4 ms·

"Maybe it’s a crazy idea, but if you’re going to spend all that money for a college education, shouldn’t you expect to learn real-world skills from people who k

by kyllo 12y ago

"Maybe it’s a crazy idea, but if you’re going to spend all that money for a college education, shouldn’t you expect to learn real-world skills from people who know what they’re doing?" Maybe it's a crazy idea, but universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers. Helping you get a job is just not the mission of these institutions. And it's just as well; it would be highly unfortunate for the academic field of computer science if the undergraduate curriculum focused on how to use current tools like Eclipse or Ruby on Rails or Angular.js. Universities are designed to give you a firm grounding in the fundamental concepts, which should give you the ability to understand whatever tools are in fashion in the industry with relative ease. Besides, if you're not doing any hacking in your free time outside of class anyway, you're probably not cut out for this career.

jiggy2011 12y ago
The problem highlighted by the article seems to be that companies are no longer so interested in hiring raw material and then providing training in angular.js or whatever but expect to hire people who already have those skills. Anecdotally, I'd say that of my CS class maybe only 5% did any serious programming work outside of class.
- KrisAndrew 12y ago
  All of programming can be self-taught. The problem with finding people who have "skills" already is that they might only be able to use libraries and frameworks to build things, but they can't really solve problems. Can they figure out the solution to a memory management problem when throwing hardware at it isn't an option? Writing an application that doesn't fall down is par for the course these days. So knowing how to use some tools doesn't cut it. The companies hiring these candidates are digging themselves a hole, or they are just satisfied with having shallow technical requirements. (I've rarely programmed outside of class/work since college. I've never had a problem getting a job. I just don't like sitting in front of a computer all the time.)
nmjohn 12y ago
You articulated perfectly exactly what I was thinking. I realize it is a popular idea among society - that college is a career training center - but that is patently false. It is an unfortunate idea too, because it leads to lots of people wasting thousands of dollars on an education they won't ever use in their career just for the sake of having the piece of paper they get at the end. > Besides, if you're not doing any hacking in your free time outside of class anyway, you're probably not cut out for this career. Bingo.
- eddieroger 12y ago
  It'd be really interesting to go back and see when people started to shift towards colleges being a training ground and not the typical apprenticeship path that was the real training for generations. The way you learned to be an electrician was by being someone's apprentice, then working your way up the ranks, and this went for nearly all trade industries that I can think of. This statement has come to sound incredibly pompous (and I genuinely don't mean for it to), but college isn't for everyone, and it shouldn't be the only road to a successful life and career.
  - pgeorgi 12y ago
    Germany is still strong on the apprentice model, but even here there's a shift towards universities. Now companies face an apprentice-shortage and they started actively recruiting university drop-outs to fill the ranks. At least it's not an expensive experiment for those kids, given that tuition costs max out at about 1000 EUR/year.
    - watwut 12y ago
      Although German universities were meant to teach things that are going to be useful later on. They were not intended to give "well rounded experience" people these days talk about without being useful to chosen career.
- adamc 12y ago
  I think universities could do more to educate the public on this, but it isn't really in their best interests, at least in the short-term. And there is a lot of political pressure for public institutions to be career training centers, since nothing else is really filling that role.
robotresearcher 12y ago
"universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers" The professional vocational degrees like engineering, medicine and law are intended exactly for career training. They are usually certified by practitioner guilds, for example. You are quite right about computer science, but that is not a vocational professional program. The OP studied engineering. (edit: reading down a bit, someone spotted that OP studied Management Information Systems, which may or may not be engineering as generally understood.)
- 2mur 12y ago
  I can't speak for law school. Medical school is absolutely not career training. It simply gives you the knowledge and vocabulary so that you can be trained to be doctor. The additional training, of course, happens in your residency. You are utterly unprepared to truly be a physician when you graduate medical school, even if you have earned the right to be called 'doctor.'
  - robotresearcher 12y ago
    An introductory vocational professional program is still a vocational professional program.
BruceIV 12y ago
Agreed. I think a better solution to the article author's problem would be to treat 'programming' education (which is not the same thing as computer science) like a skilled trade like carpentry or plumbing, and intersperse community college courses with a formalized apprenticeship program ... it might take a while to get some traction, but it seems like it would work as a way to train programmers while not gutting our ability to do blue-sky theoretical research in computer science.
jerf 12y ago
"Maybe it's a crazy idea, but universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers." Maybe it's a crazy idea, but they are equally not intended to be places where you go and learn nothing of value to anybody. I mean, I get the whole academic focus thing too, but the described education wasn't focused on academic computer science either. It was simply useless. Moreover, the idea that academics can be so strictly partitioned from practice is a rather silly one as well, at least in the computer science world. A program that claimed to be turning out really good computer scientists that, mysteriously, are incapable of actually driving a computer to do anything useful to anybody (academic or industry), would not be one that I would be paying much attention to. Even computer science academics are, on occasion, expected to be able to write an actual program every once in a while. And I certainly won't believe anyone who claims to be really experienced at, say, using multithreaded programming, because they sat through a couple of classes and did a couple of homework assignments that didn't involve coding anything. It's really easy to think you know something, until you actually try to do it, and end up spending 15 hours debugging a terrible race condition. Which turns out to be something really, really simple in the end, and the real problem was that your "academic" knowledge still needed to be hardened with real-world experience. And I'd observe that fully connects back to academia... it's the people who have actually tried things and used things and have some sort of real experience who will be pushing the boundaries forward, not some sort of semi-mystical "pure academics".
- mordocai 12y ago
  The problem is, you are thinking Computer Science == Computer Programming. You are wrong. Computer Science is more math than programming, if you want to learn marketable skills get a different computer degree. Most colleges offer a more practically oriented degree.
  - collyw 12y ago
    Computer science / real world programming work is a mish mash of concepts and practice, and everything in between. Most of the hot research these days seems to be coming from places like Google rather than universities. Certainly the stuff I her about.
ducklobster 12y ago
"Besides, if you're not doing any hacking in your free time outside of class anyway, you're probably not cut out for this career." I really dislike this mentality and it unfortunately seems to be the expressed by a lot of engineers (at least ones that have an internet presence). Just because you don't spend all of your time hacking away doesn't mean you aren't cut out for this career nor does it mean you can't be a great engineer. This kind of mindset is only going to deter potentially good engineers from entering into the field.
- mordocai 12y ago
  If you are serious about getting a job, you damn well better be hacking in your free time if you don't currently have a job in the field. The OP didn't specifically say but, at least for me, if you are in school/unemployed looking for a job you better be hacking in your free time if you expect me to hire you.
- Tarrosion 12y ago
  Can you imagine "if you are studying accounting and want a job as an accountant, you'd better be doing your friends' taxes pro bono in your free time. Otherwise you're just not cut out for this career." I'm certainly sympathetic to the idea that if you want to be a developer, it's helpful for programming to be an area of passion. But it's not at all obvious to me why that passion must be expressed in a certain way. I really like math and computer science, and once I finish grad school, the plan is to have a job in applied math or statistics. Maybe even software. But in college, I didn't spend my free time programming, nor doing regressions just for kicks. In four years of university I did one personal project and two hackathons...total time invested, maybe 3 weekends? But let us not assume this means I'm not passionate about CS and math: I was a double major, I was a teaching assistant for 8 courses, I worked through the school as a private tutor for struggling students, I did research with professors, I published...and on my own time, I relaxed.
  - kstrauser 12y ago
    > Can you imagine "if you are studying art and want a job as an artist, you'd better be doing drawing and uploading to deviantART in your free time. Otherwise you're just not cut out for this career." Yes. Yes, I can absolutely imagine judging someone in a partially-artistic field on whether they enjoy making art on their own time. That doesn't apply in every field, sure, and I bet chip designers don't generally go home and make little 8088 clones for fun. But programming is still as much of a craft as an engineering discipline, and I'm suspicious of people who claim aspirations in the field without demonstrating that they actually enjoy it. In interviews, I ask what projects a candidate has written on their own time. It doesn't have to be on GitHub. It doesn't have to be big. It doesn't have to be generally useful. One of the best responses I got was from a guy who'd been developing his own duck hunting journal for the last decade to track location, weather, etc. I'm not surprised to see that he's the lead engineer at his company now.
athenry 12y ago
"Maybe it's a crazy idea, but universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers. Helping you get a job is just not the mission of these institutions." Very true. If you want job training, go to a technical/vocational school, or enroll in a certification program. Those are both perfectly legitimate things to do, and there should be no shame in either.
cafard 12y ago
I am very sympathetic to this point of view: my undergraduate degree prepared me very well for nothing in particular. However, if you go back to the medieval roots of the universities, you find the Parisian model, which prepared one to be a cleric or a teacher of the same, and the Bologna model, where you learned law. Think of the account of the founding of Harvard: "One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministery to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust".
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Well said, the interesting thing for me is that we have too many young people who aren't actually learning they are ticking off objectives like some giant RPG quest engine. Go to school, check, go to college check, get job, uhh where? When treated as an objective rather than a place to learn, college becomes something to get "through" rather than some place to develop life skills.
rwl 12y ago
> Universities are designed to give you a firm grounding in the fundamental concepts, which should give you the ability to understand whatever tools are in fashion in the industry with relative ease. One of the things that continually frustrates me about people's attitudes toward higher education (at least in the U.S.) is that they don't recognize this fact. An undergraduate university education should give you a general competence, self-motivation, and curiosity. More particular skills can be learned elsewhere; if you spend your time in college learning Java instead of learning to be a well-rounded, thinking, educated person, you're making an expensive mistake. Particular skills go stale quickly, and, unlike other subjects you could study instead, they often lack intrinsic interest. Companies used to hire people with general competence and then train them in the particular skills they need on the job. I'm not sure why people now seem to expect students to learn these skills at universities, at their own expense. It seems to me that the burden of this training should be on industry, not on universities and their graduates.

by kyllo 12y ago

jiggy2011 12y ago

The problem highlighted by the article seems to be that companies are no longer so interested in hiring raw material and then providing training in angular.js or whatever but expect to hire people who already have those skills. Anecdotally, I'd say that of my CS class maybe only 5% did any serious programming work outside of class.

KrisAndrew 12y ago
All of programming can be self-taught. The problem with finding people who have "skills" already is that they might only be able to use libraries and frameworks to build things, but they can't really solve problems. Can they figure out the solution to a memory management problem when throwing hardware at it isn't an option? Writing an application that doesn't fall down is par for the course these days. So knowing how to use some tools doesn't cut it. The companies hiring these candidates are digging themselves a hole, or they are just satisfied with having shallow technical requirements. (I've rarely programmed outside of class/work since college. I've never had a problem getting a job. I just don't like sitting in front of a computer all the time.)

nmjohn 12y ago

You articulated perfectly exactly what I was thinking. I realize it is a popular idea among society - that college is a career training center - but that is patently false. It is an unfortunate idea too, because it leads to lots of people wasting thousands of dollars on an education they won't ever use in their career just for the sake of having the piece of paper they get at the end. > Besides, if you're not doing any hacking in your free time outside of class anyway, you're probably not cut out for this career. Bingo.

eddieroger 12y ago
It'd be really interesting to go back and see when people started to shift towards colleges being a training ground and not the typical apprenticeship path that was the real training for generations. The way you learned to be an electrician was by being someone's apprentice, then working your way up the ranks, and this went for nearly all trade industries that I can think of. This statement has come to sound incredibly pompous (and I genuinely don't mean for it to), but college isn't for everyone, and it shouldn't be the only road to a successful life and career.
- pgeorgi 12y ago
  Germany is still strong on the apprentice model, but even here there's a shift towards universities. Now companies face an apprentice-shortage and they started actively recruiting university drop-outs to fill the ranks. At least it's not an expensive experiment for those kids, given that tuition costs max out at about 1000 EUR/year.
  - watwut 12y ago
    Although German universities were meant to teach things that are going to be useful later on. They were not intended to give "well rounded experience" people these days talk about without being useful to chosen career.
adamc 12y ago
I think universities could do more to educate the public on this, but it isn't really in their best interests, at least in the short-term. And there is a lot of political pressure for public institutions to be career training centers, since nothing else is really filling that role.

robotresearcher 12y ago

"universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers" The professional vocational degrees like engineering, medicine and law are intended exactly for career training. They are usually certified by practitioner guilds, for example. You are quite right about computer science, but that is not a vocational professional program. The OP studied engineering. (edit: reading down a bit, someone spotted that OP studied Management Information Systems, which may or may not be engineering as generally understood.)

2mur 12y ago
I can't speak for law school. Medical school is absolutely not career training. It simply gives you the knowledge and vocabulary so that you can be trained to be doctor. The additional training, of course, happens in your residency. You are utterly unprepared to truly be a physician when you graduate medical school, even if you have earned the right to be called 'doctor.'
- robotresearcher 12y ago
  An introductory vocational professional program is still a vocational professional program.

BruceIV 12y ago

Agreed. I think a better solution to the article author's problem would be to treat 'programming' education (which is not the same thing as computer science) like a skilled trade like carpentry or plumbing, and intersperse community college courses with a formalized apprenticeship program ... it might take a while to get some traction, but it seems like it would work as a way to train programmers while not gutting our ability to do blue-sky theoretical research in computer science.

jerf 12y ago

"Maybe it's a crazy idea, but universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers." Maybe it's a crazy idea, but they are equally not intended to be places where you go and learn nothing of value to anybody. I mean, I get the whole academic focus thing too, but the described education wasn't focused on academic computer science either. It was simply useless. Moreover, the idea that academics can be so strictly partitioned from practice is a rather silly one as well, at least in the computer science world. A program that claimed to be turning out really good computer scientists that, mysteriously, are incapable of actually driving a computer to do anything useful to anybody (academic or industry), would not be one that I would be paying much attention to. Even computer science academics are, on occasion, expected to be able to write an actual program every once in a while. And I certainly won't believe anyone who claims to be really experienced at, say, using multithreaded programming, because they sat through a couple of classes and did a couple of homework assignments that didn't involve coding anything. It's really easy to think you know something, until you actually try to do it, and end up spending 15 hours debugging a terrible race condition. Which turns out to be something really, really simple in the end, and the real problem was that your "academic" knowledge still needed to be hardened with real-world experience. And I'd observe that fully connects back to academia... it's the people who have actually tried things and used things and have some sort of real experience who will be pushing the boundaries forward, not some sort of semi-mystical "pure academics".

mordocai 12y ago
The problem is, you are thinking Computer Science == Computer Programming. You are wrong. Computer Science is more math than programming, if you want to learn marketable skills get a different computer degree. Most colleges offer a more practically oriented degree.
- collyw 12y ago
  Computer science / real world programming work is a mish mash of concepts and practice, and everything in between. Most of the hot research these days seems to be coming from places like Google rather than universities. Certainly the stuff I her about.

ducklobster 12y ago

"Besides, if you're not doing any hacking in your free time outside of class anyway, you're probably not cut out for this career." I really dislike this mentality and it unfortunately seems to be the expressed by a lot of engineers (at least ones that have an internet presence). Just because you don't spend all of your time hacking away doesn't mean you aren't cut out for this career nor does it mean you can't be a great engineer. This kind of mindset is only going to deter potentially good engineers from entering into the field.

mordocai 12y ago
If you are serious about getting a job, you damn well better be hacking in your free time if you don't currently have a job in the field. The OP didn't specifically say but, at least for me, if you are in school/unemployed looking for a job you better be hacking in your free time if you expect me to hire you.
Tarrosion 12y ago
Can you imagine "if you are studying accounting and want a job as an accountant, you'd better be doing your friends' taxes pro bono in your free time. Otherwise you're just not cut out for this career." I'm certainly sympathetic to the idea that if you want to be a developer, it's helpful for programming to be an area of passion. But it's not at all obvious to me why that passion must be expressed in a certain way. I really like math and computer science, and once I finish grad school, the plan is to have a job in applied math or statistics. Maybe even software. But in college, I didn't spend my free time programming, nor doing regressions just for kicks. In four years of university I did one personal project and two hackathons...total time invested, maybe 3 weekends? But let us not assume this means I'm not passionate about CS and math: I was a double major, I was a teaching assistant for 8 courses, I worked through the school as a private tutor for struggling students, I did research with professors, I published...and on my own time, I relaxed.
- kstrauser 12y ago
  > Can you imagine "if you are studying art and want a job as an artist, you'd better be doing drawing and uploading to deviantART in your free time. Otherwise you're just not cut out for this career." Yes. Yes, I can absolutely imagine judging someone in a partially-artistic field on whether they enjoy making art on their own time. That doesn't apply in every field, sure, and I bet chip designers don't generally go home and make little 8088 clones for fun. But programming is still as much of a craft as an engineering discipline, and I'm suspicious of people who claim aspirations in the field without demonstrating that they actually enjoy it. In interviews, I ask what projects a candidate has written on their own time. It doesn't have to be on GitHub. It doesn't have to be big. It doesn't have to be generally useful. One of the best responses I got was from a guy who'd been developing his own duck hunting journal for the last decade to track location, weather, etc. I'm not surprised to see that he's the lead engineer at his company now.

athenry 12y ago

"Maybe it's a crazy idea, but universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers. Helping you get a job is just not the mission of these institutions." Very true. If you want job training, go to a technical/vocational school, or enroll in a certification program. Those are both perfectly legitimate things to do, and there should be no shame in either.

cafard 12y ago

I am very sympathetic to this point of view: my undergraduate degree prepared me very well for nothing in particular. However, if you go back to the medieval roots of the universities, you find the Parisian model, which prepared one to be a cleric or a teacher of the same, and the Bologna model, where you learned law. Think of the account of the founding of Harvard: "One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministery to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust".

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Well said, the interesting thing for me is that we have too many young people who aren't actually learning they are ticking off objectives like some giant RPG quest engine. Go to school, check, go to college check, get job, uhh where? When treated as an objective rather than a place to learn, college becomes something to get "through" rather than some place to develop life skills.

rwl 12y ago

> Universities are designed to give you a firm grounding in the fundamental concepts, which should give you the ability to understand whatever tools are in fashion in the industry with relative ease. One of the things that continually frustrates me about people's attitudes toward higher education (at least in the U.S.) is that they don't recognize this fact. An undergraduate university education should give you a general competence, self-motivation, and curiosity. More particular skills can be learned elsewhere; if you spend your time in college learning Java instead of learning to be a well-rounded, thinking, educated person, you're making an expensive mistake. Particular skills go stale quickly, and, unlike other subjects you could study instead, they often lack intrinsic interest. Companies used to hire people with general competence and then train them in the particular skills they need on the job. I'm not sure why people now seem to expect students to learn these skills at universities, at their own expense. It seems to me that the burden of this training should be on industry, not on universities and their graduates.