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How many jobs really require college?

devinhelton.com

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Re: How many jobs really require college?

#241

Post by literallycancer »

GCA10 wrote: post #42

Lots of interesting ideas here, but also some wacky or condescending assumptions about other people's lines of work. Let's take two: TRUCK DRIVERS: They don't just move big rigs around. They also need to keep detailed log books, plan out routes, pass inspections -- and know how to talk civilly and constructively to DOT inspectors. An eighth grade education will not get you there. Especially on the last part. The back…

>TRUCK DRIVERS: They don't just move big rigs around. They also need to keep detailed log books, plan out routes, pass inspections -- and know how to talk civilly and constructively to DOT inspectors. An eighth grade education will not get you there. Especially on the last part. The back-and-forth of a high-school classroom socializes teenagers to work with authority. Most high school dropouts give up because they can't conform to those norms, not because they can't do the work. Trucking companies rightfully insist on a high school degree for exactly this reason.

ASSEMBLING IKEA FURNITURE: It's not just about unpacking the pieces. First one needs to plan out the transportation and move the items to their apartment safely. This is much faster and easier with the help of other people. The back-and-forth of a high-school classroom socializes teenagers to work together with their peers and to form groups when their problems are too hard to solve individually. During the actual assembly, one needs to consult the manual, which requires considerable attention to detail. IKEA rightfully requires its customers to have at least a high-school degree for those reasons.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#242

Post by user5994461 »

maccard wrote: post #236
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).

> 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…

So basically, everything problem comes down to "I have to do the task myself".

That sounds dysfunctional to me. What's the point in having co-workers, teams, company if I am on my own for everything? What's gonna happen when I get hit by a bus? What's gonna happen when another guy get hit by a bus and noone knew anything he was doing?

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#243

Post by user5994461 »

maccard wrote: post #229
user5994461 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Remote doesn't work For you. I work in an office where some team members are remote. If something is urgent, you have to consider what's urgent about it. Is it you feel unable to proceed without discussing a topic face to face? If so, you are the problem , not remote work. I'd argue that 99.9% of things people claim are urgent, aren't urgent and could wait 8-10 hours. Remote work is diffeeent to office work. If you…

I never talked about urgent work. I dunno why you are talking about that. You're conflating different topics.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#244

Post by literallycancer »

akuma73 wrote: post #165
camgunz wrote: post #158

Advocates of this general position, whether it's Peter Thiel and "hey don't go to college I'll just pay you" or this author's "hey your job isn't that complicated, you can figure it out in less time for less money", all miss the point of college. The best purpose of college is to make you a reasonable citizen in a democracy. Most Americans voting in elections can't even name the Vice President, let alone articulate w…

I had a different college experience. A degree in computer engineering required very little coursework outside of engineering. Due to human nature, I ended up hanging out with primarily other engineering students. All of the non-academic socializing, in retrospect, was very limited to a narrow college bubble. It was only after I graduated and lived in the real world for a few years that I felt more 'well rounded'. Th…

>I had a different college experience. A degree in computer engineering required very little coursework outside of engineering.

This has been my experience at an engineering uni in Europe as well.

The place that tried (somewhat successfully) to make people just better, rather than better at some narrow marketable skill, was (an elite) high-school. I'd estimate the likelihood of a regular high-school being as good at about 10%.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#245

Post by therpe1 »

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…

It's weird. This article is so poorly informed and, frankly, straight-up dumb that I'm surprised that the author would put it out there under his real name. But what's more surprising is how every time a startup geek shows up and insists he alone understands an enormous, extremely complicated, century-old distributed market system better than those who have been studying it for decades -- everybody actually stops and takes it seriously. I mean, we're supposed to take hearsay like this:

> Even fifteen years ago at an Ivy League school I did not like to say things too far outside the zeitgeist in section, because it just wasn’t worth the risk of making someone in class angry. And I hear the problem is even worse now.

and a bunch of literally made up numbers (ahem, "subjective assessment") seriously?

So yeah. That's the question. Why does nobody listen to the actual experts on the American education system? The people who've been studying this for decades? And when people aren't willing to do the hard work (that requires expertise)... how do you even talk about solutions in a serious manner?

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#246

Post by chx »

My father led the chemical safety laboratory of a ~10000 employee Hungarian drug company from 1990 to 2010 or so. He said this and this stuck with me, that when he started he was able to hire the lowest level assistants straight out of trade school but by the end everyone needed a univ degree because every instrument became so complicated.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#247

Post by literallycancer »

camgunz wrote: post #226
akuma73 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a different college experience. A degree in computer engineering required very little coursework outside of engineering. Due to human nature, I ended up hanging out with primarily other engineering students. All of the non-academic socializing, in retrospect, was very limited to a narrow college bubble. It was only after I graduated and lived in the real world for a few years that I felt more 'well rounded'. Th…

Yeah I don't have a strong preference about when they're taught. I think college is probably best because the 17-23 age is probably the earliest that most people are equipped to start learning stuff like this, but then again if you can vote when you're 18 maybe it should start a lot earlier. I think there's too much siloing between, say, STEM majors and Liberal Arts majors. You get Philosophy majors who are pretty go…

>Conversely you get engineers who are pretty good programmers or EEs, but really don't understand things like "Affirmative Action isn't racist" or "taxation isn't government theft or class warfare".

You can't teach opinions. What you can teach is how to talk to people with a differing opinion.

Let's take this statement: "Affirmative Action isn't racist"

The disagreement probably wouldn't be about affirmative action at all, but rather about the definition of racism and whether both parties define it the same way.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#248

Post by user5994461 »

dsacco wrote: post #234
user5994461 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's all about time zones. US east to US west is 3 hours. It's fine.

When there are people in Europe, Asia, Russia, Australia, it gets a lot harder.

The criticism is more about working across time difference than just remote.

P.S. Mentoring is always required, unless you only hire the most experienced people you can find. Communication is always required, unless you work on trivial problems.

Out of curiosity, what do you work on?

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#249

Post by literallycancer »

branchless wrote: post #57
randomdata wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly, you'll probably not have the financial resources to walk away from the job.

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.

>h1-b - work late or life as you know it ends

I wonder if this would be the case even for people who don't care about progress towards the green card? E.g. literally being in the US just for the job, no plans to settle down.

Re: How many jobs really require college?

#250

Post by Noumenon72 »

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…

The author also has a huge blind spot for treating the world like it's a computer program where you can just increment everybody's account by $100,000 in education coupons and there will be no taxation effects, bubbles, scams, or opportunity costs. No understanding of economic incentives, no humility about the difficulty of social engineering, no respect for freedom. "Let's require all businesses to hire 14% apprentices, this will inevitably have exactly one effect, the positive one I envision. We won't require any input from the people I am commanding to carry out my untested plan."

Like you say, for this to get upvoted there must be a high demand for sweeping, uninformed radical change.

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