81–90 of 187 posts
Cook has to remember, without academic research there will be no cutting edge technology like chip or processor that support hitech company like Apple. He should be wiser.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would like to see a study that indicates that dropouts working in a professional environment are less "well-rounded" overall. I don't dispute that something exists, but I haven't seen one. I'm obviously biased, but I have a lot of interest in linguistics, history, political theory, moral philosophy, and a lot of other non-coding fields, for which I have purchased and read many of the college textbooks. I also do no…
Conversely, a significant portion of the students in my class when I was attending university were only there to get a degree & didn't care about anything but the easiest way to get a passing grade.
> Cook also added that about half of Apple's US employment last year was made up of people who did not have a four-year degree. Of course, the majority of these are probably retail, manufacturing, and support staff. Cook himself has a degree (MBA), as do most of the software engineers at Apple, I’m sure.
True, although Steve Jobs didn't have a college degree. Bill Gates dropped out too. We have to be careful to avoid survivorship bias though. reply
You should have the ability to write 20-30 pages well structured text to show that you can think, organize your thinking and communicate your thinking to others in your field. Many people graduate without this ability, but at least they have had some practice and can write 5 pages better than when they started the college.
You should know about the things in your field even if you don't master any of them yet. Being smart but restricted is not substitute for college degree. For me the value from higher education came from mandatory classes where I had to learn stuff that I was not particularly interested in. I was interested in algorithms, machine learning and low level programming. I would have never studied database design, computer networks and software engineering as methodologically on my own.
You can avoid learning most of the above when you go to college, but you learn at least something. If you don't have a college degree, you should try to learn on your own. You should have completed large projects that you can demonstrate your grit. In many ways college degree is showing for others that you can delay gratification enough to graduate.
If Cook really cares so much, why doesn’t he invest in internal training and mentorship programs? Where are all the entry-level new grad positions where a junior is paired with a senior? Where is the performance evaluation category for mentoring as a developer? These have all but disappeared in the modern job market. It used to be the company’s prerogative to train hires for their job. Now that is being outsourced to…
So those companies hired people like me and trained them. I was 14 working nights, weekends, and summers.
Now, the web is Serious. It has enough pro devs to make it nothing but a waste of time to drag along some high school kids. But there are still high school kids getting recruited, you're just not in the same low-standards part of the industry that they're in. Motivated kids these days are building weird shit in VR and hitting bug bounties. If anything it is not a problem of training and mentorship, it is a problem of getting people interested in programming in the first place. When I got my first computer at 4 years old I had to use a CLI to get around. Most of my games were in QBASIC and could be inspected and changed, which I would do when I was bored. It's harder to get the spark these days, but once it starts it is so much easier to learn than it used to be. I was struggling with pointer math at 10 years old.
Kids these days use JavaScript and Swift.
Yes, for example studying for one of those degrees, that well... are unrelated to CS.
While i agree that some could replace college with self-study, especially in the age of open-source, can't help but think that some of these high profile managers could say that college is not essential just because employees without college debt and with a non-standard resume could be willing to work for less.
What the college attempts to teach is still mostly just writing and reading comprehension and math. It's just higher level than before. You should have the ability to write 20-30 pages well structured text to show that you can think, organize your thinking and communicate your thinking to others in your field. Many people graduate without this ability, but at least they have had some practice and can write 5 pages be…
Almost all engineering programs I've seen, practically don't have any English requirements. I never needed to write a paper like that.
Colleges are turning into 'adult daycare centers'. Encouraging people to go into six-figure debt, so that they can get a degree that has zero marketability (except of course to continue on in college), is a deeply cynical enterprise. At least drug sellers and casino owners are open about what they do.
>Encouraging people to go into six-figure debt That is just wrong, the average student debt in the US is ~$30,000. It still a lot for a 22-year-old to have, but that is far shy of ~$100,000. It holds for some degrees or personal situations, but in the macro sense isn't accurate. >they can get a degree that has zero marketability (except of course to continue on in college) I do think this is true for a good number of…
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/24/5-facts-abou...
(Stay away from for-profit schools.)