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How many jobs really require college?

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Re: How many jobs really require college?

#231

Post by [deleted] »

scotty79 wrote: post #221
andrewvc wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's totally confirmation bias. Smart people are more likely to go to college. Almost everyone becomes wiser between the ages of 18 to 22. Why are you so sure that college is causative here? I don't doubt that college is where many people grow up more intellectually, but I have yet to see proof that it is the cause of that growth.

> I don't doubt that college is where many people grow up more intellectually, but I have yet to see proof that it is the cause of that growth. I can agree that it's not the sole cause. But I really have trouble believing that being exercised and lectured about the stuff you knew nothing about every working day and being strongly challenged at least semiannually has no effect on people.

[deleted]

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#232

Post by andrewvc »

scotty79 wrote: post #221
andrewvc wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's totally confirmation bias. Smart people are more likely to go to college. Almost everyone becomes wiser between the ages of 18 to 22. Why are you so sure that college is causative here? I don't doubt that college is where many people grow up more intellectually, but I have yet to see proof that it is the cause of that growth.

> I don't doubt that college is where many people grow up more intellectually, but I have yet to see proof that it is the cause of that growth. I can agree that it's not the sole cause. But I really have trouble believing that being exercised and lectured about the stuff you knew nothing about every working day and being strongly challenged at least semiannually has no effect on people.

Well it's not as if people who don't go to college sit about twiddling their thumbs.

Additionally there's an argument to be made that people who don't spend those years having their life structured and defined by a university learn other important lessons.

There's particular irony to making the point that college is where you learn to think on HN. Many founders, like Bill gates dropped out of college to be hyper focused on their mission.

Rather than thinking of college as a blanket solution for everybody I wish people viewed it as a tool. Some people need it, some people flat out don't.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#233

Post by nitwit005 »

scotty79 wrote: post #213

From my experience college is not so much about actual knowledge acquired but mostly about learning to learn and think. I could have studied civil engineering instead of CS and be exactly as good software developer as I am, maybe even better. Is college absolutely necessary to perform some jobs? Probably not. But I think I'd benefit if my hairdresser or tailor (I don't actually use services of any of those) attended…

This kind of thing always sounds like an excuse to me. If learning to think was a thing, surely the content of the course should matter? After all, this argument implies that it's not included in what was taught before university. And why wasn't it taught in high school if it was so important?

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#234

Post by dsacco »

user5994461 wrote: post #199
JDiculous wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work There are enough companies out there with remote employees and even remotely distributed teams to disprove the assertion that "remote doesn't work".

Remote doesn't work. I know, I work remote with people in 4 continents across 6 timezones. It simply doesn't work. You can't teach people, you can't train people, you can't show anything over a phone or a chat. On top of that, as soon as you have different timezones with little to no overlap. You cannot synchronise or work with your colleagues at all. Remote work and remote teams should be limited to people who are a…

The conversation about remote work is often very emotionally charged and filled with false dichotomies.

I can concede that remote work doesn't work for everyone. I'll even concede that remote work is probably not ideal for most software engineers and the companies that employ them, even in "high tech."

But I'm going to draw the line there. The team I work with is entirely distributed, between the east and west coasts. For most of my career across several companies I've worked remotely. It works spectacularly well for us because we are all very motivated and have the self-discipline to complete our work according to deadlines.

I have also worked remotely on a team where one person was across the Atlantic. I admit that was a bit more of a struggle because we were frequently not online at the same time, but it wasn't a deal breaker in the end either.

Remote work probably doesn't work for most teams because the teams are very large and the work process requires a lot of synchronous communication. But it's really disingenuous to use a caricature of remote work (distributed across several time zones where heavy mentoring and synchronous communication is required) to say it simply doesn't work as a concept.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#235

Post by stonemetal »

ThomPete wrote: post #125
wsxcde wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What else do you think a radiologist do?

Well they are full medical doctors, so see, and treat patients, carry malpractice insurance so you have some one to sue when they miss your cancer.

If it were just about reading the films, the tech who does the procedure would read the films. To be effective at a tech job you must know what you are looking at so that you can tell if you have successfully captured images for the doctor's report. If something looks off they may need to take further measurements and images.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#236

Post by maccard »

user5994461 wrote: post #215
chronic331 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any other proof than your single anectdotal evidence? No?

How about you provide proof that it works instead? Prove me that you can have a conversation with someone who's 8+ hours away and sleeping when you are awake. Prove me that you can teach someone over the phone to use a python profiler, knowing he's never used a profiler before. (That's one of the thing I had to do last week).

> prove me that you can have a conversation with someone who is 8+ hours away and sleeping when you are awake?

What's the context of the conversation? That's really important. Of course you can't have a conversation with someone who is sleeping.

Equally you can't expect a well thought out response from your colleague when you are sitting over their shoulder asking them questions, wheeeas you will get that if you give them time to respond.

> prove me you can teach someone over the phone to use a python profiler, ...

Again, why? In that case surely it makes sense for: A) you to do the task (as you colleague can't use a profiler)

B) your colleague to learn to use the profiler. If your job is to teach someone to use a tool over the air, then yes you have a very valid point. If it's mot, then you tell them to earn how to use a profiler or you'll do the task and they should tackle something else instead

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#237

Post by madengr »

figushki wrote: post #167

This sort of article comes up on Hackerrank a lot. Zero research, a spreadsheet, and a prescription to change eduction from the ground up. The author advocates curiosity as a motivator for education, yet he doesn't appear to know anything about professional architecture (certification is complicated and not always tied to education) and doesn't seem to care enough to research it before bloviating. I read his article…

You may need to go back further than 1880. I'm sure architecture was a college major in the 1880s. Engineering certainly was. Not much has changed since then.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#238

Post by didibus »

The mistake of the education system is its focus on jobs. Education should be motivated by virtue, to raise a generation that can think, reason, innovate, in all aspects of life, emotionally, culturally, artificially, physically, scientifically, spiritually, etc.

If we educated more people that way, we'd probably have a society that could solve the job problem.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#239

Post by user5994461 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #216
user5994461 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about you provide proof that it works instead? Prove me that you can have a conversation with someone who's 8+ hours away and sleeping when you are awake. Prove me that you can teach someone over the phone to use a python profiler, knowing he's never used a profiler before. (That's one of the thing I had to do last week).

Why are you teaching people at all? If you hire professionals they either know what you need already, or you tell them "We use X. Go and learn X." There are remote-only outfits, and they do fine - at least as well "We're not getting any work done because we're in an open plan office and we can't hear ourselves think" outfits. But hiring policy is an issue, and so is PM. It needs people with a compatible attitude, and…

How are you supposed to onboard people onto a project? with training and teaching.

What do you professionals do? They work with other professionals and progress with each other.

What do you do with the world class experts you have? Make them work with other world class experts to make the impossible possible. Again, lots of collaboration and interactions needed!

For anything non trivial or not explained by a stack overflow answer, the "go learn X by yourself" could easily take weeks to years, whereas it could be explained in a few days with face to face interactions.

The "can't hear ourselves think in an open plan" are dysfunctional organisation. Of course, a lot of things do better than that, including other dysfunctional organisations. Let's have a better point of comparison than that ;)

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#240

Post by user5994461 »

literallycancer wrote: post #227
user5994461 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about you provide proof that it works instead? Prove me that you can have a conversation with someone who's 8+ hours away and sleeping when you are awake. Prove me that you can teach someone over the phone to use a python profiler, knowing he's never used a profiler before. (That's one of the thing I had to do last week).

I hope you don't mean a literal phone? And I talk everyday to people who wake up as much as 6 hours sooner than I do (same timezone, but my sleep schedule is a bit off).

Phone, skype, lynq, slack, hipchat, tried them all :D

6 hours is about the limit to still have a bit of overlap. That's London-Houston for me.

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