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Some observations... I just finished Fareed Zakaria's "In Defense of a Liberal Education"[1] and while he makes a passionate argument, the capital markets over

by jasode 11y ago

Some observations... I just finished Fareed Zakaria's "In Defense of a Liberal Education"[1] and while he makes a passionate argument, the capital markets overwhelmingly disagrees with him. VC's (even those VC's not specializing in Silicon Valley tech) value makers, builders, engineers over experts in English/Art/History/Philosophy. If liberal arts education was on equal footing as STEM, there wouldn't be the jokes about that B.A. in English acting as an expensive way to train Starbucks baristas. (Please notice I emphasize the "education" of liberal arts and not the pure value of liberal arts for its own sake when making comparisons.) Unfortunately, the economic possibilities of tech droputs vs liberal arts graduates contributes to the (often smug) STEM circle-jerk. The current trend of "software is eating the world" underlies the disparity. If a 19-year old freshman compsci dropout from MIT, Stanford can work on a startup for 3 years and be regarded as higher value than the 22-year old compsci graduate, it means that MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an unspoken IQ test. In other words, we care more that you were the top percentile of SAT scores and passed other intelligence filters more so than any particular curricula you would have completed at the end of 4 years. It's fascinating that what we say (lip service about college) does not match how people in power vote with their wallets. Yes, if you want to be a Supreme Court justice, you have to go to Yale/Harvard Law -- and you must finish those degrees. If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you must finish medical school. But the tech dollars funding programmers are saying something else. So I ask as an informal survey, would you guys prefer to hire (or invest in) a dropout from MIT? or a graduate of Alabama Uni Computer Science? What's more important? The admissions filter at a top-ranked school? or the classes completed at a low-ranked one? [1]http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Liberal-Education-Fareed-Zakaria/dp/0393247686 http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Liberal-Education-Fareed-Zakar...

convexfunction 11y ago
College admissions discussion is as good a time as any to emphasize the algorithmic vs. reflective intelligence distinction, via Stanovich. SATs, grades in high school, and the rest of the college admissions stuff filters very heavily on algorithmic intelligence ("understand the rules and be willing and able to play by them perfectly") and more-or-less not at all on reflective intelligence. Engineering is also mostly about algorithmic intelligence, which makes the dropouts succeeding in tech thing a little ironic, though success in business (particularly not old entrenched business) is probably more reflective intelligence-loaded. My favorite overview of the subject is https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalists-exist/ https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalist...
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
I spend zero time considering college or collegiate history. Instead I delve into "what have you done lately?', "what are you passionate about?", along with "what do former coworkers say about your time there?" I find these last three questions several orders of magnitude more important than whether you made a B or C at Alabama Tech back in 2012. Nobody cares about that stuff. We can rent out deep-dive knowledge if we need it. What we can't find is hard-working people who can make machines solve problems for other people in a group format -- while being fun to work with.
michaelt 11y ago
people in power vote with their wallets. [...] If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you must finish medical school. But the tech dollars funding programmers are saying something else. Measuring skill/ability doesn't only produce a measurement - it produces a measurement with certain error bars. Imagine two candidates for a job: Candidate 1: "skill somewhere between 4 and 10, probably 8, salary required 5" Candidate 2: "skill somewhere between 8 and 10, probably 8, salary required 9" If I'm hiring a programmer, I might take a risk on candidate 1 as they're great value for money, and in the worst case I can always fire them and revert their commits. If I'm hiring a neurosurgeon I'd go for candidate 2 for sure, because you can't revert dead patients.
- theorique 11y ago
  And if you're investing in 20 startups, why not take a few interesting gambles on the crazy outliers in hopes that they will be the the money-printing machine of a Gates / Jobs / Zuckerberg. As long as the inventor seems smart and fanatical enough, and the idea is a good one that addresses or transforms an enormous market, it may be worth a few million bucks of portfolio money to see what he can do with it.
WildUtah 11y ago
"If liberal arts education was on equal footing as STEM, there wouldn't be the jokes" 'Liberal arts education' has become a code word for drinking to excess five nights a week and cheap casual sex with classes you can just show up to occasionally and pass. Actual literal liberal arts education is available in very few places but might be just as valuable as STEM for those who really get it. "MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an unspoken IQ test" That is in very little dispute. To investors and employers, elite university admission is an IQ test and graduation is a test of social class values -- it's a test of whether your family is stable and wealthy enough to support you financially, emotionally, and socially through four years and not interrupt you by needing you to support them financially, medically, or as free child care. Smart people from stable upper middle class families are valuable employees while the practical stuff you'd learn at MIT, especially in CS, is very easy to pick up on the job. "Supreme Court justice, you have to go to Yale/Harvard Law -- and you must finish those degrees. If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you must finish medical school." Note that those are non-market jobs. You can't pick your own Supreme Court; you have to deal with the one politics subjects everyone to. You can't pick your own neurosurgeon just because he's good; you have to take one of the ones the state licensing board, state courts, and insurance companies choose for you. And people with political power like to support the process of educational hoop jumping for various reasons -- some of them good. Customers, entrepreneurs, and investors risking and spending their own money are more interested in results than pedigree. That's why the lightly regulated software industry sees so many dropouts succeed. Dropouts do well in construction trades, agriculture, and other less bureaucratic credential dependent industries, also. Industries like Wall Street, where the primary source of income is scamming politicians, pension fund managers, regulators, and the public, depend even more heavily on pretty credentials than regulated industries like law and health care. Ivy league degrees are really valued on Wall Street because perception is so much more important than results.
dylanjermiah 11y ago
" it means that MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an unspoken IQ test. " IQ is one of the greatest corollaries to success, and from the research I've seen it's unlikely to change dramatically from age 8 till death. This is a topic I rarely see discussed. A lot of people like to mention Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg as examples of college dropout success, but fail to notice that those who succeed to a great degree all possess very high levels of intelligence. Gates, 1590 SAT. Zuckerberg, 1590 SAT. Kalanick, 1580 SAT (dropped out). Drew Houston, 1600 SAT. Read Patrick Collison's bio, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison.
- robgibbons 11y ago
  Have you ever heard of Emotional Intelligence? EQ is increasingly being seen has a higher determinant for success than IQ.
  - dylanjermiah 11y ago
    Yes. I don't know if I'd say it's a higher determinant (data to help convince me?), I'd say you need a healthy balance of both, and can't do it with one or the other.
  - bdavisx 11y ago
    Is that true in tech or just in "regular" big business? I don't see Gates, Zuckerberg or Jobs being real high in EQ as I understand it, but perhaps I don't fully understand it.
- ub 11y ago
  Agreed. But OP's point of neurosurgeons and lawyers needing to finish college whereas programmers don't need to is interesting. Using the IQ argument, one could say that even neurosurgeons don't need to finish med school. The fundamental difference I believe is that because the Internet is so new(relatively) and ever changing that you don't need experience to build software.In fact,experience may hold you back at times. Also,most of the software is not critical. Someone's life doesn't depend on it. However, human bodies and laws remain fairly stable and can affect life/death and thus,experience matters. You can't trust a college dropout to become a great neuro-surgeon without having performed several surgeries even if their IQ is in the top 0.01 percentile.
ForHackernews 11y ago
I agree with your points about employers using schools' admissions departments as as a filtering mechanism, but you need to be more careful about your terminology: Liberal Arts education includes science and mathematics, the S and M of "STEM" fields. Liberal arts doesn't mean you aren't doing rigorous, quantitative work, it just means that you aren't doing narrowly-focused vocational training. A good liberal arts education is supposed to prepare you to be a thinking human being across a variety of disciplines. "English/Art/History/Philosophy" are humanities subjects that also happen to part of a liberal arts curriculum.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
meatysnapper 11y ago
College Admissions are exactly an IQ test of sorts. Getting in is all that matters. I'll make the argument that a college CS degree does very little to prepare you for practical software engineering or being a good programmer. I do not have a CS education, but I know many people that do, from top schools. They are productive, but I would never consider them to be "A" players. Someone who passes the IQ test and then gets battle-tested at some startup, even if it's a few years of cobbling shit together, is more valuable than some PhD student who cannot engineer their way out of a cracker-jack box.
- Bostonian 11y ago
  It's an IQ test with a lower threshold if you are a great athlete, the child of an alumnus, especially one who donates a lot, or an under-represented minority. I think there is an opportunity for employers who use IQ tests without the added noise the college admissions process imposes.
  - meatysnapper 11y ago
    If I remember correctly, you are not allowed to administer IQ tests for hiring in the US.
Symmetry 11y ago
Getting into a top college is a signal of conscientiousness[1] as well as intelligence and that's just as important. I'd hope I could interview people well enough to do better than just looking at people's schools but if I were an HR drone without the ability to assess people's technical abilities I'd probably go with the MIT dropout over the Alabama graduate. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Conscientiousness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Con...
Bostonian 11y ago
The class sizes at the most prestigious schools are not growing with the U.S. population, so there must be an increasing number of very smart students who don't get into those schools. Why don't employers cast a larger net to find really smart kids who don't get into Stanford etc.? They could use numerical measures like SAT/ACT scores and high school grades.
bcheung 11y ago
I don't prefer dropouts or degree holders or the other. I would say I'm mostly agnostic to it. Having interviewed hundreds of candidates throughout my career I have found little correlation between a college degree and someone's ability to program. I have noticed that the college grads know a little more of the abstract computer science but it usually doesn't matter unless they are a candidate that will be involved with system architecture issues. For that level I would want to see a CS background but not necessarily a CS degree. I would be perfectly willing to accept someone self-taught if they had the requisite knowledge and skills.

by jasode 11y ago

convexfunction 11y ago

College admissions discussion is as good a time as any to emphasize the algorithmic vs. reflective intelligence distinction, via Stanovich. SATs, grades in high school, and the rest of the college admissions stuff filters very heavily on algorithmic intelligence ("understand the rules and be willing and able to play by them perfectly") and more-or-less not at all on reflective intelligence. Engineering is also mostly about algorithmic intelligence, which makes the dropouts succeeding in tech thing a little ironic, though success in business (particularly not old entrenched business) is probably more reflective intelligence-loaded. My favorite overview of the subject is https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalists-exist/ https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalist...

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

I spend zero time considering college or collegiate history. Instead I delve into "what have you done lately?', "what are you passionate about?", along with "what do former coworkers say about your time there?" I find these last three questions several orders of magnitude more important than whether you made a B or C at Alabama Tech back in 2012. Nobody cares about that stuff. We can rent out deep-dive knowledge if we need it. What we can't find is hard-working people who can make machines solve problems for other people in a group format -- while being fun to work with.

michaelt 11y ago

people in power vote with their wallets. [...] If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you must finish medical school. But the tech dollars funding programmers are saying something else. Measuring skill/ability doesn't only produce a measurement - it produces a measurement with certain error bars. Imagine two candidates for a job: Candidate 1: "skill somewhere between 4 and 10, probably 8, salary required 5" Candidate 2: "skill somewhere between 8 and 10, probably 8, salary required 9" If I'm hiring a programmer, I might take a risk on candidate 1 as they're great value for money, and in the worst case I can always fire them and revert their commits. If I'm hiring a neurosurgeon I'd go for candidate 2 for sure, because you can't revert dead patients.

theorique 11y ago
And if you're investing in 20 startups, why not take a few interesting gambles on the crazy outliers in hopes that they will be the the money-printing machine of a Gates / Jobs / Zuckerberg. As long as the inventor seems smart and fanatical enough, and the idea is a good one that addresses or transforms an enormous market, it may be worth a few million bucks of portfolio money to see what he can do with it.

WildUtah 11y ago

"If liberal arts education was on equal footing as STEM, there wouldn't be the jokes" 'Liberal arts education' has become a code word for drinking to excess five nights a week and cheap casual sex with classes you can just show up to occasionally and pass. Actual literal liberal arts education is available in very few places but might be just as valuable as STEM for those who really get it. "MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an unspoken IQ test" That is in very little dispute. To investors and employers, elite university admission is an IQ test and graduation is a test of social class values -- it's a test of whether your family is stable and wealthy enough to support you financially, emotionally, and socially through four years and not interrupt you by needing you to support them financially, medically, or as free child care. Smart people from stable upper middle class families are valuable employees while the practical stuff you'd learn at MIT, especially in CS, is very easy to pick up on the job. "Supreme Court justice, you have to go to Yale/Harvard Law -- and you must finish those degrees. If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you must finish medical school." Note that those are non-market jobs. You can't pick your own Supreme Court; you have to deal with the one politics subjects everyone to. You can't pick your own neurosurgeon just because he's good; you have to take one of the ones the state licensing board, state courts, and insurance companies choose for you. And people with political power like to support the process of educational hoop jumping for various reasons -- some of them good. Customers, entrepreneurs, and investors risking and spending their own money are more interested in results than pedigree. That's why the lightly regulated software industry sees so many dropouts succeed. Dropouts do well in construction trades, agriculture, and other less bureaucratic credential dependent industries, also. Industries like Wall Street, where the primary source of income is scamming politicians, pension fund managers, regulators, and the public, depend even more heavily on pretty credentials than regulated industries like law and health care. Ivy league degrees are really valued on Wall Street because perception is so much more important than results.

dylanjermiah 11y ago

" it means that MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an unspoken IQ test. " IQ is one of the greatest corollaries to success, and from the research I've seen it's unlikely to change dramatically from age 8 till death. This is a topic I rarely see discussed. A lot of people like to mention Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg as examples of college dropout success, but fail to notice that those who succeed to a great degree all possess very high levels of intelligence. Gates, 1590 SAT. Zuckerberg, 1590 SAT. Kalanick, 1580 SAT (dropped out). Drew Houston, 1600 SAT. Read Patrick Collison's bio, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison.

robgibbons 11y ago
Have you ever heard of Emotional Intelligence? EQ is increasingly being seen has a higher determinant for success than IQ.
- dylanjermiah 11y ago
  Yes. I don't know if I'd say it's a higher determinant (data to help convince me?), I'd say you need a healthy balance of both, and can't do it with one or the other.
- bdavisx 11y ago
  Is that true in tech or just in "regular" big business? I don't see Gates, Zuckerberg or Jobs being real high in EQ as I understand it, but perhaps I don't fully understand it.
ub 11y ago
Agreed. But OP's point of neurosurgeons and lawyers needing to finish college whereas programmers don't need to is interesting. Using the IQ argument, one could say that even neurosurgeons don't need to finish med school. The fundamental difference I believe is that because the Internet is so new(relatively) and ever changing that you don't need experience to build software.In fact,experience may hold you back at times. Also,most of the software is not critical. Someone's life doesn't depend on it. However, human bodies and laws remain fairly stable and can affect life/death and thus,experience matters. You can't trust a college dropout to become a great neuro-surgeon without having performed several surgeries even if their IQ is in the top 0.01 percentile.

ForHackernews 11y ago

I agree with your points about employers using schools' admissions departments as as a filtering mechanism, but you need to be more careful about your terminology: Liberal Arts education includes science and mathematics, the S and M of "STEM" fields. Liberal arts doesn't mean you aren't doing rigorous, quantitative work, it just means that you aren't doing narrowly-focused vocational training. A good liberal arts education is supposed to prepare you to be a thinking human being across a variety of disciplines. "English/Art/History/Philosophy" are humanities subjects that also happen to part of a liberal arts curriculum.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

meatysnapper 11y ago

College Admissions are exactly an IQ test of sorts. Getting in is all that matters. I'll make the argument that a college CS degree does very little to prepare you for practical software engineering or being a good programmer. I do not have a CS education, but I know many people that do, from top schools. They are productive, but I would never consider them to be "A" players. Someone who passes the IQ test and then gets battle-tested at some startup, even if it's a few years of cobbling shit together, is more valuable than some PhD student who cannot engineer their way out of a cracker-jack box.

Bostonian 11y ago
It's an IQ test with a lower threshold if you are a great athlete, the child of an alumnus, especially one who donates a lot, or an under-represented minority. I think there is an opportunity for employers who use IQ tests without the added noise the college admissions process imposes.
- meatysnapper 11y ago
  If I remember correctly, you are not allowed to administer IQ tests for hiring in the US.

Symmetry 11y ago

Getting into a top college is a signal of conscientiousness[1] as well as intelligence and that's just as important. I'd hope I could interview people well enough to do better than just looking at people's schools but if I were an HR drone without the ability to assess people's technical abilities I'd probably go with the MIT dropout over the Alabama graduate. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Conscientiousness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Con...

Bostonian 11y ago

The class sizes at the most prestigious schools are not growing with the U.S. population, so there must be an increasing number of very smart students who don't get into those schools. Why don't employers cast a larger net to find really smart kids who don't get into Stanford etc.? They could use numerical measures like SAT/ACT scores and high school grades.

bcheung 11y ago

I don't prefer dropouts or degree holders or the other. I would say I'm mostly agnostic to it. Having interviewed hundreds of candidates throughout my career I have found little correlation between a college degree and someone's ability to program. I have noticed that the college grads know a little more of the abstract computer science but it usually doesn't matter unless they are a candidate that will be involved with system architecture issues. For that level I would want to see a CS background but not necessarily a CS degree. I would be perfectly willing to accept someone self-taught if they had the requisite knowledge and skills.