Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

131–140 of 187 posts

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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, I'd say its more likely a hope to increase the market size for Apple products, since most techies prefer Macs.

I thought most techies prefer anything but Macs and iOS. With Macs, you get worse specs for a significantly higher cost. Similarly for iOS phones as well.

I like MacOS but I'd never buy it on my own dime.

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

#132
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding test early in the recruitment pipeline. I've seen plenty of CS degrees on resumes that can't pass basic coding exercises/tests; at the same time, I've been impressed with the capabilities of new grads. I'm looking for autodidects and could care less what educational format they prefer.

So you're looking for something that's so rare it's probably a myth? https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rsnr.2014... I think what you meant to say is you're looking for people with passion for the field, grit and curiosity and with a proven track record of delivering. The best engineers learn from others and stand on the shoulders of giants.

Judging by the abstract in that linked paper, I think that it is arguing more about semantics than anything else. It basically claims that: "No person is truly self taught as they stand on the shoulders of their predecessors". To which, I would agree. No man is an island and it would be very difficult to teach oneself something without material composed by others. However, I think the colloqual use of the term autodidact is more about the lack of a formal educational system or formal teaching figure and less about a person figuring everything out on their own.

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

#133
post #29

>The Apple CEO also said he believes that it should be a requirement for every kid in the U.S. to have some level of coding education before they graduate high school. Apple launched its Everyone Can Code program in 2016, a curriculum designed to help students from Kindergarten to college learn coding. >Apple is one of several corporations that doesn't require a college diploma for certain jobs Does anyone else feel…

For me there's two reasons to learn some programming: 1. Our lives is surrounded by technology, and thus software, and it'll just get more prominent in the future. Knowing a bit about how programs are put together can help reason about how a program works and its possibilities and limitations. For doing rote work it usually doesn't matter, but once you're off the beaten path this can really help. For example, it can…

Agreed. I believe it's the same as owning a car. If you own a car and use it regularly, you should probably understand at least the basics of how it operates. In the modern world, everyone is constantly surrounded by computers and software and most people have absolutely no clue about how any of it works. This will become a problem as time rolls onward.

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

#134

> Cook also added that about half of Apple's US employment last year was made up of people who did not have a four-year degree. Of course, the majority of these are probably retail, manufacturing, and support staff. Cook himself has a degree (MBA), as do most of the software engineers at Apple, I’m sure.

> ...manufacturing, and support staff... Aren't those outsourced (to different countries, no less), so they wouldn't actually be counted as US employment statistics?

Several are performed by US suppliers. For instance, Apple claims that they enable:

80,000 jobs - direct employment with Apple;

450,000 jobs - indirect employment with their US suppliers;

For more context surrounding Apple's employment numbers, start here: https://www.apple.com/job-creation/

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

#135
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, a significant portion of the students in my class when I was attending university were only there to get a degree & didn't care about anything but the easiest way to get a passing grade.

I mean, you get what you put into college. I sort of veered off my senior and took a bunch of business classes after finishing my CS requirements. I wish I took extra CS classes because there's a lot I had teach myself. Motivated people can teach themselves a lot, but there IS something to be said for having a credential.

I can see why recruiters and business-owners prefer it; it basically implies "Person X has at least this much discipline to get through this degree".

However, a sort of consequence of this is you create a sort of inadvertent filter of "normal" people, e.g. the people who passed the classes designed around them.

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

#136

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.

No amount of "roundedness" is worth the current asking price of college. They're going to have to offer more.

Corporations should pay more of the costs of training. They get about as much benefit as we do. In the case of Apple, the company gets far more benefit from each employee than each employee gets, from a nominal perspective ($400k profit per employee).

Why do we pay all of our own training costs at this point, I have no idea why. I think that the workers of America deserve the same as the workers from Europe.

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

#137
post #69

With a college degree, specifically a Computer Science degree, you generally expect a certain level of competence in CS fundamentals. E.g. the recipient will know about Big O notation, will be able to do problem analysis and design, and understand programming principles like heap memory, object methodology and concepts like memory pointers.

That doesn't take four years. Most of it can be learned in a year. (Source: I did.) CS degrees teach you things like computer architecture, operating system, relational database, networking, etc. which are nice to have but optional.

I mean, if you have even a small amount of experience with programming, you can learn big-O in a couple hours or less.

Now, if we talk about memory optimization or the intricacies of concurrency, that's a much different story. Though, both of those things can't really be taught in the basic sense. They require a lot of experience to really understand.

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

#138
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…

you have really nailed it on the head. this whole thing is just propaganda by tim cook and apple to continue to exert influence over university and high school education in order to outsource training and commoditize software engineers. in their mind, they just want universities, and now high schools, to start pumping out people ready to start writing software for them without any investment on apple's part. the more of these people, the more they can skim the cream off the top and keep wages low or lower.

as you say, there are very few companies left that are willing to properly train smart employees who may not have the background they need. it is very disappointing. this furthers the STEM myth, and it negatively affects other fields. let's say someone is interested in history. how are they supposed to feel comfortable with their decision to study history in university, if they are basically unhirable (in today's climate and for no good reason) afterwards? there is even pressure on actual STEM fields to learn software as well. the number one suggestion for mathematicians looking for a job is "learn to code". companies won't even hire mathematicians who don't already know how to code. it's so silly that companies can't say, oh, this person dedicated a lot of time to learning something i would probably struggle to or not be able to learn, but i won't hire them because they don't already know how to code, and i don't want to train them. that is the STEM myth.

universities should not be job mills, but u.s. corporations are doing everything they can to make them into that. university should be about exploration and learning and doing and not about how to land your future company's ideal job for you.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No amount of "roundedness" is worth the current asking price of college. They're going to have to offer more.

This is why European universities are _extremely_ worthwhile, especially if you're a US student.

Great point. I was thinking of returning to finish my degree at $US_PRIVATE_COLLEGE, where tuition is around $60k/year now. ETH and EPFL in Switzerland, about equally good, turn out to be, like, 1/3 the price, and those are at the expensive end. (You do need competence at French or German first.)

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

#140

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…

The understanding of ignorant reasoning is no excuse for poor judgement.

As someone who vehemently despises the US education system, I have no sympathy for ethos-bound decision makers.

Post reply on HN