Or both you know, that’s also an option.
School is all about signaling, not skill-building
91–100 of 222 posts
Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building
#92Maybe for the elite. But for middle class people like myself, I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships, and found it easy to get a full-time job straight out of school. I had about a years worth of industry experience via internships (one for 6 months, two others 3 months each). Signaling doesn't buy you much. At least in engineering, because a technical interview will sort out whether or not you a…
Look at what you wrote "I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships". That does not read like school did that for you and probably you could do the same without school. How much of that CS101 was studying on your own time? Finishing school is signaling that you are person that shows up in the morning for classes and puts up years of his life to do that. By any means I am hiring developer who is signal…
More importantly, taking internships means you have some practice, not just theory. Not quite as green. It also signals you actually take some things seriously.
Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building
#93Maybe for the elite. But for middle class people like myself, I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships, and found it easy to get a full-time job straight out of school. I had about a years worth of industry experience via internships (one for 6 months, two others 3 months each). Signaling doesn't buy you much. At least in engineering, because a technical interview will sort out whether or not you a…
> Signaling doesn't buy you much. At least in engineering, because a technical interview will sort out whether or not you actually demonstrate basic programming skills very quick.
Doesn't everyone complain about how technical interviews only measure how well the candidate is prepared for technical interviews? With that in mind, I'd argue that the willingness to prepare for a technical interview has become just another signal. Also you go against your argument just after:
> My first company that hired me out of college got a much better deal waiting for me to complete my senior year. Yes, each year isn't worth the same. This makes sense. Senior year was my capstone -- building valuable communication skills in a team environment.
Firms can not measure soft skills accurately, so this returns right back into the value of the college degree as a signal. You get points for attending a school which provided a teamwork-oriented final course. It's your final grade that matters, not what you learned in that course. You might have developed better skills than the rest of the cohort, but it's meaningless if you didn't get a better grade then them. Everyone would rightfully assume that the others have better developed skills than you, because that's what the current system is able to measure.
One final unrelated point:
> Would you pay 50% the price for a half-finished version of Microsoft Word? Probably not. It'd be far less useful of a piece of software.
The utility of added features is diminishing. It'd be worth a lot more than half, or Microsoft would just keep on piling features and raise the price quadratically (or with some power above one).
Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building
#94Maybe for the elite. But for middle class people like myself, I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships, and found it easy to get a full-time job straight out of school. I had about a years worth of industry experience via internships (one for 6 months, two others 3 months each). Signaling doesn't buy you much. At least in engineering, because a technical interview will sort out whether or not you a…
Look at what you wrote "I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships". That does not read like school did that for you and probably you could do the same without school. How much of that CS101 was studying on your own time? Finishing school is signaling that you are person that shows up in the morning for classes and puts up years of his life to do that. By any means I am hiring developer who is signal…
> Finishing school is signaling that you are person that shows up in the morning for classes
Not sure about others but I tried my damnedest not to take morning classes unless I absolutely had to -- most semesters I had nothing before 11am or noon. The flexible scheduling was one of my favorite things about college. I did take one 8AM class and thinking back I have no idea how I didn't completely bomb it -- I showed up pretty sparsely after the first week or two.
Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building
#95“If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The fact that alm…
Lol this is absolutely false. You would 100% get ejected from a Princeton class room.
Only if you're disrupting class. You wouldn't be able to attend labs though or pass exams.
Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building
#96Maybe for the elite. But for middle class people like myself, I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships, and found it easy to get a full-time job straight out of school. I had about a years worth of industry experience via internships (one for 6 months, two others 3 months each). Signaling doesn't buy you much. At least in engineering, because a technical interview will sort out whether or not you a…
Look at what you wrote "I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships". That does not read like school did that for you and probably you could do the same without school. How much of that CS101 was studying on your own time? Finishing school is signaling that you are person that shows up in the morning for classes and puts up years of his life to do that. By any means I am hiring developer who is signal…
Would you go to a doctor that learned medicine form YouTube?
I think the problem here is a bias due to the fact that the employment after earning their computer science degree is for many people not about the science part of it but rather about fairly mundane programming and general office work.
Good luck arguing that chemistry, biology, mechanical engineering, medicine and many other fields that require specific tools and environments in order to actually study not to mention make any progress in the field are all about signaling.
Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a valid opinion, but it doesn't address the question: do other fields lean more heavily on signaling than others? Does going to a top 10 law school matter more than graduating from a Top 10 CS program?
Law it's really top-14, and it matters a lot . BigLaw recruits almost exclusively out of those schools, and law has a bimodal salary distribution where BigLaw pays $180K out of school while smaller law firms and small-town law practices typically pay just $45-65K. Many other industries tend to recruit only out of top universities, and getting into them if you didn't go to one is basically impossible. Management consu…
Sounds like tech to me - if you didn't see the other tech salary thread....
(at least the bimodal bit and ivy->faa[n]g route)
Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building
#98“If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The fact that alm…
As an employer I would not care much if a new hire only had the skills of uni but not the diploma. But I’m lazy and there is no way I’m going to do what’s essentially 5 years worth of examination to ensure the candidate lives up to some self professed level of education. Especially not in a 100+ pile of applications from others who where vetted as they went by the university. It’s not “certification” over actual learning. It’s the fact that the companies need easy certainty of that actual learning or you’re going to the bottom of the pile of applications. If you don’t have a certificate but have other proof of skill that’s just as good. Dropped out of uni to build a company that managed to launch a product but later went under? Great, who cares about the diploma, you have proof of you ability.
Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mainly the syllabus and being told what to ignore.
And a forced pace, to keep moving instead of disappearing down every passing rabbit-hole.
This is a big one. I sat in on a number of 400 level CS courses after I graduated, and a big factor was just having a scheduled place to be, and homework assignment due dates that forced the correct pace for learning. The pace also made it easy to start the work early, but not obsess if I hit a roadblock, since there was a lot of opportunity to ask questions leading up to the due date. I don’t think I’d have gotten through the same course work without the classroom lectures. Double bonus was the social aspect, talking to other students and regularly walking with the prof after class.
Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look at what you wrote "I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships". That does not read like school did that for you and probably you could do the same without school. How much of that CS101 was studying on your own time? Finishing school is signaling that you are person that shows up in the morning for classes and puts up years of his life to do that. By any means I am hiring developer who is signal…
Would you go to a doctor that learned medicine form YouTube? I think the problem here is a bias due to the fact that the employment after earning their computer science degree is for many people not about the science part of it but rather about fairly mundane programming and general office work. Good luck arguing that chemistry, biology, mechanical engineering, medicine and many other fields that require specific too…
I would.