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Frankly we have a formal education system that is actively hostile to training people to do jobs, and instead teaches "fundamentals" and "how to learn". There's

Frankly we have a formal education system that is actively hostile to training people to do jobs, and instead teaches "fundamentals" and "how to learn". There's tremendous support for those concepts, though I personally consider them bogus. If we truly want cross trained people, the education system is the one that needs to change. Otherwise the funding and time that could be used for jobs training will always be soaked up by it. My humble opinion. I know its not a popular opinion, but when I see my Nanny wanting to get ahead by taking night classes, and those classes have her studying and writing 19th century poetry... I can't help but feel deeply frustrated by the disconnect. How could she possibly stay motivated to finish school, when its only giving her hoops to jump through and no practical skills to get into a better job? How could I convince her to e.g. take programming lessons from me, when society and her parents are telling her a college degree (that, at this rate, she'll unlikely obtain) is what will help her most? /rant

duxup 7y ago
>and "how to learn" Honestly I see that as something that isn't taught enough / we have a very structured system that is "here is how you're going to learn it... good luck" that doesn't provide a lot of options. I do agree with the idea that your traditional 4 year college education system is poorly equipped to help redirect existing workers.
y-c-o-m-b 7y ago
> If we truly want cross trained people, the education system is the one that needs to change. Absolutely and it goes beyond the profiteering that people typically rant about. The barriers to obtaining a degree for the sake of obtaining a degree are high in itself. Then we add bureaucracy and a bottom-up approach to teaching that I think excludes a good amount of potentially qualified people that would otherwise do great. Software development is a great example of highly successful people that either dropped out of high school or college because they discovered a top-down approach can lead to the same outcome as a bottom-up academic one. Top-down example being: you want to build an app, you learn only what you need to build it (e.g. html, css, and javascript) then with continued years of applying that experience in related areas you naturally acquire more of the fundamentals of computer science. I don't think it's appreciated here on HN because a good chunk of the members have higher education degrees and can't see past their own bias, hence the down-votes and lack of actual responses. I've seen this topic appear before and with it comes condescending responses towards those that don't hold a degree. This was especially evident on the HN platform when people learned Edward Snowden was a drop-out. The current attitude towards this is well rooted in society and still a hard one to break. Thankfully tech companies are starting to come around to the idea.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  > I don't think it's appreciated here on HN because a good chunk of the members have higher education degrees and can't see past their own bias, hence the down-votes and lack of actual responses. Ding ding ding. I've gotten my share of flak on a couple occasions for working in IT without a degree. These people looking down on me are probably right that they're smarter than me and more knowledgeable than me and could probably code circles around me. I know I ain't getting a FAANG job any time soon. I know full well that there are gaps in my knowledge that someday I'd be interested in filling once I've got enough saved up to try college again. Doesn't mean I can't be productive, too, nor does it mean I can't teach myself what I need to know to get the job done. Maybe duct-taping systems together with MSSQL sprocs and proprietary programming languages/runtimes and shell scripts and CSVs ain't the most glamorous work compared to playing around with blockchains and neural nets and Jupyter notebooks, but it's work that needs done regardless, and I ain't too proud to do it, even if it's putting grey hairs on my head decades before they've got any business being there. "Top-down" v. "bottom-up" is definitely a good way of putting it. The code I write ain't pretty, but it's gonna do exactly what I need it to do to solve the user's problem, and chances are it's solving problems for which there are no elegant solutions. It ain't gonna run like a Lamborghini, but that's okay; I just need it to run like a Tacoma.

duxup 7y ago

>and "how to learn" Honestly I see that as something that isn't taught enough / we have a very structured system that is "here is how you're going to learn it... good luck" that doesn't provide a lot of options. I do agree with the idea that your traditional 4 year college education system is poorly equipped to help redirect existing workers.

y-c-o-m-b 7y ago

> If we truly want cross trained people, the education system is the one that needs to change. Absolutely and it goes beyond the profiteering that people typically rant about. The barriers to obtaining a degree for the sake of obtaining a degree are high in itself. Then we add bureaucracy and a bottom-up approach to teaching that I think excludes a good amount of potentially qualified people that would otherwise do great. Software development is a great example of highly successful people that either dropped out of high school or college because they discovered a top-down approach can lead to the same outcome as a bottom-up academic one. Top-down example being: you want to build an app, you learn only what you need to build it (e.g. html, css, and javascript) then with continued years of applying that experience in related areas you naturally acquire more of the fundamentals of computer science. I don't think it's appreciated here on HN because a good chunk of the members have higher education degrees and can't see past their own bias, hence the down-votes and lack of actual responses. I've seen this topic appear before and with it comes condescending responses towards those that don't hold a degree. This was especially evident on the HN platform when people learned Edward Snowden was a drop-out. The current attitude towards this is well rooted in society and still a hard one to break. Thankfully tech companies are starting to come around to the idea.

yellowapple 7y ago
> I don't think it's appreciated here on HN because a good chunk of the members have higher education degrees and can't see past their own bias, hence the down-votes and lack of actual responses. Ding ding ding. I've gotten my share of flak on a couple occasions for working in IT without a degree. These people looking down on me are probably right that they're smarter than me and more knowledgeable than me and could probably code circles around me. I know I ain't getting a FAANG job any time soon. I know full well that there are gaps in my knowledge that someday I'd be interested in filling once I've got enough saved up to try college again. Doesn't mean I can't be productive, too, nor does it mean I can't teach myself what I need to know to get the job done. Maybe duct-taping systems together with MSSQL sprocs and proprietary programming languages/runtimes and shell scripts and CSVs ain't the most glamorous work compared to playing around with blockchains and neural nets and Jupyter notebooks, but it's work that needs done regardless, and I ain't too proud to do it, even if it's putting grey hairs on my head decades before they've got any business being there. "Top-down" v. "bottom-up" is definitely a good way of putting it. The code I write ain't pretty, but it's gonna do exactly what I need it to do to solve the user's problem, and chances are it's solving problems for which there are no elegant solutions. It ain't gonna run like a Lamborghini, but that's okay; I just need it to run like a Tacoma.