Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

insidehighered.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 130 posts

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#111

Post by CapitalistCartr »

walshemj wrote: post #108
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can indeed say all of that, but both statements are merely misdirection. Saying its "six of one, half dozen of the other" is a colorful way of saying mistakes are irrelevant; sotojuan is wrong, they don't actually detract from the communication. But you provide no reason. As for your reading skills, the subject is writing communications, but from your reading skill you can see the value of writing quality.

err that's not what "six of one, half dozen of the other" means

In this context, yes, it means that written right or wrong is the same difference.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#112

Post by austincheney »

jackvalentine wrote: post #107
austincheney wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Implied in finishing university is the expectation that you have been taught what you need to make it in the work place. Its part of the social contract. Its what I paid you for right? Then the person misunderstood what education is and reality is about to slap them in the face. I started a career before graduating college and now have two simultaneous careers. The benefit of having multiple simultaneous careers is…

> Then the person misunderstood what education is and reality is about to slap them in the face. Sure, but that doesn't change that it's heavily implied by the education industry and society as you grow up what OP said. If your entire life someone's been telling you an orange is an apple then when asked "what's that?" you'll answer an apple.

Perhaps I am fortunate to have grown up around technology. I knew network engineers who went to work straight out of high school without any college making $80k per year. There is a college major to configure routers and switches. It is just something you learn from gaining access to the hardware, reading books, and practicing.

I knew this because I was interested in technology and I was find people who were already making it in technology. I didn't wait around for somebody to simply gift me with a job. I know not everybody has this. If you think jobs are just something you happily pull off a store shelf like shopping in a grocery store merely because you got some college you are in for a world of hurt.

I could feel sorry for people who had absolutely no way of knowing better. Whether or not I feel sorry for these people the reality of the situation remains the same. Bottom line: Don't waste your time feeling sorry for people with first world problems.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#113

Post by lr4444lr »

nitwit005 wrote: post #110
homonculus1 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Critical thinking isn't some kind of academic jargon. It literally means applying criticism to the subject of thought.

And? It's normal for words to drift in meaning over time. You have to deal with the reality of language, not "how it's supposed to be".

I agree with you in the general sense, but the employers (whoever they are) are simply wrong by any reasonable standard of language to equate critical thinking with original thinking.

For example, the skill of top lawyers is inseparably wed to critical thinking. They need to parse arguments and pore over monotonous tomes of legislation, regulatory paperwork, contracts, and case law to find areas of weakness or inconsistency to exploit/tighten up. They do this through slow, methodical analysis, consultation with other experts, and then have to distill and apply the essence of these points into language defendable against industry peers who are working for the other side. This work requires deeply critical thinking, but has nothing to do with "new, original thought".

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#114

Post by dvtv75 »

nitwit005 wrote: post #110
homonculus1 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Critical thinking isn't some kind of academic jargon. It literally means applying criticism to the subject of thought.

And? It's normal for words to drift in meaning over time. You have to deal with the reality of language, not "how it's supposed to be".

Yet communicating in a clear, consistent, and accurate fashion is crucial.

Many years ago, I worked in a photographic store. We developed film and printed photos, primarily. One of the women took in a film for development, wrote the customer's surname in the name box, then wrote "Matt" over the name.

It's fortunate that we would hand out the top slip so we would match the packet numbers, because when the customer came back into the shop we couldn't find her package. We did find one for a Matt Sullivan (or whatever the surname was). It turned out she was quite annoyed with us for not printing it in matte as they asked, so we reprinted it at no charge and she got to keep both sets.

The staff member argued that she had written matte ("See? It says Matt right there." "That's the name, not the paper type. The paper type has an -e at the end.") on it, it's just that language changes and we had to accept and adapt to it. Didn't matter what her argument was, though, because she screwed up and it cost the business money.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#115

Post by dvtv75 »

bpchaps wrote: post #67
ericmcer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What is your greatest weakness?". Everyone is expected to lie or warp reality a bit on this question. Interviewing is just a game and people learn pretty quickly to give the answers interviewers want to hear. The alternative to overconfidence is not great.

I answered this in one of my first interviews with, "My greatest weakness is my inability to focus on things for an extended period of time." The interviewer told me never to do that, but appreciated my candor and extended an offer, though I didn't take the job. Sometimes it actually works to be honest instead of treating it as a game. :)

This leaves me conflicted.

I've noted here (quite) a number of times that I have a disability that impacts my ability to absorb chunks of written material. I've had an occupational therapist tell me that I shouldn't work in CS or IT (I have a CS degree in spite of that), and several doctors have told me I should stay away from the field, while others have told me that just go with whatever works and don't tell employers I have this disability.

I prefer to be honest, but at the same time I also like to eat most days.

I have an interview for a job in a few days, and no clue what I should do. If they don't ask, do I bring it up? What do I tell them? Most employers in the city are highly discriminatory against people with a disability, even if it means they're not hiring the most qualified one.

(I'm not actually seeking advice here, just musing online.)

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#116

Post by flukus »

lr4444lr wrote: post #32

But Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup's higher education division, which also conducts research related to graduates and careers, said these sorts of definitions can vary For instance, Gallup has found that generally an employer believes that "critical thinking" is coming up with new, original thought. But in an academic sense, it can mean more picking apart ideas in depth, he said. Given that their defin…

"new, original thought" to the employers probably just means that they can deal with a problem that doesn't fit into the general workflow or one that they haven't been specifically trained to do.

As an example, the payment system at my pub went down a few weeks ago and the staff where clueless on what to do, the accepted short term solution (at my insistence) to write down who bought what (we all have accounts) so they can be put into the system later. This is a simple, trivial example, but in jobs like that it makes you manager material.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#117

Post by nitwit005 »

lr4444lr wrote: post #113
nitwit005 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? It's normal for words to drift in meaning over time. You have to deal with the reality of language, not "how it's supposed to be".

I agree with you in the general sense, but the employers (whoever they are) are simply wrong by any reasonable standard of language to equate critical thinking with original thinking. For example, the skill of top lawyers is inseparably wed to critical thinking. They need to parse arguments and pore over monotonous tomes of legislation, regulatory paperwork, contracts, and case law to find areas of weakness or incons…

I can agree with you all I want, but it doesn't change anything. They will still believe it means whatever they think it means.

Awful used to mean awe inspiring, which is clearly what it says, but now means terrible. I'm sure people pointed out that meaning was wrong at the time.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#118

Post by flukus »

bjz_ wrote: post #109
dozzie wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Implied in finishing university is the expectation that you have been taught what you need to make it in the work place. Its part of the social contract. No. That's not contract , it's a dumb expectation , though shared by many. Vocational school is for training for a job. Universities have no sensible way to teach how industry operates, while industry does have the capabilities for teaching that.

Agreed, and I think it's harmful to universities to expect that. We need universities to excel at what they are good at - preparing students to push the frontier of their field. They're not job factories for industry and shouldn't have to try to be.

IME it's self inflicted harm, most of the university advertisements I see feed that expectation. Slogans like "education for the real world" and "industry focused" get thrown around all the time. Hard to blame students/society for expecting universities to work as advertised.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#119

Post by AElsinore77 »

denzil_correa wrote: post #22
austincheney wrote: post #10

At the current job is the first time I have worked with young college graduates. It is interesting to see that some of the developers are humble and are completely ready for the corporate world while others are the opposite. It really comes down to personality and whether a person's personality has allowed them to practice more and work harder to learn a skill. These people tend to be much better prepared without the…

Dunning-Kruger Effect : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

First thing I thought of too - the only category where students ranked themselves as less proficient than they were perceived to be is technology - the one area they are probably actually proficient in.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#120

Post by adrianratnapala »

wavegeek wrote: post #104
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do undermine one’s credibility. At the same time, a cursory study of German, French, Hebrew, even Japanese would suggest that English spelling is needlessly complicated and ambiguous. Part of addressing this problem for future generations is a push for spelling reform.

I've learned a lot of languages and they all have their problems. E.g. the horribly complicated broken Kanji characters in Japanese and Chinese. E.g. the almost completely pointless genders in German, and resulting requirements for other words changing in regular and irregular ways in agreement. Similarly verb tenses are insanely over-complicated. English is reasonably easy to learn compared to many other languages.…

> It is harder than it looks to fix spelling because ...

Of what you say and lots of things too. Much of the existing mess is caused by spelling "reform" of the ages past, such as when the Norman scribes half-replaced the conventions evolved by Anglo-Saxon scribes with French ones. It's not very different from https://xkcd.com/927/.

Post reply on HN