81–90 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.
> If you are in the bottom, say, 10% in these factors How do you know if you are in the bottom 10%?
If you can't look around the room and identify who the bottom 10% are, you're the bottom 10%.
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You say that like it’s a bad thing. More people should fail. We as a civilization deserve higher standards than what can be achieved by the average student.
I never implied that, in fact I'm pretty noncommittal on the matter and would do away with the baccalaureat (or maturite, or whatever) entirely. 60 years ago a test was hard and most people failed it. Today it's easy and most people pass it. What's the difference? Why even have a test? Since we're somehow talking about French-speaking countries, Belgium doesn't have such a test and isn't worse off for it.
Now you have private certificates that employers start asking (voltaire certificate) and there will be similar in math.
Regarding Switzerland, check the subject and grading of ECR in Vaud https://www.vd.ch/themes/formation/scolarite-obligatoire/eva... and an 8P example https://www.vd.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/organisation/dfj/dge... it's at the end of the first year of middle school // 12years old. Considering the way of grading, my daughter would pass it at 7.
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 crazy stat is that 85% of autistic college grads are unemployed. Being "normal" really is the most important thing in life to fit in.
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The problem is that we're being sold the 'meritocracy' narrative in the academical and technical circles. You often see it in HN discussions about hiring decisions (reasoning involving the "top 1% programmers" without any indication as to what that means exactly). If you have the introverted, dilligent, keeping-your-head-down, got-high-marks-at-school mentality that I assume is prevalent on HN, it can come as a shock…
Or you simply view being sociable as part of Merit. In fact I'd wager that to do well in almost any job you need to be sociable. Merit is not just about technical ability.
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Sadly this is true. I've had conversations with very smart people who can't find a job. They often attribute it to some hiring shortcoming or bias, and sometimes that's the case. But for a couple of these people the reason was obvious: they were not "presentable" and didn't have a personality that would enable them to function well in a team, i.e. they didn't dress properly, didn't look after their personal hygiene,…
Reminds me of my wife. :) After her PhD, she was writing cover letters that were screaming "I hate the recruitment process". One day, something clicked. Her next cover letter read like the first chapter in her bibliography. And one month later, she had too much work. :)
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The engineers inventing the machinery necessary for landing I the moon all had college degrees. The mobilization for the war does not require super educated population.
Yes, but his point is that the society that marshaled those degree-holders only had a pool of 5% of graduates to draw on. There's no question that some jobs require college education; the question is whether there are enough of them to justify pushing the majority of 18-year-olds into 4-year colleges.
People don't go to college to moorland nor to facilitate next war. They go to college to get corporate jobs.
I've tried to explain that for 99% of CS majors, your grades do not matter. If you're spending your time in college constantly studying and worrying about getting an A in your test because oh no your GPA will be a 3.8 otherwise, you haven't really assessed what's important. Go to college; do your best to learn because the material is useful and pretty neat; socialize, have fun; then find a job. That's it. A 4.0 isn't that important.
> 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…
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…
I saw signs of that academic dysfunction from other departments too. This was at a very non-prestigious state school, but that's the type of school that most students attend. There must be millions of people in the US walking around with degrees in subjects they don't know much about.