51–60 of 125 posts
A hugely important factors behind getting a job are: being likeable, looking good, not being weird, having a good sense of humor, etc. If you are in the bottom, say, 10% in these factors, employers will pick other candidates. And obviously, they won't tell you why.
A hugely important factors behind getting a job are: being likeable, looking good, not being weird, having a good sense of humor, etc. If you are in the bottom, say, 10% in these factors, employers will pick other candidates. And obviously, they won't tell you why.
Yeah, there’s a big difference between “kid with a CS degree” and “kid who interned at Microsoft for 3 summers and knows industry dev practices well”. This is why internships matter; it doesn’t even have to be a well-known company as long as it teaches you how to work on a dev team (git, agile workflow, DevOps, cloud, etc). In my experience it’s the tools and tech around working as more than a singleton. That’s the j…
I was a broke student so I couldn't exactly afford to relocate for a summer internship, lose my apartment, store all of my belongings and such.
I started my career with basically no experience, spent my last money on a deposit and first months rent to relocate to a new city for work after getting a job. Lost that job four months later as the company failed to meet the projections they had.
It's been a rough road. I'm doing pretty good now, but overall my bachelor of computer science definitely did not feel like an equalizer.
Seems like college fails to live up to being “the great educator” in too many cases too. For those of you who interview new grads, what percent of the time do you interview someone with a degree in the field who can’t do the most basic things in the field? In my experience, it’s pretty high. Even at the college level, education doesn’t seem to extend past “teaching to the test” horrifyingly often (horrifying, given t…
Given that schools are judged by tests results and students are judged by test results, it is surprising that both focus on the tests?
In my opinion, the problem is not with the testing regime, or even “teaching to the test”. It’s the tests themselves that suck. The top priorities for tests designed and used today are ease and efficiency at mass administration, ease of grading, and reduction of subjective in favor of objective measures. Is it any wonder that multiple choice questions are king?
When I went to university in Eastern Europe (majored in Mathematics), in many courses we had a final oral exam. The professor would drill into you, and would not get distracted by regurgitation of irrelevant memorized stanzas, he wanted a clear explanation of everything he asked about. This approach to testing is not perfect — for one, time limitations only allow to cover rather small part of the topic, and you might get lucky to get something you actually know. At the same time, there is really no way to teach and study to an oral exam other than actual understanding of the subject matter. However, this is insanely inefficient for the grader: this makes testing a full week’s worth of constant work, as opposed to few hours of just sitting on an exam, and then few more hours grading (even shorter if it’s mostly multiple choice problems). No wonder teachers prefer the latter.
You read a bunch of books. You go to lectures. You answer questions to see if you understood the material.
The content is entirely in the public domain. You can read the same content as I did and understand how to build a radio, a bridge, etc, just like me. There are literally no secrets below phd level, and nowadays you even have easy access to multiple explanations of the same ideas.
There isn't even that much teaching, and I say that having attended multiple 2-on-1 tutorials each week for close to 100 weeks. So about 3-400 hours total contact time. Add to that quite a few hours studying for those tutorials, maybe 4 hours for each hour of contact? Depends on how diligent you were.
Compare that to my work, where I've regularly worked 60-80 hour weeks for years and years, of which maybe 40 hours was sitting next to a professional superior. Basically in your first months you spend more time sitting next to an expert than your entire degree. My non-contact hours, where I'd read about finance, was similar: after not very long I'd done a similar amount of non-contact work such as reading a textbook.
My point is that there's no way that university can qualify you for work. Yes, there are jobs that you need specific degrees to get, but even in those jobs you are normally not considered anything but a junior, entry-level person when you finish the course. You're literally not a lawyer when you finish a law degree, and not an engineer when you get your Master of Engineering (like me).
So why do employers want to hire graduates, especially graduates of specific universities and courses?
The reason is they think there's a degree to which people who got into top universities in certain courses are capable of learning the necessary material for a new profession. The material may be completely different from what the person studied, in fact it most often is just so. As what I wrote above explains, it should not take long to cover an equivalent amount of material.
Computer Science may well be the only exception to this rule. On CS courses (I've looked over the shoulder of a couple of students, and I know a professor) people actually do things with a rather large overlap with professional coding. For instance, when I was in uni I built a toy radio and a toy bridge using toy tools. A CS student uses the same Git to version control his stuff, and the same compilers to build them. There's a number of CS labs that maintain actual production code that people use.
This probably means a CS student has a shorter spin-up period, but they still hit the professional time dynamics I mentioned: get a coding job and you'll learn a lot about coding that you didn't learn on the course, really fast.
There are also some economic issues about degrees.
There's a fairly strong adverse signalling effect: if you get a degree but you don't find a job reasonably fast, or you lost your job, why is that? Did other employers interview you and discover some sort of attitude problem? Perhaps I should just interview the regular new grads. You definitely don't know what a professional knows, and I can train up someone smart, and there's plenty of smart kids coming out of uni.
The same goes for your uber driver: if they gave up on getting an actuary job, which is one of the highest paying jobs in society and well worth trying to persevere at, why is that? If he's given up, why would I back him? It's an unfortunate dynamic, but it's definitely there.
Regarding "who you know, not what you know", there's a good explanation for that as well.
If you have a field of people who are "good enough", and you aren't short of them, and they're not easily differentiable, the employer might as well hire his nephew (this is where the term nepotism comes from). And because of the dynamic explained, there's an awfully large field of good enough people: they are mostly a blank slate anyway, having shown just a bit of promise. Of course you'll never know if your nephew was actually among the best, but it will certainly seem that way once he starts gaining experience.
This is why we get a lot of famous peoples' kids breaking into fields like acting, where there's a small number of jobs for a large field of people who could actually do the job. (Though I hesitate to use the same explanation in competitive sports like soccer, where there's a very strong differentiation. Eg Frank Lampard didn't need his uncle to put him on the team, he'd have gotten there anyway.)
> who you know than what you know Yeah, the world is a social place. There's a reason European royalty sent their kids to etiquette classes, and even these days fraternities and sororities have formals. That's how the world works. Someone that's surprised by this in their 20s or 30s was failed by their parents or immediate community and this has nothing to do with college. You need to be nice to people, you need to b…
Because the required level is shit. And it has been downhill since the implementation of modern math and the rejection of math in the modern era or elitist path at school. We see it everywhere and especially in France or Switzerland. 10 years old native kids who can't read fluently. 15 years old who would write 1/2+1/3=2/5. They will keep this level of skills through the end of high school and master degree thanks to…
On the other hand most people in the 50/60s would also fail the brevet (or baccalaureat for that matter). I can't speak for the math level but I do know that school in the 60s required you to learn every single prefecture and chef-lieu by heart in geography classes, and the name of every single bone and organ in biology classes. Sometimes modern reforms aren't all that bad.
With regard to the context of the article, the example that Uber driver gets a degree in acturial science does not tell much. Probably he is just doing worse than other graduates - even though he is qualified for an acturial job, the employer has tons of better candidates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are approaching this from the wrong angle. You are assuming because the cream of the crop could achieve something (I.e. most certainly had college degrees) 70 years ago that we can still form society like that today. But society is not the same as it was then. I don't think you can argue that the median job today requires the same amount of knowledge or skill then it did 70 years ago. And that is what col…
One of the highest-growth jobs for liberal arts graduates (which make up the majority of graduates) is human resources. I'll plant a flag in this conversation right now and say that no part of the human resources job requires a 4-year college degree.
Most of the college programs simply don’t teach anything useful in the job market.
A hugely important factors behind getting a job are: being likeable, looking good, not being weird, having a good sense of humor, etc. If you are in the bottom, say, 10% in these factors, employers will pick other candidates. And obviously, they won't tell you why.
How do you know if you are in the bottom 10%?