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Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary.

That's a double-edged statement. On one hand, college is correlated with success (but that may be because college peddles networking). On the other hand, they are senselessly perpetuating a perceived important of college - which may not exist (at least for disciplines outside of medicine and so forth). There is no justification for the cost, it's a very expensive printing press.

While I can understand both points of view, after my complete and utter cash grab "degree" where I learned nothing beyond what I already knew, I perceive it as a scam.

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I have studied computer science as master in Germany (Diplom) with the best possible final exam score (1,0) in databases, distributed systems, etc. That didn't help me very much with my career. I've worked on the side in startups. That experience helped me found my first VC funded startup and helped my career later on as CTO in several companies. I'm now working as a CTO coach and looking back, my university days didn't have much impact, if any at all.

Have I've learned anything useful? Yes. Was the outcome worth 6 years? No. I would have learned the same things watching excellent Youtube (Standford, MIT, ...) videos for one year.

EY [1] has shown several years ago that university had no impact on the career of their employees and dropped that requirement.

As someone who hired and managed many people I never looked at university degrees. And I never saw a difference.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/18/penguin-ditche...

I work in hiring and people/performance management. In my experience, people with a formal education in average outperform the ones without. There are outliers on either side of course.

We investigate the reasons for this but so far couldn't pin point it to anything specific.

We too don't look at degrees when hiring, but we do see a correlation of education and promotions.

It's the reading and writing. Highschool doesn't teach reading like it used to. They are getting promoted because they are better at learning and then expressing themselves on paper, something all proper university programs still teach. Ask the average highschool grad to read a 100-page manual and thier eyes glaze over. But a BA history major could probably do it over lunch.

It's not that simple, but it could be a factor, in my experience. It's probably not one single thing.

Overly generalized, formal education seems to give one more self awareness. Lesser educated peers overestimate their abilities which helps them getting hired and be successful through the first few years. Then a promotion would require a different skill set and they cannot appreciate the complexity of learning it, so they fail.

Peers with a degree often are not confident enough, and overthink. But they can adapt quicker.

How many people do you know who know things like statistics, analysis of algorithms, discrete math, calculus, to the same level as someone with a Master's degree in math or comp. sci. and just learnt that by watching YouTube videos from Stanford or MIT? I know some people (including myself) who got some exposure to some of this without getting a degree (I got one eventually) but finding someone as well rounded as a good curriculum is very rare.

Watching videos is more like thinking you're learning. In order to learn you need to practice and internalize.

Now you might argue all this stuff doesn't matter. And if you're just cranking out some mundane code maybe it doesn't. But sometimes it does. I'd imagine it'd be hard being a CTO of in a deeply technical business without having the in-depth theoretical knowledge but CTO can mean lots of different things in different companies.

All that said universities are far from perfect and their curriculum is a mixture of practical and theoretical trying to balance preparing future researchers and scientists and preparing the future workforce. Software development also tends to be very diverse. I do think software developers need some of this background and unfortunately it's much harder to get it without going to university...

The other thing is IMO universities can't make someone who has no aptitude to software a good software developer.

I've learned much more from watching statistics videos from top notch YouTube lectures (I like the Harvard ones) than from statistics at university, although there was a lot of it. That said I regularly need to look up statistics, probabilitiy distributions and hypothesis tests in books when I need them twice a year.

The main problem I see in startups I coach is they think they are "data driven" but marketing, sales and top management lacks the proper statistical understanding to make useful decisions. They forgot what they have learned at university and feel no need to relearn statistics for their job. They make all the rookie mistakes.

If you have to look them up then you haven’t learned them. You learned about them and know what to look for. But you didn’t really learn them.

With 50 I can't remember things I've learned with 20 and need to look up many things from my youth, so I guess I've never learned a thing. Thanks for that cherry blossom thought.

The point here is that it's easy to mistake understanding in the moment for durable learning. It's not ideal, and I won't say it's intentional, but I expect the repeated, spaced exposure process of reading, lecture, homework, exams and finals to yield a little more durable result than a focused video only curriculum with zero testing for retention. Students are notoriously bad at self-evaluation, conflating mastery in the moment with learning.

However, I think if someone tried to partner video lectures with a spaced repetition tool like Anki they _might_ be able to outperform the college treatment group. It's a tool I've been exploring, both personally and professionally. In my youth, I had learned the US state capitals (as many do) and Anki proved pretty quickly I had forgotten that; the same goes for say, bone names, constellations, reading music, foreign languages studied, etc.

My counterpoint is that I know a good amount of people who have a ton of parroted knowledge, and know nothing of how to apply it. I know far, far, fewer people who know how to apply knowledge. There are even fewer people who can start applying freshly acquired knowledge within the same day.

A mindless search engine can parrot and rattle off 50 probability distributions. Only a human can tell you the implications of a specific distribution emerging from your data. Google and DuckDuckGo are free, I don't need to hire someone who can do the same as a search engine.

My opinion of what you refer to as learning, is that it is the absence of learning. It is one of the longest held misconceptions, spanning hundreds of years. It is why we need to retrain everyone fresh out of college. It is why junior vs. senior roles exist. Juniors have all of the rote knowledge and no practical experience. Seniors have immense practical experience and have probably long forgotten all the rote knowledge. The latter gets paid vastly more, the latter is far rarer.

> Watching videos is more like thinking you're learning. In order to learn you need to practice and internalize.

And this is key, I think. It's hard to really understand without practice. You feel you might understand but it's fleeting.

And, the reason many say their didn't get any use out of heir college is because... Well, they now know stuff. Since they know it it's not hard (for them, because they are already used to it) and they don't even realize how involved the learning process was.

I've seen many CS graduates who after in a few years after graduation don't remember even the most basic CS stuff. It looks like most students learn just enough to pass an exam and then forgot everything.

On other hand I don't have a degree but I wish I had. All I know I learned bit by bit over the years and somebody who graduated at the top of their class definitely knows listed topics better than me.

>> after my complete and utter cash grab "degree" where I learned nothing beyond what I already knew, I perceive it as a scam.

Then you either didn't go to a proper school, or you didn't properly take advantage of the time. I went to an oldschool university (in canada) followed by a US law school. I could have slacked off an not learned much, just enough to pass, but I leveraged the resources and learned a huge amount. I used this knowledge every day, and in fields totally unrelated to my degrees. I had to recently read up on some radio frequency stuff for work. I was channeling my astronomy 202 lectures. That class was an outside elective taught by a PHD in a huge classroom, what some people would call a waste of my time. But 20+ years later I still have the knowledge and it makes me a better employee today.

In many industries, a college degree (especially from a "name" school) is essentially used as an outsourced HR screening. It's not about specific knowledge, but being able to start the process knowing that this person has certain attributes that impressed the admissions department of a selective school enough to let them in. Therefore, the HR department of company X can start with a base level of vetting already done.

At the very least, a degree proves that you can complete something that you started (something pretty difficult at that).

If you're talking about expertise, I've got two teams with 80% degrees. I spend far more time mentoring people with degrees. People without degrees tend to spend a few minutes asking questions, after which they become autonomous and possibly come back with really meaty questions. People with degrees tend to require pair programming. Definitely not a rule, but a trend.

Degrees are a valuable signal, but they are treated as a rule.

> At the very least, a degree proves that you can complete something that you started (something pretty difficult at that).

The most "difficult" part of college is paying for it (or "getting" your parents to pay for it.

At one point the idea was universities were supposed to produce well-rounded citizens, exposing them to liberal arts, different points of view and what not. But now it seems more to get a good job, which calls into question the entire setup. Wouldn't trade and tech schools or internships be better preparation for a career if that's all society cares about now?

Can I ask where you attended? Honest question. I attended a large well known public university and even though most of it was wasteful, I did learn plenty I wasn’t aware of before.

I went to the University of Pretoria. More than happy to name and shame. At the time, both their IT department and administrative systems were in shambles.

We had to calculate our own class schedules (which is all good and well), but we found that an easy class (that most had already completed in high school) conflicted with the only (I really do mean only) hard and interesting class. The easy class lecturer demanded attendance, the dean did nothing, and we were told to "fail it and retake it the following year." A hostile business; not an institution of learning.

To make matters worse, the degree was supposed to be game development. On the one hand I am happy that UP robbed me of my dream, because my bigger dream is to have a balanced life and family (which seems to be impossible in AAA studios). On the other hand, having already written games, I miraculously identified that designing websites wasn't exactly what you'd expect from a game development degree.

>>On the one hand I am happy that UP robbed me of my dream, because my bigger dream is to have a balanced life and family (which seems to be impossible in AAA studios).

Just wanted to throw in my two cents - I know it's uncommon, but not impossible. Where I work(Ubisoft) the anti-crunch culture is incredibly strong, to a point where we're told that if you see someone doing overtime make sure it gets reported higher up as no one should be doing it and if anyone is then there are problems elsewhere(after all we have tonnes of producers specifically to make sure it doesn't happen). I personally feel like I have a great work life balance, work from 8-4 every day, never on the weekends, and I'm a lead programmer.

That is really awesome to hear!

> The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary.

Somewhat. At least in our company, my friends in HR say that it's not as really a hard requirement to be successful at the job itself. Customer help desk doesn't need a bachelors. But it might cut down the number of resumes they get from hundreds to manageable number that that they can actually review in a reasonable time frame. It's also why it's an easily waived requirement if you get referred by a current employee (it's also how I got the interview at my current job).

Wouldn't surprise me if there's others using the same strategy.

> The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary.

I didn't think colleges are necessary, then a met a person who after a high school really didn't reach his potential. So I concluded colleges would ensure almost everybody "woke up" to looking into world. Then I met another person, who decided to skip college, for material reasons; but who's comfortably at an undergraduate level of knowledge, if not more.

Now I'm not sure. Seems like there is risk... both ways...

I feel sorry for you. I got a great deal out of my college experience. It was time and money very well spent. I never would have learned that stuff otherwise, or even have known what to learn.

> everyone who is in charge went to one

This is an illusion. There are of course people in charge with a degree, but most people I know who have a successful business don't have a degree. They even often dropped out of school because they were too ambitious for wasting their time there.

I do see heaps of people with a degree applying for shit jobs though. But that's what most people and parents don't want to hear of.

> The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary.

Not exactly. I can think of a certain executive working on products at the the Intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology that never graduated from college.

But let me share with you the dirty secret of recruiting in America: the college degree is used as a substitute for the IQ test, which is widely believed to be illegal. Which is why college dropout income looks much closer to college grads than those who graduated high school but never went to college -- passing the entrance exams demonstrates something about a person all on its own, regardless of classes taken after.

Not that I think something like a CS degree is worthless; there's a ton of useful stuff in there I use on a daily basis. The case is less clear for say, all of business school.

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