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Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

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Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#101

Post by jogjayr »

toasterlovin wrote: post #51
drewrv wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been spending a lot of time lately wondering if people who treat colleges and universities as though their job is worker training are confused, or if I'm naive in believing colleges and universities exist to expand human knowledge through research and education. I suspect the answer is that our culture is confused, we want people who are smart and well rounded to also be useful. And the ugly side of it is, we wa…

Higher education is used as a proxy for intelligence by companies who are hiring because they are not allowed to use IQ tests. So I think it kind of makes sense that our society is confused about the purpose of higher education.

> because they are not allowed to use IQ tests

There's actual employment law that prohibits using IQ tests? I'd never heard that before

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#102

Post by chefandy »

pavlov wrote: post #88
toasterlovin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher education is used as a proxy for intelligence by companies who are hiring because they are not allowed to use IQ tests. So I think it kind of makes sense that our society is confused about the purpose of higher education.

If IQ tests were a reliable measure of any job capability, surely the brilliant minds at Mensa would already have made a mint by selling recruitment services.

Well, part of the problem is that mensa is a total crock of shit.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#103

Post by eightysixfour »

rhaps0dy wrote: post #92
blurbleblurble wrote: post #73

> Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees. This one. Every job I see when I go looking is 40+ hrs a week, likely with plenty of idle time and projects I don't believe in. Part of this is…

I think you framed your anecdotal evidence as supporting the OP's statement, but also that you misunderstood such statement; and you actually present evidence against it. If companies find it hard to reliably staff generalist positions, _and_ you're a generalist as you claim, then you would find it _easy_ to get a job.

I think the anecdote and OP’s statement support one another - companies have a hard time reliably staffing generalists and one of the reasons for that is that they are bad at identifying them and determining how to use them.

Parent showed them a generalist skill set and they saw a lack of professionalism.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#104

Post by md224 »

> Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

This might sound stupid, and maybe it's my inner hippie talking, but did this make anyone else slightly uncomfortable? I get that it's "good business", but something feels kinda gross about saying "extract as much money from other people as you possibly can." Like... shouldn't you just charge whatever you think something (a product, your time) is worth? I realize that "what something is worth" is often subjective, but charging more just because you can feels morally ambiguous to me at best.

(Then again, if you're talking about extracting money from a corporation, that feels less gross. But of course my inner hippie would say that.)

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#105

Post by valuearb »

toasterlovin wrote: post #51
drewrv wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been spending a lot of time lately wondering if people who treat colleges and universities as though their job is worker training are confused, or if I'm naive in believing colleges and universities exist to expand human knowledge through research and education. I suspect the answer is that our culture is confused, we want people who are smart and well rounded to also be useful. And the ugly side of it is, we wa…

Higher education is used as a proxy for intelligence by companies who are hiring because they are not allowed to use IQ tests. So I think it kind of makes sense that our society is confused about the purpose of higher education.

It's not just an IQ test, it's a test of ability, which is different. Your college record shows that you

a) Whether you were able to get the work done. b) Whether you were smart enough to do the work well.

It's the combination that's important, not either single one. Employers want people who show up on time, actually care enough to try, and are smart enough to figure it out.

The college degree has a better than zero correlation to that. After you get the job it's mainly about performance and output, once you've been promoted a few times your college degree mostly doesn't matter.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#106

Post by khedoros1 »

BeetleB wrote: post #80
wnoise wrote: post #3

> CS programs have, in the main, not decided that the primary path to becoming a programmer should involve doing material actual programming. Well, that's because CS programs are designed to teach CS, not to be a vocational school for programmers.

>Well, that's because CS programs are designed to teach CS, not to be a vocational school for programmers. And which is why they should be moved out of the College of Engineering and placed into the college that has mathematics. Curiously enough, the only school he mentions where he can reliably know their grads have programming experience actually does place CS under mathematics. I think being able to program basic…

I went to a polytechnic university (i.e. one with a "learn by doing" focus). Our engineering students definitely had to have some programming classes, but they were taught separately from the CS ones. Most engineering students considered them an annoying roadblock in the way of getting back to their "real" work, and I (a CS student) spent a fair amount of time tutoring friends. I'll have to ask some of them if they use any form of programming now, in their day jobs. I suspect I'd get a mix of answers.

As for the CS students, lectures were often on the theory, and homework was usually focused on implementing demonstrations of the theory. A grad student who wasn't a decent programmer was either a cheater in undergrad, or didn't come from our school.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#107

Post by jamesrcole »

swamp40 wrote: post #58

> Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. Then why did Amazon patent the concept of a drone that will fly to your car and recharge it?

I'm also somewhat sceptical of the blanket "ideas are never valuable" statement.

Surely there are situations where not many people are going to think of the idea and being first to move on it is very important

...such that both the idea and the execution are important. You can't execute well on something that you weren't able to come up with.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#108

Post by geoffreyhale »

rytill wrote: post #99

> Meta thought: you radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it. Can someone explain b) to me? Is he saying that, assuming you fit into category a, by explicitly revealing your knowledge, your potential opportunities will expand more than you estimate?

TLDR: Yes. You will benefit from sharing knowledge.

> You radically underestimate (...) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it (much you know that other people do not).

(He is saying, at least, that) you will benefit (more than you estimate) from publishing things you know (that others don't).

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#109

Post by auxym »

hugs wrote: post #31
jasonlfunk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I often explained that CS was more like a math degree than an engineering degree.

Ironically, an engineering degree is also like a math degree.

Meh, at least my (mechanical engineering) degree wasn't.

Sure, you learn some mathematical tools that can help you solve some very practical problems, but it stops about there. I was not taught anything close to creative mathematical thinking. I was never taught the fundamentals of things: the axioms and the theorems on which the tools we "learn" are based on. I can guarantee you no one in my graduating class could read a proof of even modest complexity, let alone write one.

Granted, I did go to a school with a good reputation, but one of a very practical/applied program. Still, I'm pretty convinced that math and engineering are very, very different fields, even if all engineering programs include a handful of math classes.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#110

Post by sturmen »

dwaltrip wrote: post #47

This should be titled "Condensed snippets of accumulated wisdom, focusing mostly on software and business, that I am fairly confident of and feel compelled to share with you". Many of these nuggets are not "obvious", for any conventional understanding of that word. That said, I enjoyed the post, and liked the concise format.

This was mentioned by someone else, but in case you missed it: the "concise format" is a result of this being a 23-tweet tweet storm that the Threadreader has compiled into one page for us.
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