Live data from Hacker News

How many jobs really require college?

devinhelton.com

101–110 of 314 posts

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying women shouldn't be able to full civil rights is like saying gay people shouldn't be counted a full humans, or using the n word for black people. It's just not acceptable, in my opinion, and taints anything one writes. It's beyond the pale.

So your point is that we should ignore any point he made because he thinks something bad on a separate topic? You realize if thats your standard you should probably exclude most famous historical philosophers, along with the 6 billion or so living humans who dont subscribe to modern western philosophy. It turns out you can learn something from people that dont share your values. Or you can read Jezebel all day and ri…

I do understand that anyone from history will have held views that are morally repugnant to anyone in the modern world. Think of Thomas Jefferson and having children with his slaves and I think those children were slaves, while also thinking about the universal rights of man (and not women, blacks, or non-landholding white men).

But there is a historic millieu that one has to use to judge that person's views and ideas within, and that does allow me to consider the views of people from antiquity. But that notion also applies to judging the ideas of people writing in the world that I live in. Today, it's just clear that women should have civil rights and be equal partners in society with men. It's silly to state otherwise, and so when someone who is a contemporary states otherwise, it does call into question their views.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, but those jobs are being eaten away by automation, even if it's happening slowly. Cleaning ladies are being displaced by disposable products that don't need to be cleaned. Plumbers and electricians are being displaced by labor saving technologies. A new house contains no copper tubing or sweat fittings -- they use flexible hose and swaged connections. Wiring is no longer done with hard conduit. Framing is done wi…

Sure but before that ex. radiologist will have been replaced.

Ah, yes, but the person who owns the AI radiology business, and the equipment, will happen to be a radiologist.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be putting words in your mouth but I think you are saying that non-graduates who are not soaked in debt have more choices, and if so I'd agree. Employers want in order of preference: * h1-b - work late or life as you know it ends * big mortgage with family - work late or I ruin your family's life * big university debt - work late or I ruin your life Debt is a tool of control.

I, or my high-paying competitor who wants you working for him :)

Although, with some exception where protectionism ensures high pay, the higher the paying the work, the less concerned the market is with degrees. This is more due to the fact that high paying jobs are high paying because it's difficult to find people, and you can't be choosy when your options are already limited. But the secondary effect is that with the high pay, the benefits of "debt control" is lost anyway, so there's still no reason to look for workers with degrees.

Hence why the reasonably high paying software industry couldn't care less about formal education, but lowly office jobs that barely pay minimum wage expect the world from their applicants.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#104
post #14

The solution is to be long in anti-fragile assets such as bitcoins and gold. If approximately everybody else is getting it wrong about degrees, the economy and the value of its fragile assets, especially paper money, will shrink systematically, while my assets will keep gaining value. In that sense, it is better to encourage most other people to get it wrong. Hence, they should get MORE useless degrees and saddle the…

> especially paper money

(A) someone either forgot about or doesn't grasp the scale of the derivatives market

(B) Given the choice (and that's assuming they're given a choice) between the long-standing fiat-based currency we currently have in which the skilled already have some measure of "wealth", and a system that largely favors unknown entities and a bunch of smelly basement-dwellers who had leftover pizza money back in the aughts, guess which one the people will go with lol

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#105
Nobody has really commented yet on how highly suspect the methodology here is, nor the tradeoff between education and experience, nor the tradeoffs inherent in the world "acceptable" when you're trying to figure out what the minimum acceptable education is to land a certain job.

Just for the easiest example, the given education stat for top executives (chief executives, general and operations managers, and legislators) is listed as "high school." It's not even "some college". Now if I come to you and say, "hey, my niece actually just graduated high school and she's pretty smart, has a lot of ambition and drive, really great extracurricular involvement -- can we set up a job interview where she might take over your company as CEO?" you would laugh at me! You would say, "let her get her MBA and manage real people for a few years, and then let's talk. Or I mean if she really can't wait, let's give her an entry-level position and if she's really as good as you say, she'll be managing in 5 years and might be able to get to the top in 5 more."

But if we say "minimum" as in "could you start a company with only a high-school education and find yourself as its CEO?" then of course the answer is yes. Heck, let's knock this one down a peg, that could happen even if you don't graduate high school, it's just less likely. Legislator? Sure. I mean, most legislators today are presumably former lawyers who have 7 years of post-high-school schooling in them, but all you really need to legislate is to be elected.

Or for another example, Devin has said, "Any job specific training takes less than six months. Examples: ...cook." I mean, that's partly true, some 1/4 of cooks in this country work at fast food joints, some other 1/4 of cooks work in cafeterias etc., but placing it at "high school" as if culinary school isn't a thing is just deluding yourself for the other half or so of cooks. And if you have the choice between going to culinary school for a year or going to work in a kitchen that will take you for a year, probably if you're fresh out of high school you're going to get a lot more out of the culinary school. And that's because education has a different sort of value from work experience, which makes them very hard to compare evenly. The cook who went to culinary school for a year probably knows how to cook a much broader diversity of things, but the one-year-anniversary line cook will probably have greater appreciations for, say, prepping quickly and efficiently, taking multiple orders at once, estimating the time that dishes take to cook and communicating that to others, and so forth. They're not easily comparable.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#106
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being biased by presentism. In an age where robots are cheap and ubiquitous, we won't still hire cleaning ladies (interesting assumption they're still ladies) just because they'll be able to clean under the rug. Instead, home furniture will change so that it becomes easier to clean for robots.

No I am not being biased by anything. I said that they will get replaced AFTER radiologist will which was the point here. Longer education does not secure your position.

If all a radiologist does is pattern matching, the market would've replaced them with techs a long time ago. If not in the US, this would've happened in at least a few other countries.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#107
I knew a lot of people in college that didn't work all that hard except for last minute rushes to get things turned in at finals. Those people had a hard time finding jobs that justified the cost of their education. I also saw people that consistently worked hard. They are doing quite well. I think going to college is something you shouldn't do if you're not taking it seriously. If you're using college to put off real life, you might be better off waiting tables.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#108
post #7

I think the author of this post is making the same mistake that a lot of other people (particularly smart folks) make whenever they are thinking about the ills of modern education system and what can be done to improve it. Like Peter Thiel and others, I don't think they understand how and why students are failing in classrooms today. Take for example the author's suggestions on how school systems can be improved: Cre…

Remote work is changing. With better video chats, slack chats and such, I don't feel that remote is that much different than being there. If the whole class does get together from time to time, and the whole class is remote, I think it can work. Especially if they are in the same geographical region so they can get together and do things outside of class.

The "pursue at their own pace" is probably the part I disagree with as well. Most young people just don't have enough internal motivation to actually finish on time. You still need the structure a class and school provides. I just think it doesn't have to 100% on site.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#109
post #36

The author risks to make mistakes related to the Dunning-Kruger effect [1]. Quote: > The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive incapacity, on the part of those with low ability, to recognize the…

"Dunning-Kruger" has become the new "cognitive dissonance", a phrase everyone recognizes just enough to throw around as an epithet in lieu of making an actual point.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#110
post #14

The solution is to be long in anti-fragile assets such as bitcoins and gold. If approximately everybody else is getting it wrong about degrees, the economy and the value of its fragile assets, especially paper money, will shrink systematically, while my assets will keep gaining value. In that sense, it is better to encourage most other people to get it wrong. Hence, they should get MORE useless degrees and saddle the…

Come on, bitcoin and gold are very fragile. Look at their huge variation in value over short time frames. A new crypocurrency could arrive to take bitcoins place, also, or govt regulation could make it hard to use in the us or china. There might be an argument for diversifying your investments in these things, but these aren't the certain safe places to put your money for long term.

Yup, and inb4 "it's anon so impossible to regulate". You're not fighting someone trying to stop you from purchasing it, you're fighting an apathetic system that will go with "whatever works" and isn't a pain in the ass to use.

All it takes is for some litigators to decide that operating businesses anonymously is illegal, and now those "anonymous customers" could be police stings making your "system" more trouble than it's worth to use anonymously.

Truly-anonymous currency is either a fantasy or will only exist in niche markets. In reality all they really have to do is scare people at the point of sale, and the point of sale is by the nature of markets not hard-to-find or 'hear about on the street' (because it has to attain customers).

Post reply on HN