greater value (access to better jobs, lifestyle, environment, etc.) and is actually worth every penny.

rbanffy 9y ago

Can critical thinking and debate skills be taught? Throw in some geopolitics and I can support the idea...

jliptzin 9y ago

Education in this country needs to be totally reformed. High school is basically day care in most places. No reason the average 4 year degree cannot be completed at ages 14-18. Then if people want to get a masters they can go ahead, but it shouldn't be expected like going off to college is.

SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
Idk about you,maybe you won the Putnam, but when I was 15-20 my brain was still working on getting fiber down for the last mile of the prefrontal cortex. The bandwidth required to really grok calculus (or even write a coherent essay on the metaphors of The Great Gatsby) would have been a bit untenable. Don't get me wrong, I would have loved to have been given these types of challenges at a younger age, if only to be forced to learn time management skills sooner. However the intuitive understanding of something like the mechanism by which integrals work would have been lacking, and resulted in an employee that lacked the ability to use the lesson taught by that particular type of abstraction in a diverse and creative way.
- BearGoesChirp 9y ago
  > I was 15-20 my brain was still working on getting fiber down for the last mile of the prefrontal cortex. From what research I've read, that is happening later than 15-20. Its more in the early to mid 20s.
  - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
    That was the implication I was trying to make, I apparently failed in that regard.
crispyambulance 9y ago
While I am sure that some exceptional people can complete a 4 year university degree by age 18, there is no basis to say that's even remotely possible for the norm. For many complex and intertwined reasons (not all of which have to do with school) high schools are, in many places, failing to teach many students the fundamentals in mathematics, reading and writing. I think that this new emphasis on training programs misses the fact that many students will simply be unprepared unless they first learn what they were supposed to learn in high school.

PaulHoule 9y ago

Job training has been universally popular among US politicians for a long time, but the evidence that it helps people find work is weak. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_Technical_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_Technical_Institute

zanny 9y ago
A lot of this is because nobody wants to be honest. A huge portion of "vacant" jobs are companies that maintain listings for 10 year fully stack veterans while offering $60k a year salary. Unreasonable to anyone, but the point is to dangle the carrot in case you can get super lucky and nab talent at well below market rate. It doesn't cost you anything to keep the offer on the market. They are a great excuse to complain about vacancies, though. If there were real demand, truly authentic honest demand for work, that wasn't a known fleeting thing, humans adapt. Human history is nothing if not the demonstration that people migrate towards opportunity. It might be considered on the order of days or generations, but people will do it. So don't sit around complaining about nobody wanting to move somewhere where the salary is "competitive" but you have rigged the externalities like taxes and property ownership so far against civilians your bafflement that nobody wants to go where the "jobs" are is dastardly.

dpflan 9y ago

There is a New York Times article today (6/28/17) about the idea of skills vs. degrees. > https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/technology/tech-jobs-skills-college-degree.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/technology/tech-jobs-skil...

mezuzi 9y ago

Prestigious training in Trump University would close that gap forever!!!

sctb 9y ago
Please don't post like this on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

wcummings 9y ago

I cringe when I hear about plans for "tuition-free" 4-year college. I went to a fancy private high school, with a bunch of kids who graduated and went to fancy private universities. From what I can tell, it's done very little for them. The people who aren't working in tech or finance are literally on food stamps, extending their time in college, doing something like Teach for America, or working retail jobs. With 4-year degrees. As if that weren't agitating enough, universities seem to relish their role in "not providing job training" and being "not a vocational school" and "producing well-rounded students". The government shouldn't be footing the bill to send people to these schools (through subsidized loans or other mechanisms), which for most students are glorified daycare centers for young adults who don't want to join the workforce yet. It's a huge waste of money, as the current levels of student loan debt attests to. I don't know all the details here but an apprenticeship program seems like a step in the right direction. The federal government should forgive student loans (lay the cost on the universities)

zanny 9y ago
Problem is the university lobby is now massive. Tons of free money, using the only non-dischargable debt there is. The flaws in education are the flaws in politics at large - too much corruption that is too detached from the suffering of the commons. All major structural social issues trace back to a broken incentives structure and an absence of transparency and accountability at all levels that produce policy. Of course, that means changing the framework of that decision making, which is constitutional. And the established structure is wholly intentional, it is not just some mistake the people just need to "wake up and realize is wrong, and then we can all fix it". There are antagonists who prosper under the establishment, who now wield controlling influence in all spheres. The question for humanity in the 21st century looks to be how to fix that kind of structural misalignment of incentives towards the will of power.

remotehack 9y ago

When I was in High School, I went to 2 years of Vocational School at the same time and took advanced studies for college so I'd have something to fall back on one way or the other.

Taylor_OD 9y ago
What vocational trade?
- remotehack 9y ago
  Industrial and Residential Electricity. We learned mainly residential but our instructor wanted us to be prepared for industrial as well. In the end, I was accepted to a small college but didn't want to work a FT job and attend college so I went into the Navy instead, into the AEF (Advanced Electronics Field).
madengr 9y ago
Ditto. I had two years of VoTech (1/2 day) electronics, which I'd say was the equivalent of an AA degree. It made EE easier as I could focus on the math & physics in the first year instead of electronics. Unfortunately they scrapped that program in the early 90's as they shifted everyone into an academic track.

msluyter 9y ago

"There was a time when most people could make a career out of a skill, or stay within the same type of job, but workers today constantly need to adapt. They must become lifelong learners: Teach a student one skill and you got him one job; teach a student to learn and you got him lifetime employment." It's far from clear to me that any beyond a small percentage of people generally, but perhaps Americans in particular, have the capacity to become lifelong learners. Not saying folks are stupid -- the problem isn't a lack of raw cognitive capacity, IMHO. What actually makes someone a lifelong learner? Curiosity. If you don't _want_ to learn, it's going to be very difficult to do so, except perhaps while under the gun for short periods of time. And, unfortunately, our education system seems ideally tailored for stamping out children's natural curiosity. If that sounds overly pessimistic, I'd welcome a demonstration to the contrary. I feel that the answer is basically "let's fix our education system," which I -- again, perhaps overly pessimistically -- believe to be politically impossible.

KGIII 9y ago
I kinda disagree. It is a long story. I will skip a lot and make it as brief as I can. I used to own my own company. It has long since been sold and I am retired. We modeled traffic and I helped bring traffic modeling to the computer age. This was way back in the dark ages of the early 1990s, when you actually had to work to find people who could write good code. You also had to pay them a goodly amount of money. One of the things I offered was to help with continued education. For example, we had one lady who was a secretary and she wanted to learn to code. So, we sent her to school part time, on our dime, and she eventually found a home in QA. When we began to provision services in other areas, besides vehicular modeling for municipalities, I sent people to get the training they felt they needed. I'd even go with them, if I had time and it would benefit me. I love Defcon, and have gone even after retiring. We'd get a local university to do some research and then poach the folks who stood out - and help them complete their education. Quite a few acted on this and I have to say we benefited greatly from this. I don't have exact numbers but it was well over a third. So, in my experience, they want the education. In my experience, they can be educated. Maybe try offering to pay for it, if you're in a position to make that choice? Cover their total costs - including ensuring they can afford the time. In my case, there weren't exactly a whole lot of traffic engineers. We had to make them, and we did.

DiNovi 9y ago

These articles for the most part live off of an imagined past. It wasn't hard to train someone to work an assembly line, which used to be all you needed to do. Skilled employment such as plumbing electrical had and still have apprenticeships...

lcfcjs 9y ago

IMO we need to teach coding, I have a 7-year old daughter who I've taught plain HTML and its incredible how interested and willing to learn she is. My younger brother whose 22 couldn't care less about it.