Comment by kjkjadksj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjkjadksj | Hacker News Reader

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Often professors grade gently to avoid being mobbed at the end of the year as I was told by a few myself. Students have been getting worse by the year at that.

The worst part of the modern college experience I think is the fact in many majors, you no longer learn relevant job skills and are expected to learn them in undergrad or post grad research outside of the courseload. This obviously sets up a world where more advantaged students who can afford free time to such things continue to hold the best outcomes, despite recent DEI pushes from admin to avoid these things. I’ve heard a professor actually state with pride how the lab classes in their department have not changed in over 40 years, so that grades from 40 years ago could be compared to todays grades, somehow believing that is more useful to employers than getting qualified candidates. Then on the other hand students have to take so many concurrent credit hours in different classes that they will admit to triaging their study time and giving up on certain classes, where they might have succeeded if allowed more time for focus perhaps in one of those month-mester formats, where you can get a semester’s course done in a month or so.

> you no longer learn relevant job skills and are expected to learn them in undergrad or post grad research outside of the courseload

Colleges scoff at the idea of becoming "job training schools," but that is exactly what they need to be. The students are, overwhelming, there to "get a good job after college." Only a fraction of them will continue on to spend their entire career in academia.

The logic isn't that most students will go on to academic careers. It's that if students have a solid basis on the theory and other foundational basics of a field they can pick up a lot of the (often ephemeral) tooling/techniques/etc. on their own.

If you want to argue that elite schools in particular often over-rotate on the theory and don't do enough to get students hand-on I won't really disagree with you. But there is a distinction from trade schools.

Yes. At my CS program, there was a saying that when someone asks you what programming languages or frameworks you know, you say "any", because you are being taught foundations that will let you pick up any language or framework that gets invented (barring some massive revolution in quantum computing or P=NP or whatever)

Almost no CS major will get a job that will require them to write their own programming language and compiler from scratch. But having done that, I am way better off than if I spent that semester taking a bootcamp on the latest implementation details of the newest language or framework at the time, which is now obsolete.

In practice, in 2024, most companies want to hire programmers (and employees in general) who have done exactly this job before.

Hiring for theoretical knowledge, hiring for abstract-reasoning skills, and then training ... sounds good in marketing collateral, but only the Googles of the world can afford to do it, and even Google may be changing their tune. (Of course, R1 faculty have never looked for an industry job in their lives.)

If you don't believe me, look at some job listings.

That's a pretty strong argument for people to not go to universities. But I'm not sure there's a lot of evidence that going to college is a terrible idea.

And it hasn't been my experience at all. But code camps are always an option.

Not necessarily. Even though these job posting seek out experience with specific libraries over general theoretical knowledge, they often still require a four year degree for reasons known only to HR.

> At my CS program, there was a saying that when someone asks you what programming languages or frameworks you know, you say "any", because you are being taught foundations that will let you pick up any language or framework that gets invented (barring some massive revolution in quantum computing or P=NP or whatever)

This is the kind of thing that sounds great within the purely abstract world of an academic bubble, but falls apart at first contact with reality.

It's important to learn the foundations, but that shouldn't be treated as mutually exclusive with learning practical skills.

Sure, but how successful have you been getting a job requiring knowledge of Rust if you learned C++ in university? What about a more established language like Java if you happen to have little experience with it.

The fact is modern companies don't want you to have the ability to acquire a new skill, they want you to have that skill on day one. This is even more true outside the programming realm. It's short sighted and counterproductive long term but when the next quarter's earnings are what matters, long term is but a an abstract concept.

I hire people on a regular basis. I very much want people who have the ability to learn a new skill, and I work for a megacorp ( no faang ).

Straight out of college, the hard truth is that you know virtually nothing, even if it sounds harsh ( and no you’re not a senior engineer after 3 years ). If I find someone who’s really good at c++ out of college, has started learning rust, wants to learn, and has good foundations, I’ll happily hire them.

I have never considered which language a candidate knows, or had my set of languages considered, in hiring. That goes double for someone being hired right out of university. I want an interview to test whether you understand how a computer works, how networking/distributed systems/graphics/memory management work (pick the relevant ones). I don't care what the exact implementation language was. I _will_ test a bit more carefully if the applicant says they only know Python, because that can be a sign of fuzzy thinking around pointer/reference/value semantics, but if they can do the work, the language isn't interesting.

The only exceptions I can think of are where you're hiring someone specifically to work on language tooling - e.g., to work on the core C++ library team at Google, you probably need some experience with specifically C++ or C and compilers thereof. Those would be very specialized senior roles, though.

> I have never considered which language a candidate knows, or had my set of languages considered, in hiring. That goes double for someone being hired right out of university.

For a counterexample, I hired this way for a long time.

Like you said, it works for university students because they don't have experience under their belt yet.

It becomes less effective as you get into more complicated languages/frameworks and you have less time to ramp people up.

In the worst case, we'd invest a lot of time mentoring people in a new language or framework and 6 months later they'd decide they preferred their old language/framework. They'd either leave the company to find a job that fit their preferences, or they'd become disgruntled and spend their days complaining about our language choice or trying to persuade us to rewrite in their preferences.

In other cases, people would try to write everything in the style of their previous language, even if it doesn't match the new language or framework.

It happened enough times that I now prefer candidates who already have proven experience in the language we're using. I won't exclude candidates who don't have experience in it yet, but it's rare that I'll pick a decades-long Python programmer for a Rust position, no matter how much of a Python wizard they are, as long as we have good Rust candidates in the pipeline.

I learned java 7 in college, got a job writing java 7 transitioning to java 8, then spent 8 years writing python 3, which when I actually got the job I thought I hated python (I think it has some dumb choices and culture around it), and through some slow but definitive moves in that same company I "learned" java 8 to start working on a different project.

I was expected to learn and become proficient in things like CSS and Javascript and HTML as well despite never taking a class on any of them.

My degree taught me how computing works, from the theory to the logic gates to the math needed to interact with basics in the field.

You know, companies used to spend money "training" their employees to do the things they needed to do. When computers first came around companies had to turn a mountain of secretaries into the very first programmers and computer administrators, and those mostly women bootstrapped the entire information economy. But that investment into human resources could better be spent on the CEOs private plane so they've spent the past 40 years bitching that "waaah waaah higher education doesn't make me cheap little worker bees waaah" as if you are entitled to free labor just because you "run" a business

What languages I already know has never been an issue, past my first couple years out of school. Similarly, in interviewing experienced candidates I don’t care which languages they happen to already know, I only want people who can learn whatever languages we decide to use.

It is highly unlikely that any general college curricula could teach a generic enough curricula that would apply to enough businesses to work more like a trade school; the tech ecosystem is complex and even within one language there are multiple flavors of open source frameworks, to say nothing of companies with proprietary stuff.

It's hard to answer in the general case. I think it's fair to say I've never been hired because of expertise in a narrow technology area.

At the same time computer science programs would probably do a better service teaching you these things in an actual real language instead of their stupid in house dialect of Java. Most of the gotchas and productivity blocks in programming aren’t from theoretical shortcomings but unfamiliarity with some stupid piece of syntax.

I have no idea what you're talking about. You better have done exactly all this stuff exactly before and I will shower you with money, otherwise I'm angry you were even allowed into the building!

Speaking from my experience in stem even then they don’t train you at all for graduate school even if you aced undergrad. GPA no longer matters at that level and as such what few required classes you have are easy A seminar style classes where they make someone in the dept opine on whatever they are working on for a few weeks a semester.

The skills you actually need are manuscript writing. Being able to read a dozen scientific articles a day and gleam what they are saying accurately. Being able to convert that into presentations for other people. Using existing knowledge to develop a research proposal that’s actually topical or relevant to the field today.

People don’t get that experience, at most a training wheels on sort of manuscript project in undergrad where you cite 5 things and only your TA is reading it, not peer review. As such for most people, the first few years of PhD are basically spent spinning your wheels in the mud until you gather enough of these untaught soft skills to actually produce work.

So if you consider the whole undergrad plus these first few years lost in the wilderness in gradschool, its like 7 of your best years gone down the drain because the training system for decades has been “figure it out.” Even as bad as today is, its still a little bit better than a few decades ago when people were spending even longer faffing about in PhD programs on average.

I found the (looked down on) “skills” parts of my CS degree to be somewhat helpful the first couple years as I got started. The overwhelming value has been in theory, critical thinking and math/engineering formalism throughout my career.

I found an old thread where you said you said "K8S fixes many many serious issues in Borg that are mostly unfixable at this point (I worked on Borg for many years), it's better in many ways" I would be very interested in hearing more about that. Would you mind contacting me at radakan@fastmail.net ? Thanks.

Colleges aren't intended to be trade schools teaching job skills. This does, however, put some students in a difficult position. If someone wants to become a professional software developer and isn't particularly interested in becoming a well-rounded individual with a broad, liberal education then there aren't many good options. Coding boot camps exist but are generally limited and low quality.

You might not realize this yet, but occasionally overloading students with coursework is actually a positive. I attended an academically rigorous college and as an average student there was just no way I could finish everything on time in a high quality way. This taught me effective time management, ruthless prioritization, and the pointlessness of perfectionism. Those lessons were more valuable than the content of any particular course.

While this style of educational methods might work for you, they don’t work for everyone and in fact they are very harmful to a subset of the population. Colleges seemingly are more willing to install fencing in parking garages than to look inwardly at why they have had to install this fencing in the first place.

> Colleges aren't intended to be trade schools teaching job skills

If that’s the case then we shouldn’t be funding them as such. Virtually all the support for public funding of post-secondary education is helping people get good jobs and get upward mobility. This is obvious from listening to how politicians speak about educational funding.

We didn’t get here from the supply side but from the demand side. Entry level office work does not hire with only high school anymore, and the students have followed. There are plenty of people who would not go to college if they thought they could get white collar work doing so; in 2024 everyone dreads the high cost of college education.

I don’t really think anything in college is particularly helpful for entry level white collar work, it’s just what the employers are asking for.

Employers hiring for entry level office work only ask for college degrees because they can. During periods of relatively high unemployment this acts as an easy filtering mechanism to cut the number of job applicants down to a manageable level. If low unemployment rates continue then employers will reduce the college degree bullet point from a "must have" to "nice to have".

Of course, long term many of those entry level white-collar jobs are likely to be eliminated altogether by automation and offshoring.

Do you have an example of a developed economy where employers backslid on educational requirements? Because I'll believe it when I see it.

Does the USA count as a developed country?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/college-degree-job-requirement/

Huh, I haven't personally noticed that.

That being said, it is going to take more than one year of labor crunch for this to be reflected in the choices of students to go to school for a job years later. And I've heard of employers who have tightened the screws on older employees without credentials.

> Often professors grade gently to avoid >being mobbed at the end of the year

Mobbed how? I have had students protest their grades - there's a process for that. If the grade is somehow a mistake, or unfair, it gets corrected. If not, and if the grading is demonstrably fair, what are they going to do?

FWIW, although I am a hard grader, the student ratings indicate that they appreciate it.

Ever taught first year calculus to a batch of pre med students? They're under pressure to score high, and feel like their entire future rides on every quiz, so tend to argue every point deducted. It's an incredible time suck, and really just demoralizing.

I had many profs take great joy in "failing" the pre-meds (a.k.a. letting the PhD and industry track students get better grades) for exactly this reason.

Hell, sometimes their parents argue about it.

The best defence against this I suspect is to have a clearly communicated, unambiguous grading scheme, but this can be difficult to do in an even handed way.

I had one undergrad prof whose policy was this: All incorrect answers get 0, no exceptions. Correct answers lose points for all steps not shown the way he had demonstrated.

There wasn't a lot to argue about, but none of us felt his approach was entirely fair.

I’ve seen a professor get cornered by a student and his parter who did not even take the class, sounding like a lawyer about three points or so on an exam they totally bombed, and it got very confrontational and uncomfortable. This sort of behavior is getting more common as the people who act like this often realize most people just bend and give them what they are asking.

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