Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery • Hacker News Board

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#41

Post by DanielBMarkham » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 2:57 PM UTC

argv_empty wrote: post #38

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #26

Here's my rough criteria when selecting applicants for technology roles: 1) What have you done lately that is like what I want you to do? 2) What is your attitude like? (past references very important here) 3) Have you taken some test or certification (or can we give you one) that demonstrates skills in areas we might be concerned about? From there, perhaps you can start learning , that is, it might be worthwhile to…

I freely admit that we apprenticeship supporters wave our hands around a lot while yelling "apprenticeships! apprenticeships!" without providing necessary detail. A lot of those details could be worked out along the way. I'd be more excited to see the supporters provide actual apprentice programs than details on how everyone should operate such a program.

Agreed. All we have is a vague title, and that's by design.

The last thing we need is folks going to their dictionaries and starting to create or use formal definitions for all of this. That kind of rigidity is what got us here in the first place.

Much better to adopt a general definition consisting of "in situ" and "rapid feedback" and then try a million experiments to see what gains traction. Theory is easy. Application is difficult. We need much more application and much less theory.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#42

Post by munin » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 3:10 PM UTC

ohyes wrote: post #34

ig1 wrote: post #18

Imagine you offered a job position of "software apprentice" and say you got a thousand responses. How would you identify the ones that would be worth gambling on ? - there would be little to nothing to differentiate candidates. By and large you'll have candidates who didn't do well at school (because those who do well at school tend to go to university), have never done anything to show that they're capable of long t…

How is that different from any other job application? The job will clearly go to the boss's nephew, who is totally great at computer stuff because he plays so much WoW. (Though it is a well known fact that the best middle management comes from Eve Online). Seriously, you will generally want to look for people who are intelligent and good at abstract thinking. In my biased opinion, you should be shooting for the best…

> Currently, CS courses at top universities have very little to do with the business of actually programming, they are more based on mathematical theory. SE courses tend to look more like 'software engineering management.'

Where does this meme come from? If you get a CS degree from CMU, you are going to program your ass off. You are going to write at least one of a compiler, a HTTP proxy, or an OS kernel from scratch (and if you choose to, you will write all three) as well as countless smaller applications (your own heap allocator, your own shell, etc). I didn't go to CMU and those are the project I know about.

At UMD, the curriculum will have you spending most of your time, again, programming your ass off. I don't think there's a single class where you'll spend more time on "mathematical theory" than on programming.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#43

Post by arethuza » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 3:18 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #39

ohyes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different from any other job application? The job will clearly go to the boss's nephew, who is totally great at computer stuff because he plays so much WoW. (Though it is a well known fact that the best middle management comes from Eve Online). Seriously, you will generally want to look for people who are intelligent and good at abstract thinking. In my biased opinion, you should be shooting for the best…

Also, you can always fire them if they don't work out. I'm guessing you're in a right-to-work state, in the UK and EU firing someone for anything other than gross negligence is very, very hard. Hiring someone who "just doesn't work out" is a huge risk for an organization that can't afford to shuffle them off into a "VP of Paperclips" position.

"in the UK and EU firing someone for anything other than gross negligence is very, very hard"

It certainly isn't difficult to fire people in the UK providing they haven't been working for you for too long (it's either six months or a year). Other countries in the EU can be a nightmare though.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#44

Post by kayoone » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 3:20 PM UTC

rdouble wrote: post #13

kayoone wrote: post #5

Well computer science is not only about programming. Programming is a big part of it and people without a degree might be good programmers, but do they really have gone through all the math and theory by themselves or just skipped it alltogehter ? For example most people without a degree might not know what Big O Notation is or how it works or why certain data structures are better than others. So it depends much on…

Which courses teach how to make something that scales to millions of users, or run with exceptional performance?

None directly, but you learn how to rate the performance of an algorithm and basic concepts that atleast give you a starting point. Of course that doesnt say every CS grad knows how that works or none of the non-degree programmes knows how to do that, but a degree tells me atleast that the guy should have heared about the relevant basic concepts and gone through the theory...in theory

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#45

Post by Jach » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 3:22 PM UTC

timtadh wrote: post #33

shmageggy wrote: post #24

I suspect there are countless CS graduates who can describe Binary Search theoretically but couldn't hand-roll a binary search implementation to save their lives If this is the case, and I doubt that it is very often, then your CS program has failed you miserably.

I believe Knuth says in his article on Binary Search in the art of computer programming that it took some ridiculous number of years from when Binary Search was first described to a implementation free of bugs. I find it highly likely that the majority of programmers would produce a buggy version of Binary Search on their first attempt. Why? History indicates programmers often make small mistakes even when writing si…

That's fascinating that less were implementation errors than design errors, though "the distribution of errors among families of algorithms is not uniform" accounts for that I guess. Though the paper is from 1983...

I scanned through the paper and found no explicit mention of the typical coding error caused by using M := (L+H)/2 instead of M := L + ((H - L) / 2) (though the paper interchanges both). So I suspect a re-analysis would find more coding errors than design errors in languages without arbitrary-sized integer auto-conversions. My reasoning for that conclusion is based on: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-...

Of course, given the stories of all the CS-degree wielding applicants who flat-out can't do FizzBuzz, and the amusing incorrect designs/implementations of commenters who scoff at the notion of not being able to do FizzBuzz and try to prove they can but fail, I was already inclined to believe there's a lot of incompetence to go around. It's not even necessarily a problem with the CS programs, but there is the danger of learning to recite an algorithm's steps word for word without knowing what it means or what it's useful for and fail with a live use case.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#46

Post by barrkel » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 3:25 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #14

Posing Apprenticeships as a significant alternative to higher education is delusional. First because a true apprenticeship requires a contractual relationship between the apprentice and the master. That sort of contract is extremely problematic to modern business entities because it does not allow flexibility in staffing levels, requires a significant investment in training (several years), and because indentured ser…

Higher education in countries like the US that usually assumes taking on loans already turn it into a form of indentured service - service on the loan that is, a loan that can't be gotten rid of even through bankruptcy.

Could an apprenticeship be structured like an education loan, but one that the company reduces the balance on when you stay with them?

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#47

Post by iqster » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 3:27 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #14

Posing Apprenticeships as a significant alternative to higher education is delusional. First because a true apprenticeship requires a contractual relationship between the apprentice and the master. That sort of contract is extremely problematic to modern business entities because it does not allow flexibility in staffing levels, requires a significant investment in training (several years), and because indentured ser…

Your third paragraph reminded me of grad school!

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#48

Post by shrikant » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 3:37 PM UTC

delinka wrote: post #19

shrikant wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patio11 said it best (re: "do I have to go to college??) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1182552 edit : just re-read your comment, and I realise you're not necessarily taking sides and merely speculating if the average person can get by without the investment into college. I agree so strongly I would upvote you twice.

If only US society actually did provide four years of education and living expenses, then patio11 would be correct. Sure, such offers exist but only if you're poor. Or are the valedictorian. Average Joe gets no free ride for four years.

He meant a social subsidy, as opposed to monetary. Basically, you aren't too strait-jacketed as a student, the world is your oyster, you can try out lots of different things, etc.

There was no mention of a 'free ride'...

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#49

Post by falcolas » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 3:40 PM UTC

St-Clock wrote: post #25

So the solution to increased cost of education is apprenticeship? Is this part of the current trend at bashing higher education to make sure that we become obedient but efficient drones? There is a lot of things broken in higher education, but saying that hiring a CS/SE graduate for a developer position is like hiring a theoretical physicist to repair a car is disingenuous at best. Guess what, graduate students who w…

A graduate student is a bit different from a student just getting a bachelor's degree, which is where this article is focusing.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#50

Post by akmiller » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 3:41 PM UTC

I think it says something about the kinds of employers that look at people who have spent upwards of 100k to obtain a piece of paper that implies some arbitrary level of understanding in a given subject. The same level of understanding that I could get on my own for probably a few hundred bucks.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against higher education in theory. We've gotten to a point though were it's not about the education anymore, it's about the diploma. We enforce this idea in our high schools that you can't be successful without one and as such send our kids in droves to Colleges. We've artificially made the demand so high that these institutions can charge whatever they want and the kids are still going to attend and put themselves (or their parents) further and further in debt.