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

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#71

Post by munin » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 7:20 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #64

munin wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There are, of course, exceptions, but programming in industry is typically a design job. Your focus is on designing an infrastructure for the application that will allow it to be functional and maintainable, and survive massive refocusing of scope without determent to the prior two points. Things like compilers, HTTP proxies, and OS kernels are plugged into the infrastructure, not written as part of it. Your concern,…

I'm not sure if that's a legit complaint. Can stuff like that be taught adequately in a course or is it something you pick up by "just doing" it?

A lot of classes where you program your ass off force you to make design decisions, some explicitly as part of the assignment and some implicitly. Isn't that valuable? What would a "design based" curriculum look like?

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#72

Post by absconditus » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 8:42 PM UTC

a5seo wrote: post #36

brudgers wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a college degree does is that it provides a more equal opportunity for people to obtain a minimum qualification. Let's face it, Ben Franklin's apprenticeship as a printer for his brother more or less typifies the way in which people have obtained apprenticeships - through close personal connections between the master and the apprentice. This is unsurprising when one considers the degree of upfront investment by…

One of the best decisions I ever made was to hire a high school dropout into a de facto programming apprenticeship. The guy dropped out for family reasons, went to work in factories, got a job in IT eventually, but was really bright and hard working, but stuck in a dead-end help desk job. One of our other devs knew him and suggested we give him some programming projects on contract- like $10/hr. So we did. He did a g…

Jordan Hubbard, one of the co-founders of the FreeBSD project, is a high school drop-out. He is now the Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies at Apple.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#73

Post by brackin » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 8:43 PM UTC

Most (if not a lot of) startups i've seen look at portfolio and experience more than do you have a degree, anyway. I'd rather hire an 18 year old who's got lots of great stuff on Github, internships and other experience.

Than someone who's just finished their Computer Science degree from a random uni, with no experience. Almost all of those I know going to university are just planning to do their course and apply for jobs afterwards, expecting their degree to mean instant an instant job.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#74

Post by randomdata » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 8:52 PM UTC

munin wrote: post #71

randomdata wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are, of course, exceptions, but programming in industry is typically a design job. Your focus is on designing an infrastructure for the application that will allow it to be functional and maintainable, and survive massive refocusing of scope without determent to the prior two points. Things like compilers, HTTP proxies, and OS kernels are plugged into the infrastructure, not written as part of it. Your concern,…

I'm not sure if that's a legit complaint. Can stuff like that be taught adequately in a course or is it something you pick up by "just doing" it? A lot of classes where you program your ass off force you to make design decisions, some explicitly as part of the assignment and some implicitly. Isn't that valuable? What would a "design based" curriculum look like?

I don't necessarily disagree with you, just trying to explain where it came from. Software engineering is the "design based" curriculum.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#75

Post by absconditus » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 8:55 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…

"Is this part of the current trend at bashing higher education to make sure that we become obedient but efficient drones?"

No, the goal is to remove vocational training from higher education and return it to its supposed goal.

The graduate student that you describe is rare. A masters degree in CS typically means that the person took more random computer courses and knows no more about software development. What you fail to realize is that nearly anyone who wants a masters in CS can shop around and find a school that is willing to accept them.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#76

Post by tokenadult » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 8:57 PM UTC

"Discarding the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification would not be difficult. The solution is to substitute certification tests, which would provide evidence that the applicant has acquired the skills the employer needs."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/opinion/28murray.html

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#77

Post by crs » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 9:04 PM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #63

The problem with this is that universities get away with screening processes that would be problematic at a company. For example, screening applicants based on SAT scores is a legal gray area for a lot of companies, but the college you went to is a proxy for your SAT score. I'm convinced that more than half of the value of hiring someone from a top-tier college is who they admit, rather than what they teach. Frighten…

So very true. At the company (very large defense contractor) we have to ask the same questions to every applicant. We can't ask follow on questions or deviate from the pre-defined question list. It was deemed legally unfair to ask different applicants different questions. That makes it harder and harder to distinguish the good from the bad.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#78

Post by crs » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 9:10 PM UTC

mattdeboard wrote: post #30

sharmajai wrote: post #21

We have to stop pretending degrees are worthless. The way I see it, going to school, expedites your learning process, by exposing you to professors and your peers, it helps you learn best practices, which although generic, saves you a lot of time making same mistakes others (your professors and your peers) have made. Also it gives you the focus and urgency to finish your learning on time. As an analogy, consider the…

You're conflating the degree and the relevant knowledge gained in pursuit of the degree. They are not one in the same, and I believe that is the point most people are making. At least, that's what I believe. The skepticism directed at college education is a result of cost/benefit analysis. I would gladly take a 2-year associate's program that yielded a degree in computer science, much like nurses have an 2-year nursi…

"I'll likely drop out after getting the discrete math, algorithms and other math-intensive courses I likely would not study on my own."

I think that statement right there is why degrees are still valuable. To earn your degree you will have to study subjects that an independent learner would not likely study on their own.

So far in my career, the amount of math I was required to take to earn my CS degree has been very valuable. I have to use it a lot. (Graphics, GIS).

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#79

Post by daimyoyo » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 9:10 PM UTC

I have found firsthand that the lack of a college degree has increasingly become a scarlet letter in our society. It's not quite as bad for coders as it is in the rest of tech(the fact we have open source projects to prove we know what we're doing helps a lot) but it's still disproportionately difficult to get a job that pays a living wage unless you have the degree to "prove" you know what you're doing.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#80

Post by St-Clock » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 10:14 PM UTC

absconditus wrote: post #75

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…

"Is this part of the current trend at bashing higher education to make sure that we become obedient but efficient drones?" No, the goal is to remove vocational training from higher education and return it to its supposed goal. The graduate student that you describe is rare. A masters degree in CS typically means that the person took more random computer courses and knows no more about software development. What you f…

"What you fail to realize" First, I believe there is a cultural difference between Canada and the US. In Canada, a Master's degree is typically not a professional degree and you usually cannot buy a M.Sc. Typically, half of the credits come from courses and the other half (often even more) comes from your thesis. I don't know about the situation in the UK, the author's country of origin.

Second, I TAed and taught programming, algorithms, and software architecture courses for undergrads, Master's and Ph.D. students so I'm well aware of the advantages and limitations of higher education. I saw students in an advanced architecture course who did not know what a thread was or who had never written a single SQL query. Well, they learned it in my course.

The graduate students that I described aren't rare. At least 75% of the Master's and Ph.D. students in the SE lab and PL lab at my university match that description. Maybe they would have a hard time building a web application in a day, but I think they have demonstrated that they can learn pretty complicated things and that they will learn how to solve your particular technical problems.

I felt the article was really about "degree snobbery", meaning that the author promoted snubbing people with degrees. I understand the frustration of people without degree who need to prove every time that they don't need one. But I don't believe that having a systematic negative bias on candidates with a degree is wise either. Honestly, does it make sense as the author says that someone with a bachelor in C.S. don't know how to implement a binary search (see [1] for a possible explanation)?

Regarding the vocational training that needs to be removed from higher education, I believe a compromise is needed. I agree that you cannot efficiently learn development process and all the latest languages and frameworks at school. But you need to learn some good programming skills and software engineering practices, otherwise, it is a lot harder to understand and play with more complex concepts and it is also more difficult to bring a significant contribution if you do a Master or Ph.D. later.

[1] http://www.skorks.com/2010/10/99-out-of-100-programmers-cant...