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

businessinsider.com

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

#161

Post by tombert »

whorleater wrote: post #158
tombert wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see a study that indicates that dropouts working in a professional environment are less "well-rounded" overall. I don't dispute that something exists, but I haven't seen one. I'm obviously biased, but I have a lot of interest in linguistics, history, political theory, moral philosophy, and a lot of other non-coding fields, for which I have purchased and read many of the college textbooks. I also do no…

>Autodidacticism can lead to new perspectives on projects, and allows people to focus on things that are important, but not emphasized in most colleges. It also allows people to veer into becoming cranks, without appropriate teachers to guide you along the way. As long as we're exchanging anecdotes, in my undergrad I've met my fair share of "physics autodidacts" who seem to believe they've "solved" massive problems r…

That's fair; there's no doubt that self-teaching can lead you down an incorrect rabbit-hole (though I do think most grow out of that eventually), and I'm not an exception; I once thought I could write an entire OS kernel on the GPU because clearly no one has ever tried that.

I think my point still stands, however.

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

#162

Post by AchieveLife »

rchaud wrote: post #160
AchieveLife wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wait wait wait. You're proposing that the executives don't know what recruiting practices their company is employing to sustain talent for their operations? Cmon, that's ridiculous. They would be terrible executives if this were true. Most people I meet agree that recruiting is broken. A huge part of this is regulation. The education system is integrated into the backbone of society which is maintained through regula…

No, I wasn't hired "because of my degree"; there wouldn't be any college-educated Starbucks baristas if that were the case. What I said was that without my degree, I would not have been hired, as I wouldn't even have passed the initial ATS screen. I think we can both agree that is a state of affairs that needs to change.

Yes, we can.

I apologize for the extreme edge case.

In a way, the applicant is still hired because of a degree rather than skill if that's what's used for initial filtering. Everything after that is derivative reasoning.

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

#163

Post by gregdunn »

bla3 wrote: post #128
mantas wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What visa? If I assume correctly that you're talking about US working visa.. What you said sounds much much more US-centric than anybody who ever said "don't need a degree".

More or less any visa to any country, no?

A decent amount of countries offer point based immigration visas, where a degree certainly helps, but is not a hard requirement.

For example, Japan's Highly Skilled Worker visa can be pretty easily achieved without a degree.

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

#164

Post by bdcravens »

purplezooey wrote: post #33

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.

> for the short time in your life while you are more than just profit to the machine

Except that for most, they are adding profit to a different machine: the $1.5T in student loan debt, averaging almost $40k each. $40k to become "a more well-rounded person"

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

#165

Post by tracker1 »

purplezooey wrote: post #33

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.

Considering the political leaning, expansion of censorship and other ideologies ever more prevailing in higher education, I wouldn't exactly call it well rounded as a goal. There used to be a goal for actual tolerance and an ability to listen and respect ideas or politics they disagree with.

I have no formal education... I've worked with others in software development with no formal education who can code with the best rock star developers. I've also met those with a masters in CS who couldn't think their way out of a paper sack. It really depends.

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

#166

Post by rjf72 »

rchaud wrote: post #159
rjf72 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elison and Dell were nowhere near 1% types. Dell started Dell with money he earned selling newspapers and dropped out once it was making 6 figures while still operating from his dorm room. Ellison came from a messed up family situation, dropped out to work odd jobs, and ended up teaching himself programming dropped out and worked odd jobs before teaching himself to code. Of course the environment changes over time. A…

What difference does that make? They aren't being asked for their opinions about the job market in the '80s. They're giving their opinion of this stuff as it exists today. But they also haven't had to look for a job in a quarter of a century and don't personally vet hires unless they're at the senior mgmt level.

I had assumed you were framing things as them being out of context with 'real life' when you characterized them as "1% types." As for recruiting - that's what I was getting at. Different life experiences lead us to radically different views here. Your experience of finding your degree absolutely necessary is not necessarily indicative of people at large (depending on your field), though I'd fully grant neither is mine. It's just anecdata.

In either case, I'd fully agree with you though that a degree makes things much easier for most people. However, I think that is rapidly changing. Most of the big tech employers are now dropping college degree requirements and I expect we'll gradually see the same in ever more fields. A degree used to say a good deal about a person, and all positive. Now that's changing, and so the market is adjusting in response.

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

#167

Post by foobar777 »

saagarjha wrote: post #2

> 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.

I don’t even have a high school diploma and work as a Software Engineer at a Big Corp.

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

#168

Post by saagarjha »

mrwww wrote: post #84
Veen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, although Steve Jobs didn't have a college degree. Bill Gates dropped out too. We have to be careful to avoid survivorship bias though. reply

yea but they dropped out of ivy league schools... that's not the average dropout

Reed is not an Ivy League school.

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

#169

Post by saagarjha »

foobar777 wrote: post #167
saagarjha wrote: post #2

> 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.

I don’t even have a high school diploma and work as a Software Engineer at a Big Corp.

See my response to a similar comment by tod3834.
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