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> I believe you can learn the relevant career training most 4 year degrees provide in less than a year. I’m not quite sure about this. I do believe that with

> I believe you can learn the relevant career training most 4 year degrees provide in less than a year. I’m not quite sure about this. I do believe that with the internet, a lot of information is available and you can indeed learn a lot, but there’s a reason that online degrees outside of CS tend to be “useless” degrees. I can read about, say, biology all day and learn a lot, but there’s all sorts of expensive equipment that gatekeeps a lot of “doing” (which IMO is an important part of learning). Ditto for many scientific or engineering fields outside CS. The only reason I was able to get into software was because computers were mostly ubiquitous in the public by the time I started. Also some knowledge is still gatekept or paywalled by universities, for example see the recent post about the guy hunting for the origins of that obscure Unicode character. I’m sure somewhere, there are prodigies who can manage, but for Joe Shmoe in most fields, it seems to matter more what letters they have next to their education that what knowledge they have in their head. Though I suppose we’re getting a hit off topic.

travisjungroth 3y ago
The caveats in my sentence are necessary. By “most” I mean >50%. There are tons of counterexamples. Online degrees fall under shortcut salesmen. The problem with them isn’t so much access to equipment. It’s that for so many degrees, the point isn’t skill training. MBA is an easy example, where it’s largely networking. There’s also something there about soft skills training that doesn’t do well online (but that doesn’t mean it only works in university). So you take the skills training, which is 10% of the value. Rip out everything else and charge 30%. It seems like you’re getting a good deal, but you’re not. If you tie this all together (and maybe this is on topic for OP) it is very useful to pick apart why you are doing something. An MBA just for skill improvement is foolish. Thinking you’ll get the benefits of a Harvard MBA by reading books alone is also foolish. If you pick apart your reasons, you will more accurately decide what to do. Maybe it’s the MBA, maybe it’s books, maybe it’s joining a professional organization and networking hard. A huge hack is realizing when you can give up signaling and external motivation. So many people do that by default when they don’t need it, usually as continuing education. A second undergraduate degree is usually (>50%) a really bad idea. An example I did for myself was hiring a statistics tutor. I have no need for accreditation. I’m already a software engineer on an analysis tools team at Netflix. Focusing 100% on “get better at stats” lead to me reading two books and hiring a tutor in Poland for $30/hr who normally advises PhD candidates. I improved very quickly at exactly what was relevant for me, for very cheap. It was way better than if I had taken a course somewhere. I saved 80% of my time and money in exchange for having nothing to put on LinkedIn about it. But I’m also planning on coauthoring a paper at some point, so that’s the other side of the hack.

travisjungroth 3y ago

The caveats in my sentence are necessary. By “most” I mean >50%. There are tons of counterexamples. Online degrees fall under shortcut salesmen. The problem with them isn’t so much access to equipment. It’s that for so many degrees, the point isn’t skill training. MBA is an easy example, where it’s largely networking. There’s also something there about soft skills training that doesn’t do well online (but that doesn’t mean it only works in university). So you take the skills training, which is 10% of the value. Rip out everything else and charge 30%. It seems like you’re getting a good deal, but you’re not. If you tie this all together (and maybe this is on topic for OP) it is very useful to pick apart why you are doing something. An MBA just for skill improvement is foolish. Thinking you’ll get the benefits of a Harvard MBA by reading books alone is also foolish. If you pick apart your reasons, you will more accurately decide what to do. Maybe it’s the MBA, maybe it’s books, maybe it’s joining a professional organization and networking hard. A huge hack is realizing when you can give up signaling and external motivation. So many people do that by default when they don’t need it, usually as continuing education. A second undergraduate degree is usually (>50%) a really bad idea. An example I did for myself was hiring a statistics tutor. I have no need for accreditation. I’m already a software engineer on an analysis tools team at Netflix. Focusing 100% on “get better at stats” lead to me reading two books and hiring a tutor in Poland for $30/hr who normally advises PhD candidates. I improved very quickly at exactly what was relevant for me, for very cheap. It was way better than if I had taken a course somewhere. I saved 80% of my time and money in exchange for having nothing to put on LinkedIn about it. But I’m also planning on coauthoring a paper at some point, so that’s the other side of the hack.