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Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

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Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#41

Post by Jcowell »

vasilzhigilei wrote: post #17

There really needs to be a trade school for software engineering. Not just a short boot camp, either. A rigorous 4 year degree that focuses on industry relevant skills and hands-on projects. The biggest reason I got my 1st job out of college at Cloudflare was because I worked on a lot of personal projects and self learned Go and got experience with Postgres, Redis, and basic frontend. These things were not, or barely…

It would depend on the course load. Learning languages and how to use them can easily be encapsulated in capstone, software engineering projects, & internships. The goal of a CS degree, as opposed to a bootcamp, is for students to fully understand in intimate detail the background , history, ethics, & the 5 whys of the tool that they’re using. The way I would design a CS degree is:

1. for the first two years to be about general computing with an intro to programming via Java, Typescript, Python, & Go. 2. by the end of the 2nd year Data Structures and Algorithms should be mastered 3. Third year is for tracks , whether frontend, backend, full stack, Theory. 4. Fourth year is capstone project or internship

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#42

Post by vincent-manis »

mikert89 wrote: post #16

Highly intelligent kids at 18 are ready for the real world. Its a waste of time to make them memorize random subjects

Like how to analyze requirements, how to document their work, or even how to problem-solve during debugging.

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#43

Post by [deleted] »

TSiege wrote: post #11

A corporation, founded by a Stanford grad who’s been giving talks on the Antichrist, who’s business is to spy on everyone and create a panopticon, is offering a four week indoctrination scheme to susceptible teens. Idk how our society gets out of this mess but the elites in charge are deranged and focused on destroying one of the west’s great institutions liberal arts colleges. STEM is great but liberal arts flesh ou…

[deleted]

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#44

Post by evmar »

My first job was a dotcom startup who heard via social connections I was a bright high school student who could program. I think I was paid $15/hr to write Windows GUI code. In retrospect I think they were just happy for the cheap labor and I didn’t know any better. There was no mentorship or any other useful growth to make up for the low pay.

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#45

Post by simonsarris »

rimbo789 wrote: post #32
simonsarris wrote: post #10

My company has exclusively hired interns out of high school, including myself, since the mid 2000s. Every single hire was an intern first, either as a junior or senior in HS. The board is now 2/3rds former interns (I'm one of them), 1/3rds original founders. It works extremely well. Any high school AP CS teacher we ask is delighted to send us their best students. We basically get to interview for 3-5 years during sum…

Why would anyone accept such a terrible deal

Why would anyone take a programming job over the summer fresh out of high school? What makes that a terrible deal? What is your counterfactual here?

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#46

Post by tastyfreeze »

miltonlost wrote: post #24
mikert89 wrote: post #16

Highly intelligent kids at 18 are ready for the real world. Its a waste of time to make them memorize random subjects

If "memorizing random subjects" is all college is to you, or all learning is to you, then yeah, probably is a waste of time.

Does a computer science major or engineering degree really need history or humanities classes? Sure, it might make more rounded humans but they are completely unnecessary. However, most colleges require these unnecessary classes to get a STEM degree.

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#47

Post by flufluflufluffy »

mikert89 wrote: post #16

Highly intelligent kids at 18 are ready for the real world. Its a waste of time to make them memorize random subjects

Good thing college is not about memorizing random subjects and you can choose whatever major you want that 90% of your courses are dedicated to! I’m not saying college is necessary for everybody but when you say that it’s an insult to people who have put in four years of work into learning something they’re passionate about. One can also grow in more ways than one “intelligence” through the college experience. I was a highly intelligent 18 year old but was severely lacking in my emotional maturity and self confidence which I learned a great deal through college.

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#48

Post by grg0 »

standardUser wrote: post #40

Not requiring a degree is one thing. Not requiring any basic socialization or life experience is bizarre, maybe cultish, and sounds a little like non-sexual grooming. Hire adults, weirdos.

Next: Palantir thinks high school might be a waste of time, so they are hiring middle schoolers.

Wait...

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#49

Post by woodson »

vasilzhigilei wrote: post #17

There really needs to be a trade school for software engineering. Not just a short boot camp, either. A rigorous 4 year degree that focuses on industry relevant skills and hands-on projects. The biggest reason I got my 1st job out of college at Cloudflare was because I worked on a lot of personal projects and self learned Go and got experience with Postgres, Redis, and basic frontend. These things were not, or barely…

Some countries like Austria have a school type that combines high school with vocational training [1]. It's five years instead of the regular four-year high school there, but you start with 5h/weeks of C programming and write your own linked list implementation at the end of year one. They have similar schools for other vocations, not just software engineering (everything from construction to chemical engineering and accounting). At the end you graduate with a high school diploma that later also enables you to go to college, if you so choose, but gives you enough skills to get hired by industry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Höhere_Technische_Lehranstalt

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