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> I’ve spent much of my career arguing that the main function of education is not to teach useful skills (or even useless skills), but to certify students’ empl

> I’ve spent much of my career arguing that the main function of education is not to teach useful skills (or even useless skills), but to certify students’ employability. By and large, the reason our customers are on campus is to credibly show, or “signal,” their intelligence, work ethic, and sheer conformity. While we like to picture education as job training, it is largely a passport to the real training that happens on the job. How about just keep your hot takes out of the article if you're not going to substantiate them? Also the "real training that happens on the job", lol. I've learned so many more things in university. I'm struggling to remember the last time I did something challenging at any company.

BurningFrog 3y ago
He substantiated in this book: The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money https://a.co/d/6R5arD1 https://a.co/d/6R5arD1
- palata 3y ago
  So he is a professor, but he doesn't believe in teaching? How can that work? Genuinely interested.
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    Isn't it common for professors to be doing research, with teaching being a sort of payment for being allowed to do the research?
    - palata 3y ago
      I get that teaching is part of the contract. I just would hope that a professor is hired based on that fact...
  - BurningFrog 3y ago
    He believes in teaching. He doesn't believe that is the primary purpose of the higher education system.
echelon 3y ago
> Also the "real training that happens on the job", lol. I've learned so many more things in university. I'm struggling to remember the last time I did something challenging at any company. Maybe you're taking the wrong jobs? Lack of growth is a strong signal to move on. The theory I was exposed to in undergrad was great, but writing active/active services that handle billions of dollars of financial transactions a day is orders of magnitude better training than university. And now that I'm running my own company, I'm learning everything at volume. The experience is a fire hose of learning. College is fine, but there's nothing like a real job with complex domain challenges. There are so many cool jobs out there, too - autonomous cars, AI/ML, delivery drones, computer vision, etc.
- infinghxsg 3y ago
  [dead]
- gambiting 3y ago
  They are definitely taking the wrong jobs. I was at one of the best universities in the country for CS but I didn't really learn how to be a professional C++ programmer until I got an actual job. Universities can give you some solid foundations, nothing more.
  - sebstefan 3y ago
    What did you last do for a company that was difficult?
    - gambiting 3y ago
      We've had to write the entire raytracing pipeline for a proprietary game engine and make it perform fast enough on the PS5 - it's the kind of stuff that you can't go on stack overflow and ask, you have to actually study and come up with a good technical design by yourself.
      - sebstefan 3y ago
jakear 3y ago
Is that even a hot take at this point? I’m pretty sure I had lecturers that said much the same. Also, if you’re seeking out challenges but there are none to be found, you must be at some wonderful most profitable & stable shop of all time. If not, you perhaps could look deeper for challenges.
- sebstefan 3y ago
  >Also, if you’re seeking out challenges but there are none to be found, you must be at some wonderful most profitable & stable shop of all time. Maybe we're working different industries but even for FAANG, the bulk of the work is CRUD
  - jakear 3y ago
    As an entry level employee perhaps. But past your first promotion it should change (or indeed what would the point of being promoted be?)
cm2012 3y ago
This is considered common knowledge and is not especially controversial. Your personal life appears to be a special case.
- sebstefan 3y ago
  No that's preposterous, I've lived both being self taught and going through college. As a self-taught I couldn't know my unknown-unknowns and/or would've had the drive to study some topics college forced me through, and those who went through college are kidding themselves if they think they'd have learned what they know on the job.
lordnacho 3y ago
Pretty much the truth, isn't it? The other strand of this thinking is from Taleb: wealth leads to degrees, not the other way round. That could perhaps qualify as a hot take. What did you learn at university that you actually use on the job, in the form that is usable on the job? I did a tiny bit of programming, but I couldn't code properly until I was working. I could do calculus, but you don't actually use that as a derivatives trader, you just internalize a few results and that's it. I coded up a model that needed a Bessel function once, but that was a small project. Generally you don't solve new equations every day at work (you apply the same ones over and over), but somehow that's what you do at uni. I don't think I learned anything at uni that I needed at work, in academic terms. I'm pretty sure I could have just jumped straight to working after high school. My first boss didn't do uni and he did just fine. Uni was maturation, and the last chance to see a few of the wonders of human knowledge. Materials, electromagnetism, computation, fluids, structures, and so on. But really just a tour of those things. None of these things is what you do at work, where the real skill is grinding, networking, and understanding how some business works.
- sebstefan 3y ago
  I had been coding for a long time before joining university and I still learned a ton. This is what I consider that helps me daily on the job Algorithms, data structures, functional programming, object oriented programming, dynamic programming, compilers, shell, basic front-end web development, android apps, systems programming, concurrency, distributed software, hadoop, UI/UX, testing, information theory, cryptography, security, networks, configuring switches, embedded software development, databases, linear algebra, assembly, computer architecture, graph theory, statistics, complexity theory, automata theory, discrete mathematics I did not get classes on electromagnetism, fluid dynamics or engineering topics like you seem to have had I've excluded things I don't use as much such as Prolog, algorithm provers (COQ/Promella), advanced calculus, lambda calculus, lots of common-sense classes related to soft-skills like communication and project management Also I didn't enroll in the graphics programming classes and I regret it a lot
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    Perhaps it was worth adding the caveat that people who did a CS course actually do seem to use it directly. Practical things like Git and Linux commands are the real thing. CS is somewhat unique in that you actually do what you do at a job, with the same exact tools. You don't use a toy version of a c++ compiler or a version control system, and your computer is as powerful as the one you get at work. Everyone else at uni does things that are not the same thing at all, with the exception of medics who are sent to the hospitals. I built a 1m model of a bridge, and a radio that was fixed to one AM station. I used Cadence for a week to build a CPU with a few thousand transistors. Don't get me started on Economics and Management.
scotty79 3y ago
> I've learned so many more things in university. I'm struggling to remember the last time I did something challenging at any company. That's his point. You ostensibly learn things useless for the job so you can prove to your employer your capacity to learn and be somewhere on time and meet the deadlines reasonably well. In the real job you learn a lot, of things that are incredibly easy when compared to useless stuff you've learned in the university. So easy in fact that you might not even notice them. Throughout my whole career maybe two courses from the university were directly useful. And yet when I was getting employed in a corporation I was asked for a proof that I completed higher education, despite the fact that nothing on the job required even a shred of knowledge from there but required a lot of knowledge I acquired later. Which they already tested me on before the point they asked for my diploma.

BurningFrog 3y ago

He substantiated in this book: The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money https://a.co/d/6R5arD1 https://a.co/d/6R5arD1

palata 3y ago
So he is a professor, but he doesn't believe in teaching? How can that work? Genuinely interested.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  Isn't it common for professors to be doing research, with teaching being a sort of payment for being allowed to do the research?
  - palata 3y ago
    I get that teaching is part of the contract. I just would hope that a professor is hired based on that fact...
- BurningFrog 3y ago
  He believes in teaching. He doesn't believe that is the primary purpose of the higher education system.

echelon 3y ago

> Also the "real training that happens on the job", lol. I've learned so many more things in university. I'm struggling to remember the last time I did something challenging at any company. Maybe you're taking the wrong jobs? Lack of growth is a strong signal to move on. The theory I was exposed to in undergrad was great, but writing active/active services that handle billions of dollars of financial transactions a day is orders of magnitude better training than university. And now that I'm running my own company, I'm learning everything at volume. The experience is a fire hose of learning. College is fine, but there's nothing like a real job with complex domain challenges. There are so many cool jobs out there, too - autonomous cars, AI/ML, delivery drones, computer vision, etc.

infinghxsg 3y ago
[dead]
gambiting 3y ago
They are definitely taking the wrong jobs. I was at one of the best universities in the country for CS but I didn't really learn how to be a professional C++ programmer until I got an actual job. Universities can give you some solid foundations, nothing more.
- sebstefan 3y ago
  What did you last do for a company that was difficult?
  - gambiting 3y ago
    We've had to write the entire raytracing pipeline for a proprietary game engine and make it perform fast enough on the PS5 - it's the kind of stuff that you can't go on stack overflow and ask, you have to actually study and come up with a good technical design by yourself.
    - sebstefan 3y ago

jakear 3y ago

Is that even a hot take at this point? I’m pretty sure I had lecturers that said much the same. Also, if you’re seeking out challenges but there are none to be found, you must be at some wonderful most profitable & stable shop of all time. If not, you perhaps could look deeper for challenges.

sebstefan 3y ago
>Also, if you’re seeking out challenges but there are none to be found, you must be at some wonderful most profitable & stable shop of all time. Maybe we're working different industries but even for FAANG, the bulk of the work is CRUD
- jakear 3y ago
  As an entry level employee perhaps. But past your first promotion it should change (or indeed what would the point of being promoted be?)

cm2012 3y ago

This is considered common knowledge and is not especially controversial. Your personal life appears to be a special case.

sebstefan 3y ago
No that's preposterous, I've lived both being self taught and going through college. As a self-taught I couldn't know my unknown-unknowns and/or would've had the drive to study some topics college forced me through, and those who went through college are kidding themselves if they think they'd have learned what they know on the job.

lordnacho 3y ago

Pretty much the truth, isn't it? The other strand of this thinking is from Taleb: wealth leads to degrees, not the other way round. That could perhaps qualify as a hot take. What did you learn at university that you actually use on the job, in the form that is usable on the job? I did a tiny bit of programming, but I couldn't code properly until I was working. I could do calculus, but you don't actually use that as a derivatives trader, you just internalize a few results and that's it. I coded up a model that needed a Bessel function once, but that was a small project. Generally you don't solve new equations every day at work (you apply the same ones over and over), but somehow that's what you do at uni. I don't think I learned anything at uni that I needed at work, in academic terms. I'm pretty sure I could have just jumped straight to working after high school. My first boss didn't do uni and he did just fine. Uni was maturation, and the last chance to see a few of the wonders of human knowledge. Materials, electromagnetism, computation, fluids, structures, and so on. But really just a tour of those things. None of these things is what you do at work, where the real skill is grinding, networking, and understanding how some business works.

sebstefan 3y ago
I had been coding for a long time before joining university and I still learned a ton. This is what I consider that helps me daily on the job Algorithms, data structures, functional programming, object oriented programming, dynamic programming, compilers, shell, basic front-end web development, android apps, systems programming, concurrency, distributed software, hadoop, UI/UX, testing, information theory, cryptography, security, networks, configuring switches, embedded software development, databases, linear algebra, assembly, computer architecture, graph theory, statistics, complexity theory, automata theory, discrete mathematics I did not get classes on electromagnetism, fluid dynamics or engineering topics like you seem to have had I've excluded things I don't use as much such as Prolog, algorithm provers (COQ/Promella), advanced calculus, lambda calculus, lots of common-sense classes related to soft-skills like communication and project management Also I didn't enroll in the graphics programming classes and I regret it a lot
- lordnacho 3y ago
  Perhaps it was worth adding the caveat that people who did a CS course actually do seem to use it directly. Practical things like Git and Linux commands are the real thing. CS is somewhat unique in that you actually do what you do at a job, with the same exact tools. You don't use a toy version of a c++ compiler or a version control system, and your computer is as powerful as the one you get at work. Everyone else at uni does things that are not the same thing at all, with the exception of medics who are sent to the hospitals. I built a 1m model of a bridge, and a radio that was fixed to one AM station. I used Cadence for a week to build a CPU with a few thousand transistors. Don't get me started on Economics and Management.

scotty79 3y ago

> I've learned so many more things in university. I'm struggling to remember the last time I did something challenging at any company. That's his point. You ostensibly learn things useless for the job so you can prove to your employer your capacity to learn and be somewhere on time and meet the deadlines reasonably well. In the real job you learn a lot, of things that are incredibly easy when compared to useless stuff you've learned in the university. So easy in fact that you might not even notice them. Throughout my whole career maybe two courses from the university were directly useful. And yet when I was getting employed in a corporation I was asked for a proof that I completed higher education, despite the fact that nothing on the job required even a shred of knowledge from there but required a lot of knowledge I acquired later. Which they already tested me on before the point they asked for my diploma.