5 ms·

My biggest issue with education is the whole "study this, get a job doing that" idea. It's plainly wrong, and it sucks in people who drink the koolaid and think

My biggest issue with education is the whole "study this, get a job doing that" idea. It's plainly wrong, and it sucks in people who drink the koolaid and think there's an easy route to work. Very little is learned in college that is necessary for general employment. By general I mean just about everything that isn't licensed, like being a doctor. What college does is it throws a bunch of hard but irrelevant subjects at you that you slog through, so that you learn how to learn stuff. The best demonstration of this is in subjects that are scientific mathematical, because there's very deep trees of knowledge there that you have to trace, and there's relatively few ways to use common sense and cultural experience to answer questions. This is why there are so many devs with no "relevant" degree. If you can sort through the mess of learning a stack, you can do the job. If you need to know some particular CS thing, you will find it and learn it yourself. There's no magic dust in any class, it's all publicly known information that's been digested by many many people before us, and these days you can find umpteen explanations for just about anything online for free. The thing that sorts people is the ability to persevere through technical issues. You'll find a lot of people in this world are for some reason unable to deal with the mess. This is not a condemnation, I realise everyone has their own situation, economically and personally.

fuzzy2 5y ago
I agree that university isn’t vocational training. However, the knowledge is relevant. If you don’t know that some data structure/algorithm/whatever exists, would you know to look for it or what to look for? Sure you can learn all this by yourself, but you can also learn it at the university.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  Maybe the way I'd phrase it is the knowledge you learn at university, to the extent that it's applicable, is actually just indexing. So for instance I figured out that numerical methods are a thing that you can use to approximately solve differential equations, which often don't have a nice analytical solution. Can I solve differential equations? Not anymore. Can I solve one by the end of this week? Definitely. What you do in college is a bit of intellectual tourism, looking at wide variety of topics briefly. There are natives who depend on the tourists for part of their living, who know every nook and cranny of PDE solvers. But like in the real world we're mostly at home in one place and tourists everywhere else. The other answer to your question is that you build up an intuition for where the dragons are. The more tourism you do, the more you come to suspect there are other continents in certain places.
  - qsort 5y ago
    I largely agree with your points, but i'd say it's more "intuition building". To make a silly example, I don't know C# at all, in fact I have never written a single line of C#, but I'm very confident I could get up to speed relatively quickly because I know Java fairly well. This is simply due to the fact that after a while you just "get" how things work. Similarly, even though I'm by no means a mathematician, I feel, at least to a limited extent, like I "get" math. This kind of intuition, innate feel for how things work in a certain field of study lasts way longer than the details of a specific proof or the code for a specific algorithm, and I feel it's the actual output of higher education.
    - throwaway3699 5y ago
      I was able to build a decent intuition in both maths and programming before going to university. It's not something specific to higher ed, just experience.
  - chii 5y ago
    > numerical methods are a thing that you can use to approximately solve differential equations indexing of knowledge is useful for certain fields, but without in-depth understanding, you can never apply this knowledge in ways that hasn't been imagined before. I am reminded of the story of Feynman and the Connection Machine, where there was a need to figure out how much traffic CPUs would generate for the router they designed. If you weren't fluent in differential equations analysis, you would never have thought of using this method to perform the analysis. Search for "By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router" in https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/ https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machin... to find the relevant section about this.
    - fuzzy2 5y ago
      > without in-depth understanding, you can never apply this knowledge in ways that hasn't been imagined before. Sure, sure. But the hard truth is that I’m not getting paid to do so.
- vkou 5y ago
  If university isn't vocational training, why do employers prioritize hiring people with university degrees? They seem to think it is.
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    Because the training in "deep diving into something" is evidence that the person can learn some other thing over the next few years. It is a tenuous connection at best. It works somewhat in STEM because of the mentioned deep trees: some people are just naturally curious and will get to the bottom of anything, be it DS&A, circuits, complex analysis, or accountancy.
  - fuzzy2 5y ago
    Because in most western(?) states, the entirety of education and (junior) hiring is just a load of bs. I totally understand too, it’s super easy saying “oh for this position we require X, Y and a PhD in Z”. It’s guaranteed to filter out lots of candidates. Whether that filter is the one you need is another question altogether. It’s still bs and it’s gatekeeping at its finest.
pattusk 5y ago
Thank your for articulating something I've experienced over the years so clearly. It's one thing I wish recruiters/HR would understand. I have an advanced college degree in a field that has nothing to do with engineering and I've found that omitting it from my resume actually made the recruitment process a whole lot smoother as a candidate. Interviews went from inquisition sessions about why I wasn't doing what my graduate degree had "destined" me to do, why I had "given up" on it, how I could relate my academic background to the current job (I don't because I haven't cared for it in years), etc... It's like you're inherently suspicious if you didn't follow the path you took in your 20s all the way to your retirement. So I stopped making any mentions of my academic creds, and the worse I get now are some condescending lines about how hard I must have worked. Other than that response rate & interviewer's attitude have improved markedly.
- danuker 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, what is your degree in?
  - pattusk 5y ago
    History (BA/MA/PhD)
    - schwartzworld 5y ago
      I have a music degree, and when people ask me why I do web development, the answer is a combination of "I enjoy it" and "I have children and therefore need to be able to afford things".
      - matwood 5y ago
        Music is one of those degrees I think naturally translates to programming. My first programming boss many years ago, was a classically trained professional musician. He ended up starting a software company with another person (who was crazy so we all moved on) to create some kind of management software. Eventually he retired as the CTO of a large privately held company.
krige 5y ago
That's entirely not the point of college. College isn't supposed to give you job skills. There are other educational avenues far superior for that purpose. College is supposed to install you with broad and reasonably thorough knowledge base in the general direction you chose as well as shape your perception of the world and the underlying mechanisms. It wasn't ever supposed to be a required qualification for the modern world emplyoment but here we are.
- chii 5y ago
  > It wasn't ever supposed to be a required qualification for the modern world emplyoment but somebody who had been through college (in the early days) is a good proxy for being intelligent and capable. It's easy to check for this qualification, rather than an indepth vetting or trial period. But as soon as this is found to be a metric being measured, it ceases to be a good metric.
- raffraffraff 5y ago
  Surely that's not the case with proper engineering degrees where someone might be expected to spec out steel for a load-bearing structure that cannot fail without loss of life.
MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
> Very little is learned in college that is necessary for general employment. College used to have two value propositions: - enabling very smart people to do research and nothing else - identifying / finding reasonably smart people that are needed for important tasks in society, but which might have languished in some village otherwise Finding smart people has become a non-issue, and research has been corrupted by publish-or-perish. Thus, college today serves four purposes: - cementing stratification, instead of loosening it: wealthy donors buy their way into prestigious universtities for their offspring - serve as rite-of-passage: as we abolished all others, this is one thats left to signify a transition to adulthood - enable a class of parasitic administrators and bureaucrats to extract as much money as possible from future students - establish a caste of unproductive left-wing ideologues that spread ideas such as critical race theory among the future generation
- dukeyukey 5y ago
  Can't talk about academia, but why has finding smart people become a 'non-issue'? Without university I almost certainly would've gotten a job in my small rural town rather than moving to London with a lucrative and productive career.
  - MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
    > why has finding smart people become a 'non-issue' The internet. Though somewhat complicated by misguided Civil Rights laws, admittedly. > Without university I almost certainly would've gotten a job in my small rural town rather than moving to London with a lucrative and productive career. If you leave aside the social conventions for a second, could there have been another road to that prestigious job in London other than university? I'm pretty sure the answer is "yes" for at least 80% of all jobs.
- empthought 5y ago
  As if Oxford and Cambridge weren’t cementing stratification, enabling parasitic administrators, and establishing a caste of ideologues since the 13th century… Nothing has changed; the elements of your second list have always been present. You just happen to have been told to disagree with the ideologues currently there by your own ideologues.
nabla9 5y ago
It can be all summed into reading, writing, math, and some grit. Among US college graduates only a minority can demonstrate literacy proficiency. Roughly half demonstrate intermediate skills. Then there is 10-15 percent who are "below basic" (the educational system failed them). Many other countries have similar problems with their education.
qmmmur 5y ago
I think you need to caveat where your experience is from. In the uk and where I am courses are practically grounded and you spend a lot of your time in the final part of your degree during a practical placement. As a result I think you get a much less theoretical background.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  I did my engineering degree in the UK, and it was mostly theory. I did do a placement as well, but the course itself seemed to be a tour of various science subjects, plus math. I mean I built a working radio and a mini bridge in my first year, but you didn't get credit for anything other than the exams. All in all it seemed like a whole bunch of vignettes. Here's how structures work, here's how electric circuits work, here's Navier-Stokes, here's some data structures, this is thermodynamics. Just a whole load of things that would be easy by themselves, individually, but piled high so that time management is the real issue. The econ and management parts were much the same, just less hard because essay subjects are more bullshitty. Load of topics, there you go, now let's write an essay.
  - qmmmur 5y ago
    That's strange. I know students who had placements where it was all practical such as working for the BBC in one of their audio engineering teams for example or working as a programmer for a game studio. Didn't really seem like an extension of university at all.
macspoofing 5y ago
>Very little is learned in college that is necessary for general employment. Obviously for a programming job you don't necessarily need a 4-year university degree, but I wouldn't diminish its value either. >What college does is it throws a bunch of hard but irrelevant subjects at you that you slog through No. That's not the right way to look at university education. The golden rule is "You get out what you put in". If you see college as being useless and irrelevant then that's what you'll get. You can certainly graduate with a 4 year degree and know nothing and have it be a complete waste of time. That's on you. I know many people like this. On the other hand, every CS class you take is valuable and does teach you something deep about our profession that you can take away. It's also especially valuable for a student because as someone learning you don't know where your interest lie so getting a sampling of the entire field is very nice IF YOU PUT THE WORK INTO IT. So what you deem as 'slogging' is really 'learning challenging topics' - which is hard whether you do it in class, or independently. So tell me, which CS classes do you think are irrelevant and useless? Looking back at my education, I had a Database class where we had to implement a database backed by a B-Tree, the cornerstone data structure of many modern databases. Was that useful? In your world, it isn't because I didn't have to implement a B-Tree in my career ever again and if I want a database, I can choose an existing offering ... but when I work with databases having this as part of my mental model of how databases work has been invaluable.
- sergiomattei 5y ago
  I agree. If you're in college spending who-knows-how-much for your education, make it worth the money... Take some electives on stuff you're into. Music theory, humanities, social sciences... Take the time to go deeper on your passions. Study the broad amount of subjects: you're going to have more structure than self-study.
snarfy 5y ago
> persevere through technical issues This insight is severely under appreciated. It may very well be the primary personality trait that separates engineers. It's not intelligence, reasoning, or problem solving skills. Those are certainly needed, but they are needed in a lot of occupations. Engineers for whatever reason are unwilling to let a problem go no matter how frustrating.
snickerer 5y ago
A university is not a programmers' boot camp. (I can talk here only about Western Europe here, I don't know academia in other parts of the world.) A university is for learning the ways of science. Of scientific thinking and methods. And to learn the foundational facts of your field. Engineering is the application of the science. It is not the science itself. You don't need a scientific background to engineer. It helps, but it's overkill. You don't need to study to do development work. But a structured education helps to become a good software developer. Why? Because on the job you teach yourself only the bare necessities to solve the next problem. You have never the time to dive deep into the background of the problem. And deep and broad background knowledge is fun and helps to train your brain in general.

fuzzy2 5y ago

I agree that university isn’t vocational training. However, the knowledge is relevant. If you don’t know that some data structure/algorithm/whatever exists, would you know to look for it or what to look for? Sure you can learn all this by yourself, but you can also learn it at the university.

lordnacho 5y ago
Maybe the way I'd phrase it is the knowledge you learn at university, to the extent that it's applicable, is actually just indexing. So for instance I figured out that numerical methods are a thing that you can use to approximately solve differential equations, which often don't have a nice analytical solution. Can I solve differential equations? Not anymore. Can I solve one by the end of this week? Definitely. What you do in college is a bit of intellectual tourism, looking at wide variety of topics briefly. There are natives who depend on the tourists for part of their living, who know every nook and cranny of PDE solvers. But like in the real world we're mostly at home in one place and tourists everywhere else. The other answer to your question is that you build up an intuition for where the dragons are. The more tourism you do, the more you come to suspect there are other continents in certain places.
- qsort 5y ago
  I largely agree with your points, but i'd say it's more "intuition building". To make a silly example, I don't know C# at all, in fact I have never written a single line of C#, but I'm very confident I could get up to speed relatively quickly because I know Java fairly well. This is simply due to the fact that after a while you just "get" how things work. Similarly, even though I'm by no means a mathematician, I feel, at least to a limited extent, like I "get" math. This kind of intuition, innate feel for how things work in a certain field of study lasts way longer than the details of a specific proof or the code for a specific algorithm, and I feel it's the actual output of higher education.
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    I was able to build a decent intuition in both maths and programming before going to university. It's not something specific to higher ed, just experience.
- chii 5y ago
  > numerical methods are a thing that you can use to approximately solve differential equations indexing of knowledge is useful for certain fields, but without in-depth understanding, you can never apply this knowledge in ways that hasn't been imagined before. I am reminded of the story of Feynman and the Connection Machine, where there was a need to figure out how much traffic CPUs would generate for the router they designed. If you weren't fluent in differential equations analysis, you would never have thought of using this method to perform the analysis. Search for "By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router" in https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/ https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machin... to find the relevant section about this.
  - fuzzy2 5y ago
    > without in-depth understanding, you can never apply this knowledge in ways that hasn't been imagined before. Sure, sure. But the hard truth is that I’m not getting paid to do so.
vkou 5y ago
If university isn't vocational training, why do employers prioritize hiring people with university degrees? They seem to think it is.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  Because the training in "deep diving into something" is evidence that the person can learn some other thing over the next few years. It is a tenuous connection at best. It works somewhat in STEM because of the mentioned deep trees: some people are just naturally curious and will get to the bottom of anything, be it DS&A, circuits, complex analysis, or accountancy.
- fuzzy2 5y ago
  Because in most western(?) states, the entirety of education and (junior) hiring is just a load of bs. I totally understand too, it’s super easy saying “oh for this position we require X, Y and a PhD in Z”. It’s guaranteed to filter out lots of candidates. Whether that filter is the one you need is another question altogether. It’s still bs and it’s gatekeeping at its finest.

pattusk 5y ago

Thank your for articulating something I've experienced over the years so clearly. It's one thing I wish recruiters/HR would understand. I have an advanced college degree in a field that has nothing to do with engineering and I've found that omitting it from my resume actually made the recruitment process a whole lot smoother as a candidate. Interviews went from inquisition sessions about why I wasn't doing what my graduate degree had "destined" me to do, why I had "given up" on it, how I could relate my academic background to the current job (I don't because I haven't cared for it in years), etc... It's like you're inherently suspicious if you didn't follow the path you took in your 20s all the way to your retirement. So I stopped making any mentions of my academic creds, and the worse I get now are some condescending lines about how hard I must have worked. Other than that response rate & interviewer's attitude have improved markedly.

danuker 5y ago
Out of curiosity, what is your degree in?
- pattusk 5y ago
  History (BA/MA/PhD)
  - schwartzworld 5y ago
    I have a music degree, and when people ask me why I do web development, the answer is a combination of "I enjoy it" and "I have children and therefore need to be able to afford things".
    - matwood 5y ago
      Music is one of those degrees I think naturally translates to programming. My first programming boss many years ago, was a classically trained professional musician. He ended up starting a software company with another person (who was crazy so we all moved on) to create some kind of management software. Eventually he retired as the CTO of a large privately held company.

krige 5y ago

That's entirely not the point of college. College isn't supposed to give you job skills. There are other educational avenues far superior for that purpose. College is supposed to install you with broad and reasonably thorough knowledge base in the general direction you chose as well as shape your perception of the world and the underlying mechanisms. It wasn't ever supposed to be a required qualification for the modern world emplyoment but here we are.

chii 5y ago
> It wasn't ever supposed to be a required qualification for the modern world emplyoment but somebody who had been through college (in the early days) is a good proxy for being intelligent and capable. It's easy to check for this qualification, rather than an indepth vetting or trial period. But as soon as this is found to be a metric being measured, it ceases to be a good metric.
raffraffraff 5y ago
Surely that's not the case with proper engineering degrees where someone might be expected to spec out steel for a load-bearing structure that cannot fail without loss of life.

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago

> Very little is learned in college that is necessary for general employment. College used to have two value propositions: - enabling very smart people to do research and nothing else - identifying / finding reasonably smart people that are needed for important tasks in society, but which might have languished in some village otherwise Finding smart people has become a non-issue, and research has been corrupted by publish-or-perish. Thus, college today serves four purposes: - cementing stratification, instead of loosening it: wealthy donors buy their way into prestigious universtities for their offspring - serve as rite-of-passage: as we abolished all others, this is one thats left to signify a transition to adulthood - enable a class of parasitic administrators and bureaucrats to extract as much money as possible from future students - establish a caste of unproductive left-wing ideologues that spread ideas such as critical race theory among the future generation

dukeyukey 5y ago
Can't talk about academia, but why has finding smart people become a 'non-issue'? Without university I almost certainly would've gotten a job in my small rural town rather than moving to London with a lucrative and productive career.
- MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
  > why has finding smart people become a 'non-issue' The internet. Though somewhat complicated by misguided Civil Rights laws, admittedly. > Without university I almost certainly would've gotten a job in my small rural town rather than moving to London with a lucrative and productive career. If you leave aside the social conventions for a second, could there have been another road to that prestigious job in London other than university? I'm pretty sure the answer is "yes" for at least 80% of all jobs.
empthought 5y ago
As if Oxford and Cambridge weren’t cementing stratification, enabling parasitic administrators, and establishing a caste of ideologues since the 13th century… Nothing has changed; the elements of your second list have always been present. You just happen to have been told to disagree with the ideologues currently there by your own ideologues.

nabla9 5y ago

It can be all summed into reading, writing, math, and some grit. Among US college graduates only a minority can demonstrate literacy proficiency. Roughly half demonstrate intermediate skills. Then there is 10-15 percent who are "below basic" (the educational system failed them). Many other countries have similar problems with their education.

qmmmur 5y ago

I think you need to caveat where your experience is from. In the uk and where I am courses are practically grounded and you spend a lot of your time in the final part of your degree during a practical placement. As a result I think you get a much less theoretical background.

lordnacho 5y ago
I did my engineering degree in the UK, and it was mostly theory. I did do a placement as well, but the course itself seemed to be a tour of various science subjects, plus math. I mean I built a working radio and a mini bridge in my first year, but you didn't get credit for anything other than the exams. All in all it seemed like a whole bunch of vignettes. Here's how structures work, here's how electric circuits work, here's Navier-Stokes, here's some data structures, this is thermodynamics. Just a whole load of things that would be easy by themselves, individually, but piled high so that time management is the real issue. The econ and management parts were much the same, just less hard because essay subjects are more bullshitty. Load of topics, there you go, now let's write an essay.
- qmmmur 5y ago
  That's strange. I know students who had placements where it was all practical such as working for the BBC in one of their audio engineering teams for example or working as a programmer for a game studio. Didn't really seem like an extension of university at all.

macspoofing 5y ago

>Very little is learned in college that is necessary for general employment. Obviously for a programming job you don't necessarily need a 4-year university degree, but I wouldn't diminish its value either. >What college does is it throws a bunch of hard but irrelevant subjects at you that you slog through No. That's not the right way to look at university education. The golden rule is "You get out what you put in". If you see college as being useless and irrelevant then that's what you'll get. You can certainly graduate with a 4 year degree and know nothing and have it be a complete waste of time. That's on you. I know many people like this. On the other hand, every CS class you take is valuable and does teach you something deep about our profession that you can take away. It's also especially valuable for a student because as someone learning you don't know where your interest lie so getting a sampling of the entire field is very nice IF YOU PUT THE WORK INTO IT. So what you deem as 'slogging' is really 'learning challenging topics' - which is hard whether you do it in class, or independently. So tell me, which CS classes do you think are irrelevant and useless? Looking back at my education, I had a Database class where we had to implement a database backed by a B-Tree, the cornerstone data structure of many modern databases. Was that useful? In your world, it isn't because I didn't have to implement a B-Tree in my career ever again and if I want a database, I can choose an existing offering ... but when I work with databases having this as part of my mental model of how databases work has been invaluable.

sergiomattei 5y ago
I agree. If you're in college spending who-knows-how-much for your education, make it worth the money... Take some electives on stuff you're into. Music theory, humanities, social sciences... Take the time to go deeper on your passions. Study the broad amount of subjects: you're going to have more structure than self-study.

snarfy 5y ago

> persevere through technical issues This insight is severely under appreciated. It may very well be the primary personality trait that separates engineers. It's not intelligence, reasoning, or problem solving skills. Those are certainly needed, but they are needed in a lot of occupations. Engineers for whatever reason are unwilling to let a problem go no matter how frustrating.

snickerer 5y ago

A university is not a programmers' boot camp. (I can talk here only about Western Europe here, I don't know academia in other parts of the world.) A university is for learning the ways of science. Of scientific thinking and methods. And to learn the foundational facts of your field. Engineering is the application of the science. It is not the science itself. You don't need a scientific background to engineer. It helps, but it's overkill. You don't need to study to do development work. But a structured education helps to become a good software developer. Why? Because on the job you teach yourself only the bare necessities to solve the next problem. You have never the time to dive deep into the background of the problem. And deep and broad background knowledge is fun and helps to train your brain in general.