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This is under the assumption that you see college is a program of self-betterment and not busy work for receiving a degree that says you can have a middle-class

This is under the assumption that you see college is a program of self-betterment and not busy work for receiving a degree that says you can have a middle-class job. It feels like even the universities themselves see it as the latter these days.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
But if you can't do the middle-class job because you can't write, the piece of paper will only get you so far. It may get you an entry-level job, but you probably won't get much in the way of promotions. So even from that perspective, plagiarism isn't helpful.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  To be honest, I arrived at university fully capable of my first job out. I think most people do. The selection process has you write essays and do math and all that shit. Work is hard, but like most things you learn best doing the thing. Not saying SICP was shit. Just that I could have done that in high school and accelerated my time to money (and through it, contentment). Maybe I'll let my kids do something like that if they feel the mildest desire to.
  - derwiki 6y ago
    Kudos to you— having started coding QBasic in fifth grade, I definitely needed 3-4 years of undergrad to be ready for my first professional SWE job.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      That's really funny. We first did Logo and then BASIC at that age (~10 years). Good times, eh? Back in the day? Everything was new and fresh.
      - derwiki 6y ago
        I was _thrilled_ that I could program with something already on my PC. This was before the internet, and I was under the impression a C compiler was several hundred dollars that we couldn’t afford. Eventually, I even wrote “production” QBasic: my boss at the ISP would manually move spam to a spam folder in Thunderbird, export it periodically and kick it over to tech support. We used to manually look at IPs and enter them into the Cisco blocklist, until I wrote a super janky QBasic script to extracts IPs. Two years later, I learned about regular expressions.
        renewiltord 6y ago
        Haha incredible. What a story. Love that you managed to use BASIC in production. What a tale. We had to go to computer lab at school to use the computer. But then my parents spent a fortune on getting us one. Now that I think about it, it was like half a year's rent. Jesus Christ, what were they thinking?! Mostly played games. But then got a Linux CD from a magazine when I was 13. Wiped the drive accidentally trying to partition it. Disaster. Path to writing code begun.
- brooklyn_ashey 6y ago
  Wait...does anybody care about writing skills anymore? ——outside—or even inside—journalism? I wish they did. Writing seems to be treated like a 20th century skill of the uber-affluent layabout these days. I jump for joy when I stumble upon some great writing on the internet.
  - bitexploder 6y ago
    Yes. Try consulting. Information security consulting to be precise our work product is a written report. We have to communicate nuanced and complex topics to a variety of audiences. Writing well, even technical writing, is hard and it’s not as obvious as code when it is not quite right. We care deeply about it. Writing clean proposals, white papers, blog posts etc. It all matters to us. Sure your average coding job doesn’t require it, but plenty of work does. And I do believe having communication skills at a high level in a written form is a competitive advantage. It’s hard to see, but in the long run people who can eloquently write their ideas have an advantage on the less articulate.
    - glenstein 6y ago
      The number of people in this thread breezily dismissing the value of effective writing is taking my breath away. I don't think these confident declarations we're getting in this thread paint a remotely accurate portrayal of skills that actually help career advancement. I think everyone's kind of playing a game where it's treated as a trick question and they're looking to emphasize the exceptions as much as possible. Any sort of work, in say, nonprofits, or public relations, or marketing, or consulting, or any institution where you're at a level of management where your job is to present plans and preside over their progress while being accountable to oversight, and these are examples of the top of my head where I have at least some sort of familiarity, are places where strong writing is an asset. And I'm sure I'm just pointing to a small slice that I know from my own experience. These aren't special exceptions. These are the norm. The counterexamples make me wonder what, if any, actual career experience people are actually drawing from to claim otherwise, or whether they have the perspective to understand how representative those counter-examples actually are.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  > But if you can't do the middle-class job because you can't write, the piece of paper will only get you so far. It may get you an entry-level job, but you probably won't get much in the way of promotions. So even from that perspective, plagiarism isn't helpful. Where do these mythical jobs exist where being able to write well is a requirement for career growth? Certainly not at engineering companies. I wish what you said were true, but in my experience, "being able to write and communicate well is critical in the workplace" is one of the top lies taught to me when I was at university. We had to take a regular writing class, and a technical writing class to graduate with an engineering degree. And when I get to industry, I see no signs of people practicing what they're taught, and it doesn't hold anyone back. Edit: I should say my experience is more about writing than communicating as a whole. People do need to be good speakers/presenters. But writing? Not really.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    Writing and communication skills are absolutely necessary for career growth. The power of persuasion is directly linked to the ability to communicate your ideas well.
    - BeetleB 6y ago
      > Writing and communication skills are absolutely necessary for career growth. The power of persuasion is directly linked to the ability to communicate your ideas well. I've updated my original comment to reflect that I was referring to writing and not general communications in general (although I wrote it more broadly). I've seen people really value presentation skills and PPT. Persuasion on 1:1 and via presentations is definitely valued. But via writing? No. They're atrocious when writing emails. And they rarely write docs/briefs. If they do the latter, it's really meant to be a teaser to get someone interested, and then that person will go talk 1:1 to get the details or ask for a presentation. My experience at work: Writing anything longer than 1-2 pages is a good way to ensure no one will read it. And again, if I have a good enough "lead", what will happen is the senior person will read the lead, stop reading, and schedule something to talk to me in person so he can understand in detail. At some level, I understand why he would do that - it can be an interactive conversation where he can interrupt, ask for clarification, etc. Whereas if he read the thing, he would have to write up a response, or even worse, make notes to ask me the next time he sees me. I almost never get anything as well written as a typical HN comment. Even (internal) documentation/manuals/Wikis are poorly written.
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  Most of the jobs don't require you to be able to write well at all - especially not university level writing. Really, all most folks need is the ability to communicate effectively in person or over email. You might - just might - be required to write a letter. Of course, these skills are ones that a store manager at any random retail or dining establishment needs too, and some of these 'middle class' jobs require nothing much at all (if it is a factory that pays well enough). Besides, plagiarism isn't really about writing. You can lump it into two categories: Cheating, which isn't most folks' intention, and more importantly, giving someone credit for an idea. This last one is something folks need to do in some professions. Don't take an employee's idea and call it your own, same for something your boss has you pass along. Don't pretend something is your own idea when it was implemented at a job you had years ago. This version of plagiarism is vastly more important than writing skills (which can be taught without needing to address plagiarism).
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  If you have the skills to get the degree with 8 hours of work per day or to get the degree with 2 hours of work per day, getting the degree with the 2 hours of work does not mean you will not be able to do the job which will require you to do the 8 hours of work when you graduate.
- WJW 6y ago
  There seems to be a sizable group where any job (especially an entry-level middle class job with the associated health insurance benefits and salary) would be a massive step up in income and social status. Cheating on a test to escape a life of poverty in the slums is not much of a dilemma IMO.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    It's actually the opposite. First generation migrants try their best because they know what happens if they fail. Cheating is easier if you can bribe authorities.
leereeves 6y ago
Even if you only care about obtaining the degree, rampant plagarism also diminishes the value of that degree.
knowuh 6y ago
The cynical anti-intellectualism in this thread is bracing. All part of the zeitgeist I guess. News is fake. Science is fake. Schools are barriers. Everything is subjective, objective reality is nonexistent. How do we have productive disagreements going forward?
- antepodius 6y ago
  Or: Objective reality might exist, but it's not necessarily present in the universities, which are mostly there as an IQ test by proxy with a filter for the most lazy, with some social indoctrination thrown in. Any science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order of the day.
  - zarathustreal 6y ago
    >Any science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order of the day. This is not objectively true but I understand what you're trying to say. I'm sad to hear that your experience of science and truth has been only that which society has given you, or at the least that you feel that others are only experiencing it in that way
    - zepto 6y ago
      This is a crucial argument. Do you have a link to something that supports your statement that “this is not objectively true”? I think it would help a lot in these debates.
      - tahdjri 6y ago
        >Any science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order of the day. gravity exists independent of social order
      - tripzilch 6y ago
        Yeah it's called "The Barstool Experiment". Look it up :-) The short summary is: Two people sitting in a bar, discussing how there is no objective truth, or that "science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order" and stuff like that, all day long. And then a third person comes along and smashes their brains with a barstool. In some variations, the first two people are a scientist and a priest. But the third person is just some dude with a barstool.
nine_k 6y ago
To have a middle-class job, you need knowledge, not a degree. (Disclaimer: my son does not have a degree but has a pretty demanding middle-class engineering job.) If you spend time in a university to just get a diploma and maybe some connections, you likely are wasting your time and significant money (remember, a student loan cannot be got rid of by a bankruptcy).
tripzilch 6y ago
> This is under the assumption that you see college is a program of self-betterment and not busy work for receiving a degree that says you can have a middle-class job. That's not really up for discussion though. The degree itself will become utterly meaningless extremely quickly if we would actually generally accept that kind of reasoning. The whole reason the degree is worth something is because it's perceived as a token of you having done the work and self-betterment etc. It's not an empty token that allows you to have a middle class job. In practice it might be, but as soon as you openly accept that is just what it is, and only what it is, then you only get cheaters.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

But if you can't do the middle-class job because you can't write, the piece of paper will only get you so far. It may get you an entry-level job, but you probably won't get much in the way of promotions. So even from that perspective, plagiarism isn't helpful.

renewiltord 6y ago
To be honest, I arrived at university fully capable of my first job out. I think most people do. The selection process has you write essays and do math and all that shit. Work is hard, but like most things you learn best doing the thing. Not saying SICP was shit. Just that I could have done that in high school and accelerated my time to money (and through it, contentment). Maybe I'll let my kids do something like that if they feel the mildest desire to.
- derwiki 6y ago
  Kudos to you— having started coding QBasic in fifth grade, I definitely needed 3-4 years of undergrad to be ready for my first professional SWE job.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    That's really funny. We first did Logo and then BASIC at that age (~10 years). Good times, eh? Back in the day? Everything was new and fresh.
    - derwiki 6y ago
      I was _thrilled_ that I could program with something already on my PC. This was before the internet, and I was under the impression a C compiler was several hundred dollars that we couldn’t afford. Eventually, I even wrote “production” QBasic: my boss at the ISP would manually move spam to a spam folder in Thunderbird, export it periodically and kick it over to tech support. We used to manually look at IPs and enter them into the Cisco blocklist, until I wrote a super janky QBasic script to extracts IPs. Two years later, I learned about regular expressions.
      - renewiltord 6y ago
        Haha incredible. What a story. Love that you managed to use BASIC in production. What a tale. We had to go to computer lab at school to use the computer. But then my parents spent a fortune on getting us one. Now that I think about it, it was like half a year's rent. Jesus Christ, what were they thinking?! Mostly played games. But then got a Linux CD from a magazine when I was 13. Wiped the drive accidentally trying to partition it. Disaster. Path to writing code begun.
brooklyn_ashey 6y ago
Wait...does anybody care about writing skills anymore? ——outside—or even inside—journalism? I wish they did. Writing seems to be treated like a 20th century skill of the uber-affluent layabout these days. I jump for joy when I stumble upon some great writing on the internet.
- bitexploder 6y ago
  Yes. Try consulting. Information security consulting to be precise our work product is a written report. We have to communicate nuanced and complex topics to a variety of audiences. Writing well, even technical writing, is hard and it’s not as obvious as code when it is not quite right. We care deeply about it. Writing clean proposals, white papers, blog posts etc. It all matters to us. Sure your average coding job doesn’t require it, but plenty of work does. And I do believe having communication skills at a high level in a written form is a competitive advantage. It’s hard to see, but in the long run people who can eloquently write their ideas have an advantage on the less articulate.
  - glenstein 6y ago
    The number of people in this thread breezily dismissing the value of effective writing is taking my breath away. I don't think these confident declarations we're getting in this thread paint a remotely accurate portrayal of skills that actually help career advancement. I think everyone's kind of playing a game where it's treated as a trick question and they're looking to emphasize the exceptions as much as possible. Any sort of work, in say, nonprofits, or public relations, or marketing, or consulting, or any institution where you're at a level of management where your job is to present plans and preside over their progress while being accountable to oversight, and these are examples of the top of my head where I have at least some sort of familiarity, are places where strong writing is an asset. And I'm sure I'm just pointing to a small slice that I know from my own experience. These aren't special exceptions. These are the norm. The counterexamples make me wonder what, if any, actual career experience people are actually drawing from to claim otherwise, or whether they have the perspective to understand how representative those counter-examples actually are.
BeetleB 6y ago
> But if you can't do the middle-class job because you can't write, the piece of paper will only get you so far. It may get you an entry-level job, but you probably won't get much in the way of promotions. So even from that perspective, plagiarism isn't helpful. Where do these mythical jobs exist where being able to write well is a requirement for career growth? Certainly not at engineering companies. I wish what you said were true, but in my experience, "being able to write and communicate well is critical in the workplace" is one of the top lies taught to me when I was at university. We had to take a regular writing class, and a technical writing class to graduate with an engineering degree. And when I get to industry, I see no signs of people practicing what they're taught, and it doesn't hold anyone back. Edit: I should say my experience is more about writing than communicating as a whole. People do need to be good speakers/presenters. But writing? Not really.
- azinman2 6y ago
  Writing and communication skills are absolutely necessary for career growth. The power of persuasion is directly linked to the ability to communicate your ideas well.
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    > Writing and communication skills are absolutely necessary for career growth. The power of persuasion is directly linked to the ability to communicate your ideas well. I've updated my original comment to reflect that I was referring to writing and not general communications in general (although I wrote it more broadly). I've seen people really value presentation skills and PPT. Persuasion on 1:1 and via presentations is definitely valued. But via writing? No. They're atrocious when writing emails. And they rarely write docs/briefs. If they do the latter, it's really meant to be a teaser to get someone interested, and then that person will go talk 1:1 to get the details or ask for a presentation. My experience at work: Writing anything longer than 1-2 pages is a good way to ensure no one will read it. And again, if I have a good enough "lead", what will happen is the senior person will read the lead, stop reading, and schedule something to talk to me in person so he can understand in detail. At some level, I understand why he would do that - it can be an interactive conversation where he can interrupt, ask for clarification, etc. Whereas if he read the thing, he would have to write up a response, or even worse, make notes to ask me the next time he sees me. I almost never get anything as well written as a typical HN comment. Even (internal) documentation/manuals/Wikis are poorly written.
Broken_Hippo 6y ago
Most of the jobs don't require you to be able to write well at all - especially not university level writing. Really, all most folks need is the ability to communicate effectively in person or over email. You might - just might - be required to write a letter. Of course, these skills are ones that a store manager at any random retail or dining establishment needs too, and some of these 'middle class' jobs require nothing much at all (if it is a factory that pays well enough). Besides, plagiarism isn't really about writing. You can lump it into two categories: Cheating, which isn't most folks' intention, and more importantly, giving someone credit for an idea. This last one is something folks need to do in some professions. Don't take an employee's idea and call it your own, same for something your boss has you pass along. Don't pretend something is your own idea when it was implemented at a job you had years ago. This version of plagiarism is vastly more important than writing skills (which can be taught without needing to address plagiarism).
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
If you have the skills to get the degree with 8 hours of work per day or to get the degree with 2 hours of work per day, getting the degree with the 2 hours of work does not mean you will not be able to do the job which will require you to do the 8 hours of work when you graduate.
WJW 6y ago
There seems to be a sizable group where any job (especially an entry-level middle class job with the associated health insurance benefits and salary) would be a massive step up in income and social status. Cheating on a test to escape a life of poverty in the slums is not much of a dilemma IMO.
- imtringued 6y ago
  It's actually the opposite. First generation migrants try their best because they know what happens if they fail. Cheating is easier if you can bribe authorities.

leereeves 6y ago

Even if you only care about obtaining the degree, rampant plagarism also diminishes the value of that degree.

knowuh 6y ago

The cynical anti-intellectualism in this thread is bracing. All part of the zeitgeist I guess. News is fake. Science is fake. Schools are barriers. Everything is subjective, objective reality is nonexistent. How do we have productive disagreements going forward?

antepodius 6y ago
Or: Objective reality might exist, but it's not necessarily present in the universities, which are mostly there as an IQ test by proxy with a filter for the most lazy, with some social indoctrination thrown in. Any science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order of the day.
- zarathustreal 6y ago
  >Any science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order of the day. This is not objectively true but I understand what you're trying to say. I'm sad to hear that your experience of science and truth has been only that which society has given you, or at the least that you feel that others are only experiencing it in that way
  - zepto 6y ago
    This is a crucial argument. Do you have a link to something that supports your statement that “this is not objectively true”? I think it would help a lot in these debates.
    - tahdjri 6y ago
      >Any science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order of the day. gravity exists independent of social order
    - tripzilch 6y ago
      Yeah it's called "The Barstool Experiment". Look it up :-) The short summary is: Two people sitting in a bar, discussing how there is no objective truth, or that "science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order" and stuff like that, all day long. And then a third person comes along and smashes their brains with a barstool. In some variations, the first two people are a scientist and a priest. But the third person is just some dude with a barstool.

nine_k 6y ago

To have a middle-class job, you need knowledge, not a degree. (Disclaimer: my son does not have a degree but has a pretty demanding middle-class engineering job.) If you spend time in a university to just get a diploma and maybe some connections, you likely are wasting your time and significant money (remember, a student loan cannot be got rid of by a bankruptcy).

tripzilch 6y ago

> This is under the assumption that you see college is a program of self-betterment and not busy work for receiving a degree that says you can have a middle-class job. That's not really up for discussion though. The degree itself will become utterly meaningless extremely quickly if we would actually generally accept that kind of reasoning. The whole reason the degree is worth something is because it's perceived as a token of you having done the work and self-betterment etc. It's not an empty token that allows you to have a middle class job. In practice it might be, but as soon as you openly accept that is just what it is, and only what it is, then you only get cheaters.