If you want to get a Visa at some point in your live: things get much easier to if you have a university degree. All these "don't need a degree" posts always seem a bit US-centric.
Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful
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Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I’d say a lot more jobs currently tied to NOT needing a college degree will be automated out of existence True, but I was making commentary on a large number of college education required positions. They are mutually exclusive assertions. All the reasons to get Andrew Yang on the debate stage! Andrew Yang 2020! YangGang!
I had never heard of this guy before your comment. After reading about him, he's certainly an interesting person who has well-thought out policy ideas. He doesn't match all my political ideas, but he's certainly not a Democrat party-line guy.
listen to his joe rogan interview. He is very close to meeting the threshold of being in the DNC debates.
Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful
#113I consider the University as a shortcut for knowledge. Without University, how many years I would take to understand ACID databases, for instance. How many bad decisions and mistakes I would do, how less competitive I would be, how much time I would lose doing things wrong. In the University I was guided and tested. I learned theory and practice, through the books and also by the mistakes of others.
Depends entirely on your curiosity, motivation and energy.
The answer could be "less than four years" or "a lifetime."
Everything is "self taught" when you get right down to it. The only difference is whether one has/needs guidance about what to study, and advice from others with more experience.
Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not the same thing but maybe a compromise due to the scale involved: you can work your way up from the Apple Store into corporate without a college degree. “Geniuses” funnel into QA mostly while “Creatives” funnel into marketing and design. We did hire many, many interns too when I was there but they were from college programs.
> funnel into QA That is, the lowest paying and least respected "tech" jobs in the company.
I agree that QA typically don't get the prestige of development. But at my job we happen to have some QA people that are worth their weight in gold. And that is generally understood and respected by the dev teams here.
Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful
#115He could also explain why we don't need headphone jack ports.
Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful
#116If you want to get a Visa at some point in your live: things get much easier to if you have a university degree. All these "don't need a degree" posts always seem a bit US-centric.
Even more specifically, a graduate degree of some kind. Because most employers don't want to put in the effort to justify a BS visa hire whereas justifying a MS or PhD visa under H1B is much easier.
Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful
#117The Economist had an article about 6 weeks ago that reached the opposite conclusion. It essentially found a comfortable middle class lifestyle was going to be hard to achieve without higher education now, compared with previous generations. Now, it wasn’t specifically looking at coders and Tim was, but the title doesn’t mention that.
Well, then the Economist is almost laughably wrong. This completely ignores the building and construction trades. In America, the average Millionaire drives a F150 pickup truck, not a Mercedes-Benz or BWW. (well documented in the book The Millionaire Next Door.)
Don't discount the trades.
Take the HVAC guy who just spent a morning putting in a heat pump at my neighbor's place for $6000. It was Move up to doing two such jobs per week (or even three) and a very solid upper-class lifestyle is within reach. Get a couple crews working under you doing a couple of those jobs per day, and now you're talking about a high standard of living, indeed -- vacation home on the coast/mountains and luxury vacations.
Another example: The guy who built my home is an Ivy-League MBA. After graduation he quickly discovered he couldn't tolerate sitting in a cubicle, so he turned the "side job" doing home renovations (used to help pay for his $250,000 degree) into a full-time profession. Now 20-years on, he has built hundreds of homes and is a millionaire many times over. By swinging a hammer.
Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful
#118A college degree is not some terminal credential to make you into a coding cubicle robot the rest of your life. It goes more towards helping you be a more well-rounded person, for the short time in your life while you are more than just profit to the machine. US execs aren't helping anybody out when they push this anti-college garbage.
No amount of "roundedness" is worth the current asking price of college. They're going to have to offer more.
Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful
#119If 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…
This is also a huge part of the lie of "caring about diversity" large enterprises are trying to sell.
Disadvantaged groups have less educational attainment. If you want a diverse workplace, you have to invest in training for people without the stanford/mit/etc background.
Verbally recommitting to diversity at every all hands is some frustrating, cynical bullshit when the company expects recruiting to magically source diverse candidates who have the same credentials as people who grew up without institutional discrimination.
Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful
#120Earlier 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.
I mean, you get what you put into college. I sort of veered off my senior and took a bunch of business classes after finishing my CS requirements. I wish I took extra CS classes because there's a lot I had teach myself. Motivated people can teach themselves a lot, but there IS something to be said for having a credential.