21–30 of 84 posts
Half the classes they make you take at universities are worthless anyways. They're just there to keep you 4 years and get more money. A CS major doesn't need to learn about Greek Mythology.
That sounds like a strawman. Does any CS major require Greek mythology?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like a strawman. Does any CS major require Greek mythology?
I don’t know how it is today but when I went, you had to take a certain number of credits in humanities, social sciences, etc, no matter what your major was. So while they didn’t specifically mandate “Greek Mythology,” they mandated a certain number of credits from courses in that bucket, which stretched the time commitment for the degree at least a year from what it would have been if I focused on just my major requ…
Is there such a term as "edmill"? A process of mass producing cheap labor for low-paid positions. This post just smells of hype and marketing for something like that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_technical_school
Half the classes they make you take at universities are worthless anyways. They're just there to keep you 4 years and get more money. A CS major doesn't need to learn about Greek Mythology.
I question the depth of education you can receive from a six-month course set as opposed to a full four-year undergraduate experience. This feels like the same kind of marketing you saw from Flatiron School or one of those other coding bootcamps, but with a larger name attached. Cynically, I'd say that Google is just trying to increase the number of qualified individuals to fill grunt-work positions so they can pay e…
There is not much to question here. If you look at the list the positions listed are not rocket science type and basics of each can be squeezed into 6 month. Problem is that the result is most likely very narrow skilled individual with not much future unless of course they keep learning.
This is now true no matter what level of education. Just need to start somewhere, and this is a great option for those without access to funds or the desire to take on the crippling debt increasingly associated with a 4 year degree.
I don't trust a company like Google to act in its students' and certificate holders' best interests. It's not hard to imagine that the certifications will all be tied back to a Google account that they can terminate at any time, at their discretion. On a more Google-y note, I wouldn't want to get an email in five years telling me that they're sunsetting their online certificate verification portal, meaning no one can…
This is only a problem for a specific implementation. You can skip the online verifier for example by handing out a certificate-signed PDF. Until we see the actual implementation or plan, there's no need to criticise the potential ones. Thought exercise: how do employers verify certificates currently, and how would they do it if your college shut down? In my experience, it's "they don't" and "they couldn't". It's bot…
Elsewhere in tech, Cisco's certifications come with a sort of verification code which you can punch in to their site to check (in addition to the paper trail from Pearson and the physical certificate they mail you). If it weren't such a long-running part of their business, I'd be equally skeptical about them maintaining the certification infrastructure, as it's wildly tangential to the business of building networking equipment. As to the question of what a potential employer would do if Cisco (or Google, or a college, or a bootcamp) did shut it down their verification systems? I couldn't say, I've never hired anyone, nor have I had HR breathing down my neck to check off position requirements.
Half the classes they make you take at universities are worthless anyways. They're just there to keep you 4 years and get more money. A CS major doesn't need to learn about Greek Mythology.
They're only worthless if you're treating college as a vocational school instead of a chance to broaden your horizons.
I took a similar format course offered by IBM in data science on Coursera, and my goodness, I found a lot of pure junk work in the peer review process. Either that, or it was straight up copy and pasted from somewhere else online.
Online classes might definitely work, but they need more iterations to make it work.
Half the classes they make you take at universities are worthless anyways. They're just there to keep you 4 years and get more money. A CS major doesn't need to learn about Greek Mythology.
What is continuously useful are three main categories of skill: general critical thinking, analytical writing, and empathy. The first is helpful when solving any problem at all, the second when proposing solutions to new problems, and the third when understanding what problems need to be solved, both at a code level (what does the user need, what documentation do my coworkers need) and at an interpersonal level (how should I focus pairing sessions with this colleague, what projects and teams would they function well on, how can we help to ensure their professional growth).
I have to say that, on average, the humanities courses I took did a much better job of teaching these skills than the science courses.
Of course, even outside of immediate practical benefit, I learned a lot of really interesting stuff in those classes! A lot of them helped to shape the way I still see the world today.
Sure, we can try to pare down “higher” education to what has historically been called vocational school (in the US) or similar, but I think we’re potentially losing a lot along the way.
College in the USA is an economic plague on young people. This most certainly can't be as bad.