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Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful

businessinsider.com

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Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful

#141

Post by AchieveLife »

purplezooey wrote: post #33

A 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.

Roundness isn't acquired from a degree. It's acquired from learning multiple perspectives.

Colleges push that propaganda but they only offer perspectives that fall into academia approval.

Life is much much more than structured curriculum. Life is chaotic. Knowledge can be obtained through structure. Wisdom is obtained through chaos.

Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful

#142

Post by [deleted] »

motohagiography wrote: post #127

Commented on something related in another thread, but it was either Bierce or Shaw who said something along the lines of, "all professions are a conspiracy against the layman." This is distinct from trades and arts, where there is a simple scale of competence. The reason most jobs demand a university degree today is because of the professionalization of management and HR means that the people making hiring decisions…

[deleted]

Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful

#143

Post by johan_larson »

commandlinefan wrote: post #71
mikerg87 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your credentials matter a lot less when you are the founder.

I always got the impression that, at least in Jobs' case, he was the founder _because_ he didn't have a degree - i.e. he had nowhere else to go.

Jobs had a steady job at Atari before he left to start Apple. I seem to remember he offered the first version of the Apple I (or maybe II?) to HP while he was there, but they turned him down.

Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful

#144

Post by andrewmcwatters »

purplezooey wrote: post #33

A 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.

There's a difference between anti-college and anti-intellectual discussion.

Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful

#145

Post by AchieveLife »

nabla9 wrote: post #85

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…

> In many ways college degree is showing for others that you can delay gratification enough to graduate.

I disagree. A degree shows that the individual is capable of following structure, rules, and traditions.

Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful

#146

Post by clairity »

motohagiography wrote: post #127

Commented on something related in another thread, but it was either Bierce or Shaw who said something along the lines of, "all professions are a conspiracy against the layman." This is distinct from trades and arts, where there is a simple scale of competence. The reason most jobs demand a university degree today is because of the professionalization of management and HR means that the people making hiring decisions…

i am one of those idiots who thought college was about knowledge, and it took me a long time to understand the "way of the world" you articulate here.

with that said, i still find education valuable and have had lots of it by now. it took that plus time and life experience to be able to properly criticize education itself (so i'm nitpicking at your concluding line a bit).

Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful

#147

Post by forstdcli »

Theres always so many views on this idea (whether its worth it to go to college if you work in tech and the externalities involved) but Tldr: I would have loved to take a 6 figure job without $80k in student loans.

I am a female software engineer and encourage the girls I know to not worry about the fact they are in their mid 20s stuck in retail jobs. I tell them to take udacity etc. Bootcamps. At our company some of our best hires are girls and guys who are doing bootcamps or took udacity courses.

One great benefit to this is

1. From my view they arent tainted in tech. As a female I hated going to a tech school with men and I would have loved to haved skipped the four years of social hell.

Getting hacked keylogged and told I only got accepted into college because im a girl despite having a 4.0 and making perfect SAT scores was the norm and ive confirmed from other tech schools as well including but not limited to MIT.

2. They dont have egos or entitlement associated with having a degree. They only have their relevant work.

3. They have the ability and initiative to be self taught and learn new things without it being handed to them in a curriculum.

4. They often feel inferior because they dont have a college degree which is bad but often as a result they are incredibly humble, open minded, respectful, greatful, eager to learn and grow.

We are currently hiring two great female candidates from bootcamp and honestly they know alot more relevant to my job because the classes are very applied whereas im stuck paying off loans and teaching myaelf everything they learned as well.

Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful

#148

Post by AchieveLife »

rchaud wrote: post #109
rjf72 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be a substantively different talk if Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Larry Elison, Mark Zuckerberg, etc, etc had said something similar?

It really wouldn't. At the end of the day it's a bunch of 1 percent-ers spewing platitudes when meeting with government; they have no idea what recruiting for non-executive jobs looks like these days. While I feel that the cost of college is totally out of line with the salaries most people make, I know that I wouldn't have been hired without a degree. Although I'm far from a Thiel fan, he at least offered an alterna…

wait wait wait.

You're proposing that the executives don't know what recruiting practices their company is employing to sustain talent for their operations?

Cmon, that's ridiculous. They would be terrible executives if this were true.

Most people I meet agree that recruiting is broken. A huge part of this is regulation. The education system is integrated into the backbone of society which is maintained through regulation.

If you were hired for only a degree then I would be wary of Price's law. https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/

Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful

#149

Post by ashayh »

Most answers are about CS degrees.

I imagine almost all Electronics, Electrical, Mechanical engineers at apple and elsewhere have degrees in their respective fields. With good reasons. One being that it is really difficult to learn these fields on your own, unlike CS/programming/coding/etc.

Re: Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful

#150

Post by glitchc »

3pt14159 wrote: post #86
glitchc wrote: post #67

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…

I've been coding for a long time. All that has changed is your perspective. It used to be that the "real" developers were working on "real" technology, like satellites and mainframes. This whole messy website muck was chided. 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 t…

If enough kids weren’t interested, the science and technology pipeline would dry up. Diversity in the stream may be an issue, but overall dearth is not currently a problem (used to be a much bigger problem in the past when computing was a less reputable industry).

Does it really matter what the technology or application area is? Electricians train and apprentice, as do scientists (what a PhD and post-doc are after all).

Given that you are a senior, do you feel these kids would not benefit from your mentorship? If so, does the organization you work at create opportunities for such mentorships? Do they count towards your promotion case?

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