College-educated workers are taking over the American factory floor
wsj.com
wsj.com
This is a horrible and vicious feedback loop, but it's hard to blame the employers, who are actually being fairly rational about their use of a BS degree as a filter (it's the new HS diploma). The blame lies at the feet of an uncontrolled government loan policy that has given the BS this new status.
College is eating years of our lives and is transferring vast amounts of middle class wealth to the education sector of the economy. In the US, it's probably the greatest misallocation of resources outside of our health industry.
I agree that college financing is out of control, but that doesn’t mean a college education is a waste of time. Secondary education was once the domain of rich kids too, but we changed that and the long term value to the world is obvious. Financing public goods is a solvable problem.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that as human society grows more complex and specialized, humans would benefit from more education.
A degree doesn’t just steal value in terms of money, which puts you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of compounding debt, but it also steals your time, and indoctrinates you into a top-down style of learning. Your time, the most valuable asset in the world, could be spent solving real problems in the real world. The whole system is a scam, and I’m truly sorry for those who have fallen for it.
My advice would be to cut your losses and get into entrepreneurship or work for a company that interests you ASAP. Life is too short to participate in someone else’s profit centered system of learning (Doctors and Lawyers excepted, but only because the level of gatekeeping in those fields is so high and perverted, and backed by government, that learning only via apprenticeship has literally been outlawed)
Within a couple of years of starting my CS degree, I was far better at programming than every hobbyist programmer I've met. I didn't have many opportunities out of school. I was from a poor country town that topped the state crime statistics. I know my mum hadn't finished high school and I don't think my father did either. I joined the military, got a trade and went to university at 30 as a single father working full time. University changed my life for the better, gave me a lot of tools and made me much more valuable.
Reasons are more than I can cover in one post - gatekeeping is real, very super real in most well paid jobs. Nobody hires new accountants, managers, electricians, architects, any kind of engineers, and many more without school. Nobody is going to give them expertise coming from job required to grow. Not all jobs are learnable just from online tutorials and books. You don't want to have your house built by guy who aced some online architecture test but has no degree, do you.
You were lucky and seemingly very talented. That is great, but not a usable advice for maybe 95% of the folks. I don't like how things are, but currently they are like that all around the world and there is no change coming soon.
This is a highly questionable assertion, given that these firms largely recruit candidates from CS degree programs to staff their most cutting edge projects.
The very best case for the non-college trajectory which is that you were able to work on real, cutting edge problems from your entry into the workforce and had the discipline to learn the important parts of CS fundamentals required to work on them.
The very worst case of college education - doing only the required for the degree, no side projects, industrial placements, or advanced topics.
Yes, a good autodidact doing genuinely interesting work is going to be a more valuable contributor at 22 than someone who has spent the last four years doing a CS degree by the numbers. That's not a good example because those are two different people. Many people who enter the tech workforce at 18 may spend years doing paint-by-numbers business applications using a single set of tools, those people aren't going to FAANG jobs.
While focusing on developing marketable skills should be the top priority of students, there are a lot of other values that a college experience provides.
College has an entrance barrier and is very disconnected to the outside world, so it has a strong signal effect.
Also consider this: with four years of college time, you can get two career educations with real life industry experience and come with much less cost.
College also increasingly ties in industry experience with in-class experience as companies are only willing to take on interns that are currently studying at colleges they're partnered with. Not to mention the way people use it as a networking opportunity and a chance to try out new things before having to dedicate themselves to a career they might despise.
Democracies depend on voters who are lucid, informed and rational. Modern technological civilization provides so much, and in very abstract ways, that it is non-optional that people be able to understand, or know they don't understand, massive swathes of broad-reaching ideas and concepts. Because democracies say "choose a candidate to represent you on all these things".
...depending on both the student and the career.
Many tech jobs require not much more than literacy, 6th grade algebra, and a tiny bit of grit. Most smart middle schoolers could make mid five figures slinging PHP part time. I did in early high school, and I'm not particularly smart or hard working.
But there are many jobs, even in relatively easy fields like programming, where nonnegative productivity requires years of practice.
That narrative is totally destroyed by knowledge retention studies. It's one of the few things in life where the data is completely unequivocal: people don't keep what they don't use, and most people use almost none of what they learned in college. (I predict anybody who disagrees will be a STEM major in a STEM job, i.e. extremely unrepresentative of former college students at large.)
Getting a college degree requires one to work with large amounts of information. Even if you retain none of those facts and figures later in life, you can still retain facility at working with information. And that is much more important to long-term success than how much you memorize.
If this weren’t the case, just hire people who dropped out during senior year for a wonderful discount. They got 7/8s the education!
For example, I learned how to conjugate verbs in foreign languages, and algorithms with O(n) vs O(log n) in computer science.
Then later in a foriegn country I expanded my my vocabulary. On the job, I learned about version control, how to read other people's code and how to fix bugs.
The issue is that it's a waste of time for people who will never use it for anything. If you spend four years to get a BS and then find a career as a factory worker, it was a waste of time -- the education is worth less to you than the cost in time it took from you.
This comes from subsidies causing oversupply. If you're going to actually be a doctor or an engineer then a college degree is worthwhile. But some people are going to be retail clerks and factory workers. Just blindly sending everyone to college because Everyone Should Go To College is wasting their time and the taxpayer's money.
This economist has looked at economic research on the effects of education, such as:
* How well students retain information
* How well students apply their knowledge in contexts outside of the classroom
* How much college graduates make versus how much someone makes after dropping out of school at the last minute
* How much more productive nations are after educating large swaths of their population
* How many companies outright tell their new hires that the knowledge they gained in school needs to be forgotten, and that they need to start learning everything from scratch.
And the conclusion Caplan comes to is that college education is a social signal, i.o.w. it's a zero-sum game where getting a college degree comes at the expense of everyone else with a college degree since the signal is degraded and is not as special as it once was.
Seems reasonable to me. I'd love a better method for quantifying the value of education, too. It's too easy for Big Ed to argue how college is essential as they jack up the prices.
Cost structure of college
Cost structure of healthcare
Mass incarceration (actual cost + lost GDP etc.)
If we fixed those 3, or at least dramatically reduced their impact, we would unlock 30+ years of growth. Its basically free money, just sitting there, waiting for someone to restructure each of them.
Transportation and infrastructure are broken requiring private car ownership and whose design holds back community and local growth around the country (in transit and in broken water, electric, and internet monopolies).
Agriculture is also super broken with subsidies for unhealthy corn syrup, half of food wasted, huge meat subsidies, an industry dependent on undocumented labor, etc.
Really they all come back to planned bad incentives - housing is regulated to be cost prohitive and NIMBYed, all infrastructure is deeply controlled to protect encumbant oligarchs, prison industrial complex is lobbied by the prison supply chain and police forces. It all comes back to politicians acting in the interest of few over the many contextualized over many circumstances. And that can only happen if they are unaccountable, which is the root problem to fix.
Paying for the Party is a good book that explores this modern issue.
wasn't there an article trending on HN a few hours ago about the 2T$ for Afghanistan?
With Germany, in contrast, the priority was to get us up and running as a democratic society. Mostly this was a side effect of needing a stronghold against Communist-Russia dominated GDR, but still - had the US gone through with de-industrialization of Germany as some plans wanted to, Germany would have been in chaos again.
Secondly, I'd love to see some real data on college as a misallocation of resources. Everything ive seen would suggest the opposite. The "college experience" is kinda the height of a true free market place for ideas and people leave better for it. The government should be funding more for education, not cutting people off from it.
College costs an insane amount of money in the States. I'm not sure more money is the answer. The government should be pushing ways to make it cheaper. Ceasing to guarantee public student loans and making private debt more easily dischargeable in bankruptcy would be a great start.
Turn off the money firehose and colleges will return to their core competencies - teaching and research - instead of building football stadiums, basketball arenas, and doing other stuff that's irrelevant to a good education. They may also differentiate by having tuition prices better reflect costs and future job prospects. So for example art, writing, polisci, history degrees may cost way less than engineering, science or medical degrees. Making community-college-to-state-college transfers easier would be another thing to try.
Basically there are many things one could do to expand access to college, and leave students better off, without spending more tax money.
At best, it could be close to that if you chose the right major and friends. But the majority experience seemed closer to binge drinking, cheating on homework assignments, and wasting time in class by asking the professor if X was going to be on the test.
College is absolutely just a continuation of high school for most people, and I'm afraid it's going to become even worse as the demands for free college get louder.
There’s also been some follow on studies that look for differences in the effect depending on race and gender
[1]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C32&q=Kru...
So you think 63% of the population under 34 are either illiterate or unconscientious?
University did take a chunk of my life that I would have liked to be earning money and growing my family. But it was a much better experience, and made me a much better person than when I was surrounded by ignorant and bitter men working in the trades as a commercial electrician.
It just chaps me that employers immediately think (in my case) 14 years of professional working experience is worth less than being able to APA format your paper and temporarily remember stuff for a test between rounds of beer pong.
True, and it's exploitative in a Marxist sense.
> transferring vast amounts of middle class wealth to the education sector
Confusing to me. Who are the institutions most benefitting from this? Are they not simply the _financial_ institutions furnishing the liquidity? I am not seeing the towering edu-monopolists' gravitational pull warping markets and other economic realities.
> In the US, it's probably the greatest misallocation of resources outside of our health industry.
There are a few others, such as the Military-Industrial Complex, the Prison-Industrial Complex (Militarization of Police, War on Drugs, etc.), Monocrop Agriculture chewing through our ecological endowment, etc.
A few years ago, there was a widely publicized article about University of Florida getting rid of their CS programs while simultaneously expanding their English/History programs.
The US Federal Government is providing 90%+ of the liquidity. What benefit is it gaining?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/educ...
All junior software engineering jobs that could be filled by recent CS grads or bootcamp grads want 2-3 years of professional experience. The next level up that should require 2-3 years wants 5-10.
The unemployment numbers are crap. Ask anyone who has a middle of the road white-collar job how confident they'd be in quitting and getting a new one and they will laugh at you. Nobody is really hiring on fair terms. Everybody wants a new senior employee for the price of a junior one.
> Ask anyone who has a middle of the road white-collar job how confident they'd be in quitting and getting a new one and they will laugh at you.
Again, I'm not sure what to make of this. That could mean the job market is weak, or it could also just mean that transaction costs are too high (not the same thing), or maybe they're just perceived to be very high and scary. If we instead look at what people actually do instead of what they'd tell you they feel like doing, we arrive at the definition of the unemployment rate - number of people who are looking for a job and can't find one. And that is quite low.
Now I can't say for sure that you're wrong, but I have to say I find the traditional unemployment rate methodology a lot more compelling than your method.
My father got hired on as a machine maintenance person almost immediately after he dropped out of college, with no previous training or experience whatsoever, and then bought his first house within two years. They trained him and he worked his way up on the job and held it for over 30+ years. Lets look to a quick Indeed listing typing in that same job title today and read a few off the top listing together that don't have 'senior' in the title.
Applicant must have 3 to 5 years’ experience
Three (3) years equivalent work experience required or a machinist/technical degree.
Technical degree/machinist certification or 4-6 years equivalent work experience required.
I mean if you are going to argue that this is the same way the market has always been, that is just completely incorrect, both anecdotally and statistically.
A company I worked for in the 1980s went through some financial hard times, and they instituted an across-the-board 10% pay cut. One of the engineers there was furious about it, and we talked about it. He said how mean, cruel, and unfair it was. I suggested if he felt that way, he should quit and work elsewhere. He was angry at me for that suggestion, saying there was no way he could get another good job.
More generally, people in the 70s/80s were not secure in their jobs nor their job prospects.
Two year certificate at a community college. I hate to break it to you, but I know a lot of people who take this route, buy houses, and live fulfilling lives with decent salaries for their area. In rural Minnesota, an electrician can buy a 4 bedroom house, new truck, and take 2 or 3 hunting trips a year to Canada. A machinist makes about the same, and can get a decent job in a 20-30 worker plant, as described in this article.
And yes, traditional high school has not prepared us for this, but the workarounds are there. Many community colleges will allow concurrent study for an associates, often at reduced or subsidized cost. In Saint Paul, MN, you can attend a local community college for free if you graduate high school.
I frankly have the opposite opinion. Parents pushed kids to get a bachelors, the gov pushed kids to it, and colleges played along, and kids who had no aspirations to white collar desk jobs ended up with degrees that didn't help them.
The issue is that you can’t even get your foot in the door to haggle. And even if you get an offer, you’re not guaranteed a better one even if you think you’re “worth more”.
Jobs were never guaranteed in the US. If you were worth more, you still needed the salesmanship to convince an employer that you were worth it.
Spending effort learning how to write resumes, present yourself, and sell yourself in an interview is extremely worthwhile.
I will say, to get your foot in the door you need to be strategic and realistic with your salary expectations. You're not going to get a great an amount on your first entry level job.
Thinking you're going to be making >100k as a junior engineer outside of SF is optimistic and entitled. Having been in this field for a while at this point it's not unsurprising a lot of engineers are complaining about the skillset required to get the job done. The issue is startups can't afford to hire interns and juniors as they need to actually get work done and not have supervise them.
> And even if you get an offer, you’re not guaranteed a better one even if you think you’re “worth more”.
This isn't an issue, if you "think" you're worth more then you decline that offer and continue looking. If you're struggling for money you take it and keep looking.
That's why there's so many unemployment numbers. They actually capture a pretty full picture when we find the right one for the conversation. In this case the rate of voluntary quits has been steadily improving and looks healthy:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUR definition at https://www.bls.gov/jlt/jltdef.htm
We can even break it down by industry, but that gets noisier. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=JTU6200QUR,JTU510099QU...,
This has been happening for the five years I've worked here and likely longer. For whatever reason no one can convince HR and senior management that we need to give significant raises (%10-20) each year for the first couple years after they graduate in order to keep decent engineers. The last time I brought it up I got some bullshit response about loyalty.
(1) The engineers are not actually all leaving - it may feel like that, but maybe it's cheaper to hire a bunch of junior devs and filter out anyone that doesn't buy the loyalty bullshit and isn't content with 3% annual raises
(2) They don't need decent or senior engineers, hiring and managing cheaper juniors is effective enough and cheaper
(1) HR/Management are incompetent and the business is doomed to failure
I was not trying to limit my statement to Silicon Valley, where the job market is very robust (although still far from perfect)
We frequently say that there is a lack of talent out there. Anyone who has ever interviewed knows that this does not mean that there are a lack of applicants. It's just that you really, actually only want to hire one in 100 or one in 1000 of the people who apply. The vast majority of people applying for programming jobs want an easy job with a high salary, not a programming job.
If I'm hiring a junior, it really honestly doesn't matter if they are a new grad, just out of boot camp, a hobby programmer or have 2-3 years of experience. However, if they have 2-3 years of experience, you at least have some way of evaluating them. How do I evaluate new grads? Grades? How do I compare them against boot campers? I suppose with hobby programmers I can at least read their code!
Of course we ask for experience. Same thing goes at every level. People with a couple of years of experience are an absolute mixed bag. You'll get some who are awesome and you will get many who are horrible. At 5-10 years out at least they have opinions that they can talk about without resorting to "Well, I heard that X was crap and so I don't do that".
And this is broken record territory for me, but I'm old. I have something like 30 years of professional experience. Why are you talking about 5-10 years of experience like it's a ridiculous requirement? Why wouldn't you want at least 20 years of experience for a senior developer??? Even that is only half way through your career? Why are we hiring all these young, inexperienced, naive people into mission critical positions?
Are you sure people want "a new senior employee for the price of a junior one". To be very provocative: you've only even talked about experience levels that would be super junior in virtually every other professional career.
Hmm... Maybe I should conclude with "Get off my lawn" ;-) The above is really tongue in cheek, but I hope it provides a different perspective. I agree that we do not hire and train juniors properly, but I think that's mainly because we also do not hire seniors properly.
My main point was that when you've just spent 4 years in college learning and accumulating debt, it's very disappointing to look around and find nobody willing to invest in you. I have friends and family graduating from good 4 year schools ending up doing email customer support for startups and making next to no money. That's employment, but it's not what you want/expect.
>Ask anyone who has a middle of the road white-collar job how confident they'd be in quitting and getting a new one and they will laugh at you
Once you do have 1-2 years of experience in dev (nothing glamorous, I did maintenance mostly), it's actually pretty safe. All of my white collar jobs have been middle of the road and I took multiple, extensive breaks was still able to get something. There is a big initial hurdle, then you can sit nicely on a plateau. If you want to challenge yourself, there's always FAANG companies or starting your own business.
If the experience is not enough, networking can get you a position. Same for public side projects.
Ten years is Senior Staff / Principal territory.
On the one hand, I've never had my lack of a degree be an issue in tech, especially startups. Some founders even place a weird bonus on being a dropout and see you as more of a hustler than degree-holding employees.
On the other hand, there are some opportunities that are closed off to me unless I decide to finish my degree. For example, I would have liked to get an MBA or go to law school for fun, but those options are completely closed off. You absolutely must have a four-year degree.
Another one that came up recently, I've been thinking of taking a break from tech and going into public service, all the jobs I saw in the three-letter agency I was interested in also had a hard requirement on a four-year degree.
A degree isn't necessary for everyone, it certainly wasn't for me and it's nice that I had almost two years as a head start on my career in tech. However, I wouldn't encourage people to drop out.
Having a degree gives you options. You're better off with those options than without. You don't _have_ to take out 200k in loans. There's fantastic public education systems like CUNY that you can take advantage of.
Anyway my conclusion is the same as yours. I’d even planned on going back part time as there were some adult grants offered but they were largely removed by our most recent provincial government in the course of a large number of education cuts.
The University of Washington is a well-regarded school, and it costs about $30K/year including room, board, and books. Although it isn't an elite school, you can get an elite education there with careful selection of courses.
an MBA curriculum is not materially different from that of a BA in business, so if you want the knowledge, just get the BA in business, which then also confers upon you the desired bachelor's degree in the process. an MBA doesn't really build up from an undergrad degree (vs. an engineering degree, for example).
the difference, of course, is that MBA-seekers will come in with work experience, have a professional network, be a little older, have a little more independence/focus, etc.
My earliest jobs all stated that in their requirements, but were happy to interview and hire me anyway. (Later on, "or equivalent experience" became popular.)
I've never worked for the government but wasn't Edward Snowden an NSA employee while also being a high school dropout?
I'd fail that one today. My high school never taught such things, and I never learned to cook.
The NY City fire department recently had to shell out millions to people who weren't hired because of a similar ruling. No discrimination found other than that black people didn't do as well on a test as white people.
Understandable but we cannot ignore how history plays into these decisions you know?
> No discrimination found other than that black people didn't do as well on a test as white people.
I don't know the details of this case but there are a lot of systemic effects if the history of racism in the US that have lingering effects in society today.
Consider how practices like redlining significantly affected finance and education access. Jail sentence time disparity and a lot of other often invisible ripples of what happened in the early years of this country.
It's very hard to know what causes some of these disparities and sometimes a society tries to deal with it by using equal/similar outcomes as an admittedly flawed proxy for equal treatment while we try to address the underlying factors ( better schools, representation, access, etc.)
The inertia that this has created frustrates me deeply. Of course there is value to a broad liberal education that includes STEM, philosophy and art. That should be obvious. The fact that our economic system cannot reward the great effort that people go through to get them is a failure of the economic system, not of the education system (edit: there is plenty to condemn in the education system, for instance the cost, and the fact that many college degrees are only job preparation programs now, and the general free market/business take over of education).
The "employers" are at fault. Until we can release the stagnation of monetary flows in the US, we are going to have these issues. Unfortunately, based on the current state of regulation, I imagine that the monetary flows that are most likely to occur will be the allowance of those already wealthy to take their money elsewhere. Reading Foreign Policy magazine has made me aware of what it will mean to live in a waning US, and this is obviously a symptom.
Shouldn't it be the opposite? If I was worth a gajillion dollars, I could spread it over many many bets. That diversification would let me take higher risk bets compare to if that gajillion was spread over a larger number of people.
A bit like the House of Mouse making sequels and remakes, rather than taking a risk on a newcomer or interesting (and therefore risky) concept film.
Regardless, widespread education is of tantamount importance. It will give our society greater meaning.
I've been thinking about leaving my job fixing computers, networks, and servers at an MSP-like business, and getting a basic factory job.
Why? Because in my town, factory workers are making more per hour than I do, they get overtime, and they get full benefits and good vacation packages. Meanwhile I'm overtime exempt for a decent wage (but compared to what these "simple" factory jobs are paying, it's peanuts), no benefits at all except a small stipend to help with health insurance, and a shitty vacation policy (normal-ish by american standards, however).
Sure, they work 12 hour shifts, yeah that sounds hard. But: I work 10 hour shifts so it's not that big of a difference.... and they also work four days a week where I work my ten hours M-F plus an extra 5 every other Saturday (running a storefront with a small number of employees sucks). The exception is when they're in crunch mode and working overtime, but they're getting beaucoup bucks for those overtime hours where I get zilch extra.
The kicker here is that this is all something I could do without leaving where I live. To get a better paying IT job, I'd have to move, which at this exact moment, I'm not able to do.
My dad does full time remote with a bunch of travel around the world, to boot; the lucky bastard. ;)
To get his job, my friend completed a 3 year program at a local community college. He learned about welding, robotics (obviously), a bit of control theory, destructive and non-destructive testing, metallurgy, safety certifications, and more. The latter bits of training are critical, since his job involves setting up and monitoring the robots that weld together the pieces of truck frames.
Math? Yes
Physics? Yes
CS? Maybe
Cogito ergo sum? Hell no.
No one teaches at the jobs anymore because those people then leave.
You need to smack the owners and HR departments who can't get their head around the fact that raising someone's salary is cheaper than having to hire a replacement.
Unfortunately, as things stand in American business, if you want to get ahead you have to jump around at least every 5-8 years.
This is circular though. Companies don't invest in their employees because they leave anyway <-> employees leave for better opportunities because their companies don't invest in them.
We need to start questioning bad assumptions about education. Shuffling money around isn't going to do it.
To be a machinist or welder can require a training program like this. I'm not clear on whether that's well represented in this article.
As if, what; this is the way things have always been? College attendance, funding, and cirriculum are akin to laws of physics?
This is a relatively recent issue which began when the fed started backing student loans in the mid sixties.
It may be unnecessary but if the premium is large enough the "overqualifcation" may be rational if there is enough of an edge on average.
There are only really two ways to fix this problem.
1. Make college education free. This includes trade schools for those that would want to go that route.
2. Government regulation to cut back on companies demanding higher education for blue collar work. Since this is the result of the free market (companies wouldn't demand that level of education if they couldn't get away with it) then you would have to add some restrictions on the free market to solve it.
There's a compelling case that most college degrees are mostly valuable for signaling reasons. Most people use very little to none of what they learn at university. Yet employers still care a lot about degrees because they signal that the worker is most likely intelligent and diligent enough to successfully complete the degree.
Even if its mostly a farce, it's still a smart idea to play along. Not having a degree can lock you out of a lot of important activities. But from a policy perspective, the signaling model tells us something very different than the human capital model (which assumes that higher education is valuable because it confers useful skills).
If we're all just getting degrees to signal our good qualities, than its inherently a wasteful zero-sum game. The more people that get degrees, the less they're worth. Rather than talking about expanding people's access to higher-education, we should be figuring out policies to discourage people from going to college.
The overwhelming majority of people would choose the former. Which is pretty strong evidence that the value of a Harvard degree is the social status and credibility that it gives you, not the things you learn in class.
Different definitions may be appropriate in different cases. Deciding whether to go is one case (extremely valuable, depending on discipline). Evaluating how useful it is for education is another (in my opinion, it's a pretty terrible value).
I think some of this should be a certification/licensure process rather than a degree.
I worked for a tech company that was acquired by some big valley tech company. They couldn't find any of the fancy CS degree folks they were looking for in the valley so they decided to "try" bringing a few of us over from this nobody company (that they had picked up just to absorb customers, we were just the folks left over after the layoffs because they didn't want to deal with supporting those customers themselves).
I didn't finish college, and I was warned that this was high tech stuff and they usually hire some pretty smart people to do it.
So out to the valley they fly me and some others and first day i'm absolutely overwhelmed ... by how simple a job it was they were doing, and some pretty poorly.
They were so invested in their resumes and being in the valley I don't think they really understood that day to day the job was basic troubleshooting. At one point one of them showing me how things worked asked "What do people do in Minnesota for work?" I told him "The same thing you're doing..." He found that hard to belive.
In about 6 months a handful of us from nobody company were churning through work at twice the rate of the other folks and with higher customer satisfaction scores (it was basically technical support)... and engineering was asking that critical cases be transferred to us "for efficiency".
Ultimately the job was customer support some mild technical skills / ability to learn / take good notes / ask good questions / the ability to formulate a theory, test it, and so on.
I knew dozens of people who could do that job at a third the cost, but they'd never hire them.
Years later I change careers and I sit through interviews where they hum and haw about my lack of CS degree again ... for a job maintaining their wonky CRUD app.
I've long suspected that much of what the algorithm testing craze (and other grilling on "strong CS fundamentals") in the current default hiring process boils down to is -- they just want to have some kind of vague reassurance that the people they're hiring are somehow "better" than the folks the other companies are hiring.
Even if the standards of "better" (and they means of measuring it) are - when we think about it - pretty dubious.
(To head off some of the tangential discussion that would otherwise likely ensue from what I just said: I don't dispute the value of doing some algorithm testing -- the point is that a lot of places seem to overtest these days, and it seems also that the only reason they're doing it is because they think that's what other companies - or at least the ones they'd like to fantasize that they're emulating - are doing).
And since that became the standard from the beginning, it's what remains now.
> They couldn't find any of the fancy CS degree folks
Fascinating.. I wonder if their creating a high barrier of entry actually backfired and caused them to hire less competent people?
My hypothesis: people with CS degrees are fairly high in demand, and on average are qualified to get much "better" jobs than customer support. This being the case, if you require a CS degree, you end up with predominantly the people who were unable to get a better job elsewhere, who are less capable whether it be due to motivation, intelligence, or something else.
Note this completely assumes that software engineering jobs have better compensation/benefits than customer support and I acknowledge I don't know your previous employer's specific case. I also don't want to knock any customer support people, so I hope you will excuse my liberal use of the word "better": I only mean better in terms of compensation and I understand there are more important things than money.
Depends on the exact question; degrees trigger Berkson's Paradox [0]. If you do a survey of company workers doing [task X] then there will be a negative correlation between formal qualifications and competence. That is because all the the uncertified individuals doing the task will have gotten in by being very, very good at it but the statistical outcome is that the certification becomes a negative competence signal.
Such as this anecdote, in fact.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox could be considered a variant of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
A property manager told me once that if you are having problems finding good tenants that you should lower prices. Perhaps counterintuitive, no? He claimed that it opens you up to a much larger pool of people that allows you to discover better tenants.
1. The hands-on subjects will be very easy for obvious reasons
2. The theoretical subjects are going to be extremely interesting to you, because you will be able to investigate the theoretical basis of things that you've learned from experience - when a subject is very interesting to you, automatically it's less hard to study.
3. Studying at a relatively mature age is actually awesome! Studying feels more like a privilege and less like a chore. And the interaction with younger students is probably not going to be as hard as you think.
I took some time to take a class for a career change and I LOVED IT, i was shocked how much I enjoyed it, but don't have the time / resources to go all in at this time.
I completely echo your sentiment about taking classes at a mature age being completely different. I was not a good young student but I found myself excited EVERY DAY for class when I was going. It was so much fun. There were a few of us older students and we were always excited with a handful of younger students.... the rest of the students looked like they were greatly inconvenienced by going to class (admittedly I probabbly did too at that age).
The difference taking classes now vs then is night and day for me.
There was a core group of us who worked together a lot showing up early / staying to help each other, and it was about 30% older and 70% younger and it was a great experience.
For context, I went to school several years later in life than most undergrads, but I wasn't a developer during the intervening years. I came into university with nothing more than a hobbyist's knowledge, but through continued extracurricular activities and paid internships, I kept myself perpetually well ahead of the curve.
1. True, and the ability to complete over-engineer undergrad CS projects just because you have the time to do so is often a lot of fun.
2. Didn't work that way at all for me. I already had a better theoretical understanding than the undergrad curriculum was designed to teach me, so I was constantly bored. I didn't even do particularly well in the theory-focused classes because tests often asked to regurgitate what the class taught rather than asking for an explanation of the theory that was the subject of the class.
3. I find this one utterly baffling. How anyone could consider studying (as distinct from learning!) a privilege is totally beyond me.
There’s a world of difference between a college degree with no experience and no college degree also with no experience. There’s a significantly smaller difference between a college degree with ten years experience and no college degree with ten years experience.
There is a world of difference between work and a degree, particularly in the UK where a CS degree varies widely.
It’s a surreal experience to be teaching people who on paper blow me away on academic qualifications on the other hand I’ve decades of producing code that produces value, experience with business side of things and knowing how to get stuff done mostly on time and mostly on budget which by the standards of our industry is pretty good.
Not the only one at my company either, the senior dev/tech lead side of things is about 50/50 degrees/no degree depending.
The CTO and Head of Software Engineering are firmly on the a CS degree is only a weak signal at best that someone will make an effective commercial developer.
Not like we are doing crud of the week either, we have VR division, are solving complex problems and have about 4K employees (only about 100 devs though).
I wish I had the time to go back to school and get one. I would do it if I could afford to do so in a heartbeat. I wasn't a very good student in my early years, but during a career change took a class and found I loved it, but that time has passed for me for now (kids and career obligations for now). And honestly after I changed careers to a more coding centric career I certainly see the value.
I do think the differences you describe VERY MUCH depend on the tasks / job, and are not universal by any means.
There might be artificial factors requiring the factories to hire people with white collar education.
In fact after the company was acquired again later (well a few acquisitions later) I had moved on and was thinking of changing careers when a former coworker(s) and a manager contacted me desperate for help. I was only mildly interested but I agreed to interview at the new company. Their system rejected me for no CS degree, it was an automated email from their HR system ;) I had years of experience with some of their proprietary systems, but nope.
Before they could fix that glitch I had reconsidered and told my friends I wanted to move on (more so based on my personal interests).
I wouldn't be as there are not a lot of 'technical support' degrees.
Someone once told me something to the effect of "the two people groups that understand a program the most are the developers and application support", which I interpreted to mean that just because you didn't write the program doesn't mean you don't gain close familiarity with its problem domain, inputs, outputs, behavior under adverse conditions etc.
If you're any good and in SV, you try to move up role or move up the ladder, ain't staying in a low paying support position. The opportunities are everywhere waiting to be taken. It's kind of a brain drain.
If you're any good and in side Minnesota, it might be quite harder to move up.
That isn't the point. The point is to blow up your valuation to multiple billions without making a dime in profits by making all sorts of vague and pompous statements. Like claiming that you only hire the best (and actually hiring the people based on their ability to make buzz) and then dump it on the unsuspecting retail investor from outside the Valley.
This will prevail until the public investors stop drinking the hypergrowth kool-aid and start demanding actual profits. May take another decade though.
Of course that's a very poor proxy (some people live at home while getting 4 year degrees, etc), and often times college becomes more about signaling you're part of a certain socioeconomic background (with all the subtle discrimination that entails).
Either way, even if the things you learned are entirely irrelevant to the actual job, a lot of employers look to it as a very rough signal for "had things together", and have a set of beliefs about people who have them.
If that was the real requirement companies are interested in then wouldn't someone working variable shift at a fast food restaurant proving that they can "adult" just fine? Those jobs have very real repercussions for not showing up even once unlike college.
At my Uni (my major, that is), there were exactly zero classes with compulsory attendance. What would happen was this: First 2-3 weeks were packed with students, then it would thin out, and two thirds into the semester you'd sometimes have only a dozen of students.
Come last lectures and class review, lectures would be packed.
That is even more relevant today, with video / streamed lectures.
With some notable exceptions the classroom experience was pretty poor and all of the information and resources were readily available on the internet. And if you're not the best autodidact there were plenty of study groups were students got together and figured things out just fine.
That said, I still think self-directing yourself through that kind of environment takes a lot of agency and skill, agency and skill that companies require for jobs where neither ageny or skill of that magnitude will be required.
Most jobs don't require time management skills beyond "be at this building for 9 hours a day".
Another interesting hack is to go to Europe for college/grad school. My wife got a Master’s degree in 1 year in England, and could have spent only 2 more for a Ph.D. (And college there is often only 2 years.)
Modern university-as-business institutions try to keep students enrolled for as long/late as possible, so any approach that potentially counters that is interesting.
Every kid I knew in University that had been homeschooled had pretty serious issues with social skills, something I suspect is just lack of exposure to enough peer social interaction to learn how to get good at them. To be fair this is a pretty small sample to draw conclusions from.
I suppose there could also be a pretty strong selection bias at play where the only kids homeschooled in the current environment either have pre-existing issues or messed up family dynamics.
I’ve heard this narrative before but have yet to see it in real life. All the homeschooled kids I’ve met were years ahead of their peers in every respect, especially in social development. They carry themselves like adults and interact with adults as a peer at 16 or even younger.
I suspect those who homeschool because they think their family and community has something much better to offer than the standard fare often do.
Healthy families beget healthy children, regardless of schooling option chosen. I’d argue that unhealthy/unstable families are the ones whose kids would benefit from being educated outside the home.
I have a friend who coached a club sport for high school students. They said that they saw, over their tenure, over 100 homeschooled kids come through their teams, and they can remember only a single one without significant social challenges.
There are probably a few jobs out there that do not require the ability to interact successfully with bosses and peers, but I'd imagine they are few and far between. Looking at "success" in a given job holistically, I would be inclined to argue that "soft" or social skills make up a nontrivial portion of the requisite skillset.
Is the socialization problem more due to lack of social interaction because they don't go to a school building, or more due to the kinds of people who homeschool being fringey types who wouldn't let their kids socialize with "normal" kids for fear of contamination?
Maybe I'm too "Midwestern" but my mental model of homeschooled kids is kids who were kept away from the sinful secular world by parents who really, really wanted them to grow up utterly immersed in one specific dogma, such that even the local parochial schools were too broad-minded for them. They're going to have problems integrating once they leave home, but it isn't because their parents lacked the opportunities to let them run around down at the local playground, and building more playgrounds isn't going to help them, because their parents wouldn't want them around "those" kids anyway.
I'm kidding, and I stole that, but I have a point. Much of "socialization" in school is horrible. It's not quite as bad as socialization into prison, but it's socialization into a society that's rather broken. Why do we assume that socializing into that is going to produce healthy adults?
Me, I wasn't homeschooled. I attended a private school until fifth grade, and then public school. I... um... wasn't all that well socialized by the process.
There's a lot of confirmation bias going on here. How many homeschooled kids with good social skills didn't you notice?
There's also a potential selection bias in that parents maybe be more likely to homeschool kids that have social issues because they have social issues and don't fit in at school.
But all the home-schooling communities I know of solve this problem by making sure they participate in exactly that - a community. This is more often that not tied to a church, but not always. But multiple (5+) families that all have the same approach to home schooling regularly let their kids go to each other's homes for different lessons etc. Then you add the church component and they get exposed to a broader number of families who also could be doing similar things.
You don't end up with kids that are party animals, but you do end up with kids that are very articulate, talk like adults, can read social cues, and all things considered, more well rounded human beings than the average public school attendee. Does it always work out? No, but I'd say if you have the energy and passion, you'll get a better result.
I personally don't have kids (yet) , but if I did, it would be a toss up between a good private school and home schooling.
Really? All the homeschooled kids I met at our top-ranked STEM college were way advanced technically compared to the other students and are now all married, with children, while the 'regular' kids are still dating around, no kids, no families.
Perhaps homeschooled kids don't fit in to overall American socialization, but given that overall American society is one of falling (below replacement) birth rates, increasing loneliness, more suicide, etc, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
Recognizing authorities and hierarchies are what most people mean when they talk about socializing I think.
I think many homeschool parents vastly overestimate their ability to educate a child. I know mine did. It's hard work and you have to cover all the bases, including socialization, or you'll be responsible for some pretty important shortcomings in your kid's development.
Yes, it was awesome being able to rush through my "boring" school work by lunch time so I could program computer games and read books all day.
No, it wasn't awesome feeling totally incompetent while trying to talk to girls or make friends in college. Turns out, all those "dumb secular public schoolers" were pretty good at some things, like having fun together and bonding.
I would not call homeschooling a "hack". It's an alternative system of education that takes a lot of hard work, a single-income-bearing parent, and enough awareness to fill the gaps that your child is losing by being at home all day, every day.
I did that - in fact, I accumulated enough credits to complete a 2-year degree before I was old enough to have finished high school. On the whole, I don’t think it was a good thing and I wouldn’t recommend it. My GPA wasn’t exactly stellar (calculus really hurt my average), so I couldn’t use that credit to transfer to a great school. When you graduate, nobody cares how old you were when you took the classes (it wouldn’t even occur to them to ask): what matters is where you went to school and what your GPA was.
In general that sort of thing would probably be better served going to highschool and taking community college classes on the side, which is what I did when I was growing up.
What also works with theis having a city "efficiency" (tiny) dwelling for the working parent and a cheaper house/homestead in a suburban/rural area to raise a family. Preferably, in the office area on weekdays/commuting home for weekends and 50% telecommuting/50% office for 1 or 2 weeks at a time. For these folks who don't make $300k+, living in a big city full time would be unwise. For almost everyone, Commuting long distances in an ICE solo-occupant vehicle is unwise.
Also, England's university system (three years, not two) is notorious for turning out unrounded graduates who are unable to think for themselves and know little outside of their subject area. The reason for a four-year degree is that you spend two years doing courses from other areas (inc. your own) and actually develop all the soft skills that are usually of vital importance in the work place. In particular, the ability to turn your hand to something new and manage is going to be very important going forwards.
College is about precisely the opposite of learning as fast as you can. That isn't knowledge that is useful in the real world. You need experience, and understanding.
An Associates degrees is college, and is normed at two years.
> The reason for a four-year degree is that you spend two years doing courses from other areas (inc. your own)
While some, especially liberal arts, four year degrees work that way, that's not really generally true except at the level of looseness in the meaning of “other areas (inc. your own)” where it is essentially tautologically true of any course of study. Many engineering programs, for instance, are intensely focussed on the central focus from day one.
Employers often demand a four-year degree, but they don't really know why. They'll test you on your technical skills, but not on those "soft" skills -- writing, understanding requirements, negotiating, collaborating -- and then complain when you don't have them.
Such things are hard to define and hard to test for. STEM majors regularly complain, loudly, about the fuzziness of the classes that teach those skills. I believe that we could all do a better job of explaining why many of the most important things are hard to measure, and some of that starts with (for example) teaching programmers that their job is to understand what the client really wants. Which is practically never being able to sort a list in .02 milliseconds rather than .03 milliseconds.
I don't know if American liberal arts educations are any better than English universities at cranking out students who can think for themselves. While they do get an extra year, full of courses that should be able to help them think about and communicate about what people think and feel, they often treat those as blow-off requirements. The classes are often uninspiring. They are hard to teach, but I think we could do better at trying to show why the notion is important.
Now the same grade the equivalent of ASO (assistant scientific officer) is a degree entry Maggie Aderin-Pocock (one of the sky at night presenters) started out as a ASO at RAE post degree, and ASO is what Bob Howard was recruited as (Bob got screwed on that btw)
I have also heard it said the US has 4 year degrees as high school isn't hard enough.
There are numerous postings seeking interns. There are quite a few require 1-3 years experience. There are many seeking qualified professionals. I have seen almost nothing that would permit a new college grad to gain a position.
This leaves me wondering several things. One, how did business manage to offload the cost of absorbing the educated but inexperienced into the profession back onto the people. You can listen to people in hiring or executive positions bemoan the costs of training new software engineers, but how did we get to a point where literally everyone other than business is expected to bear every cost of doing business.
And two, how do new college graduates find work without either creatively interpreting the meaning of "experience" (that is, lying), or just ignoring the requirements portion of the job postings to which they reply.
The company I work for classifies all candidates as “campus” or “experienced hire”. There’s no category for non-experienced hires who are out of college, the company won’t even acknowledge that these people even exist because there’s no interest in recruiting from that pool.
We created a country where education started to be widely available and financially supported for a large fraction of the people. What do you expect would happen as more people get educated then? Companies wouldn't use a commonly available criterion to weed out who they want? Or develop technology that takes advantage of large numbers of educated workers?
In the evolution of our demography and economic history too, this is no surprise. We're no longer in a post-war growth phase where any warm body was suitable for filling the basic jobs necessary to fuel our growing economy. Other countries are in that phase, we are not. We have low growth, and for someone to stand out and get hired is now a higher bar. Our labor is expensive, so complicated equipment and automation gets used. And there's an educated workforce to operate it.
What company wouldn't use some available criterion to choose people of with more productive/reliable attributes? College degree is available, it's a not unreasonable proxy.
It's inevitable.
Another issue is that employees jump around companies these days making companies less likely to invest in employees. People used to be lifetime employees and thus companies were more willing to invest in them with training and education.
This is only true if the population growth accelerates (as in: the per-year percentage goes up every year. So 3% this year, 4% the next, 5% the next, and so on). If population growth is stable at a given percentage, then so too will be the proportion of the old to the young.
To give an exaggerated illustration, consider a population that doubles every day. Every day, half of the population is one day old, a quarter is two days old, an eighth is three days old, and so on. While I admit I may misunderstand the statistics, a quick look at the median age suggests that exactly the opposite is happening: The median age has been steadily rising since the 60s.
While constant growth is indeed unsustainable, an overpopulation of youth does not appear to be a part of that unsustainability.
(edit: formatting)
Alvin and Heidi Toffler predicted this with profound accuracy in their 1970 book Future Shock. I highly recommend reading the chapter on Adhocracy, or for a TLDR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adhocracy
- undergraduate degree
- ability to carry heavy weights
Which struck me as antithetical, but it looks like it's now the norm.
Second step: Secondary education is made easier, everybody passes, so the minimum standard is university.
That's why everybody needs a master's/doctorate now.
For example an infantry officer needs to be able to carry heavy weights and typically an undergraduate degree.
My company, for example, requires us to be able lift 30 pounds. They don't have any sort of test or anything like that, but I doubt anybody (except maybe people who deal with printers) lifts more than that.
the new hire is responsible for carrying all the rocks around
That's why.
Is managing a machine harder than driving a car? If not a few weeks similar to how long it takes to learn to drive should be enough education.
FWIW in NSW it's 120 hours logged as a learner and nearly everyone I've asked admits to lying a bit. It was only 50 hours when I did it, and most lied back then - mostly due to just driving until they felt ready for a test without really logging, then adding it later.
It's a result of a much higher proportion of HS graduating classes going on to college.
Then again, I don't think any other country on the planet shackles its young to such huge levels of debt in the name of education. Is there a 'fox and the grapes'-type situation going on, where people are hating on something they can't have?
Having a Bachelor's degree or higher means that you're less likely to be unemployed, you earn more money, you have better health outcomes, you're more involved in your children's education, and perhaps most importantly, society benefits from your education.
And the people who say "I don't have a degree and I make $150k per year at Google"? You're a statistical anomaly. The average salary for a high school graduate is $37k per year. (https://smartschoolsusa.org/blog/the-average-salary-by-educa...)
Being a naive European, I think education should be free just like universal healthcare - both of these things benefit society immensely. The sad thing is that those who have paid (or are currently paying) for the privilege of education or healthcare seems to be determined to maintain the status quo. Free stuff for other people is tantamount to communism in some people's eyes.
I’m not sure if it’s really blue-collar if you’re a plumber, nurse or an electrician, because my English is lacking, but we need those a whole lot more, even compared to people who studied the soft-IT educations.
These days, it's mostly "laborer" vs "office dweller". But, there are a lot of jobs in the middle.
A plumber who works for somebody else would be considered blue collar. A licensed plumber who works for themselves and can bill at high rates is in that awkward middle - they still have to do some labor, but can be highly compensated (by middle-class standards). Same for electrician.
Nurses are sometimes called "pink collar" - those jobs that are traditionally held by women. Teachers, clerical, hair dressers, too. But, like electricians, they are highly trained and, in the right position, highly compensated.
Once blue collar work starts paying more than white collar work, it will become “cool” again.
And back in the day the entry requirements for Advanced apprentices where high - more stringent than Nursing or direct entry to a bank
I saw an administrative assistant at a medical practice wanting 10-15 years of experience AND a 4 year degree and it was like 15$ an hour, similarly I've seen jobs requesting a phd AND experience with a starting hourly pay of 15-16$ an hour.
The world has gone insane.
An eighth grade education used to be very normal. In the Deep South, Blacks used to be essentially unable to attend high school. A lot of Black families moved to northern cities -- or sent children to stay with relatives -- so they could attend high school.
The US military invented the GED to give credit to literate members because it used to be very common for people to grow up on a farm and not finish high school. Now even the military treats GED holders like second-class citizens.
If the world doesn't have some kind of serious crash, demographically or in other ways, I imagine it will become increasingly common for people to have advanced degrees and "ordinary" jobs. With 7 billion people on the planet, more information is how you stretch limited physical resources and also how you constructively occupy the masses.
It actually got him out of fighting in the front lines of the Korean conflict. He was the only guy in the battalion with all the necessary military schools. His bags were packed. He was supposed to ship out to Korea the next day when he got the call.
My ex was also career army. He was a high school graduate taking college classes while enlisted to try to stay competitive.
The people who actually want to learn would congregate around something that could be used as a decent measure for that and the party people could party and everyone would be happy. We’re near this (if not, we’ve reached it.) if you look at our GDP and what most people are doing for work it makes sense.
The current trend in HR seems to be using the Internet to remove human judgement and "the interview" from the front line of the hiring process. In its place, a machine-like contact involving websites, a sterile distillation process that relegates people like me to the "no callback, not even interested" queue.
It's Evolution in Action. For they not I.
It also raises the interesting case women (who get more degrees but have less physic strength) now have factory work opened to them.
The implication I read is the massive amounts of men who can't get degrees are in trouble and so are their families, since people marry at similar levels their wives will not have high paid jobs if any at all. New double income families now will become even richer, single income families poorer.
Many Police and Fire Departments famously used testing as a legal screening method -against black applicants at the times- for what is a purely physical blue collar job.
Cynical view / hyperbolic not researched opinion ahead -> Many companies see The Perfect Employee as someone who is overqualified and will burn both ends of the candle, drink the company kool-aid wholesale, do all of their training on their own time and never ask for raises or move to another company on their own, all while doing so for peanuts.
Each particular company adjusts that spectrum back towards reality just enough to hire people to meet their own staffing needs. That's why the particularly grueling companies like restaurants or entertainment venues have such trouble hiring people when the economy is doing well.
Thus most jobs and situations are engineered so you don't have enough disposable income to get a head. And if you do manage the tax system punishes you for it.
>New manufacturing jobs that require more advanced skills are driving up the education level of factory workers who in past generations could get by without higher education, an analysis of federal data by The Wall Street Journal found.
Considering the 1.5 trillion dollar student loan crisis, it seems natural to tap unemployed grads for manufacturing work, however this isnt happening anytime soon. You dont take 50 years of denigrating trade jobs like ironwork, machining, and manufacturing and expect to hire a college kid whos been told tradework is the devils black hand.
It also implies college begets manufacturing education when in most cases it does not. Statistical Process Control, C(pk) ratios, and center process math can be learned on the job just as easily as it can be learned in college. Trade schools teach this stuff, but for fifty years they too have received a scornful rebuke from boomers pushing collegiate success to every kid, come hell or high water. It means someone who might have been a damn good welder wound up with a philosophy degree and enough debt to sink a city council.
And what of apprenticeships? Well if you have a good union (International Association of Machinists is amazing) you'll get on the job paid training and a rewarding career. On the other, more common hand, unscrupulous profiteers running auto body shops and HVAC will often tell you to "wait for a slot to open" for your apprenticeship. Until then you're mixing paint, buffing wheels, and basically never intended to advance beyond your hopes and dreams.
This might be the tradesman in me, but perhaps its wishful thinking...perhaps this is just a generation of older managers and directors hoping against hope that they can create meaning and worthiness for the college education again if they just demand it in every single hire. That somehow the blunder of turning your higher education system into a profit center will smooth out if you just make sure no one questions the validity of an underwater crochet degree. Or perhaps this is an increasingly terrified old-guard. Boomers who see what theyve done, and are willing to sweep an entire class of workers out the door just to make sure their college graduate kids have something, anything left, before they shuffle off.