Maybe in factories, but we’re seeing a real need for craftsmen in Denmark after three decades of university being the only “cool” education path. Mean while white collar students with less attractive degrees struggle to find work.
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.
Blue collar basically means anything you have to physically exert effort for, as opposed to sitting in a chair and using a computer and attending meetings.
Once blue collar work starts paying more than white collar work, it will become “cool” again.
"Blue collar" refers to the blue chambray or denim shirts often worn by factory workers and other laborers in the early 20th century.
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.
Nursing is the only field on there that could be considered well compensated. There's this mystique around nursing that it's some crazy well-paying position, but it's really not. When you consider the education requirements and the work involved, it's alright. $35/hr is pretty good, except you have to maintain a license, clean up peoples' shit, be nice to assholes, and get berated by doctors. Or you can take a huge pay cut to go work in a doctors office. (source: married a nurse that couldn't make it 10 years before changing careers)
Teachers make a bit more than the median wage, but most jobs require a masters degree to progress beyond a certain point. Hair dressers require licensing and a surprising amount of education (up to 1,500 hours) to work in mostly flat-rate jobs, sometimes without benefits. And clerical work is basically the lowest tier work in an office.
Not listed: dental hygienists. Also a traditionally female job which has crazy education requirements for mediocre pay.
Depending on your entrepreneurial skills, being a hairdresser can be a lot more profitable than you’d think. My wife’s hair dresser does exemplary work and has a terrific reputation in our area. She earns about $165 for an hour and a half worth of work, works ten hours a day, and is booked solid every day of the week three months out. This is in Texas, where the cost of living is not that high and I would guess she easily grossed around $200k+ last year alone. Yeah, if you just want to clock in and out at Great Clips and not be the best you can be, then it’s not a high paying profession, but for people that invest in their skills and learn how to market and build a solid client base, it’s actually crazy how much money some of them can make. I was very surprised by it.
Sounds like this lady is the equivalent of a developer with a popular App that pulls down millions. If $50k puts a person in the 90th percentile, then $200k is maybe the 99.99th percentile?
Yeah, the well compensated was about nurses. And I was thinking of specialty positions like nurse-anesthetist or nurse practitioner. Both earn well into six figures, but as noted on top of a ton of education/training.
It depends severely on how much individual corporations demand workers managing the machine be able to successfully troubleshoot and repair failure modes.
Yes. I know from personal experience. Some machines require programming cuts to specifications, measuring and reasoning about tolerances, and understanding the loss of precision during routine use.
And, based on what I see every day, a license still doesn't always mean "drive[s] a car safely".
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.
I think the license acquisition process is mostly sufficient. What is think is missing is re testing after. There are 80 year Olds who can hardly see anymore who are still driving. As well disqualifying people from driving for offences like using a phone.
Stuff like this is why I have a problem questioning the value of a college degree. Even if you never need what you learned during college the degree is still an entrance ticket to a lot of jobs. If you don’t go to college you are handicapping yourself. It’s just bad advice not to go to college.
"Fixing the real problem" is huge - you need to get hundreds of millions of people to change their behavior. Leading your life as if you may not have the ability to materially change the world isn't a bad idea.
I think higher education in general is valuable for, well, any job. Especially because of the dire state of highschool education in the US due to a combination of factors. That's partly why companies demand a college degree because it's a guarantee of a certain level of performance (and wealth, for that matter).
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.
Or we could just not make getting such an education financially burdensome and we can go forward as a universally highly educated and thoughtful society?
To be fair, I like to learn new things and see no need for me to get a Master or PhD degree. I have no idea why I would want or need an alphabet after my name, be that for an extra half dollar per hour or feeling smug enough to not talk to the janitorial staff.
People go to graduate school to learn new things and, specifically, to learn to discover new things. A PhD is essentially an apprenticeship for researchers. You spend very little time in the classroom, maybe a half dozen classes or so over as many years.
If you go for the title or for the money, you're going to be very disappointed, very quickly.
Not everyone needs to go to Princeton but everyone who wants a degree and is willing to do the requisite learning should be given the opportunity at a solid degree.
Further, outside of some niche circumstances, most of the people who wouldn't "thrive" would be much more able if the earlier systems hadn't failed them so spectacularly.
I tend to agree, but look what happened; supply went through the roof, and the four year degree is today's equivalent of a 1960 high school diploma. It's not like all of the people going to college are getting much out of it. It's just a thing you are told you have to do now. Most of my friends spent more time drinking than studying and got very little out of it. They would have been far better off learning a trade.
>most of the people who wouldn't "thrive" would be much more able if the earlier systems hadn't failed them so spectacularly.
Most? Maybe, maybe not. Some amount of them absolutely, but that's once again a different problem to solve, not something to band-aid over later.
The issue with education is that it's not just about the jobs. There are lots of other positive externalities that aren't as easy to account for. Things like financial literacy, political literacy, economic mobility, and a whole slew of intellectual tools that can help them later in life regardless of job.
Personally, I'm totally ok with making college just as mandatory as high school as long as it doesn't place an undue burden on individuals.
Also, we know that education rates skew heavily with SES. It's much more an issue of availability and quality of education than it is some kids being dumb or something...
Even if it were free, the idea that it would take someone with an existing career four years as a full-time student to pursue a different career is too much.
We need to start questioning bad assumptions about education. Shuffling money around isn't going to do it.
> You're talking about career changes as opposed to initial schooling
Yes, but it's the same question. Initial schooling is implicitly accepting a working age adult contributing no income for four years. We're just accustomed to it.
> what assumptions do you think need to change?
* 18 year olds are capable of making decisions about what career they will want for the rest of their lives
* Leaving (or pushing back entering) the work force for four years in pursuit of a degree is a nigh-universal good
* Taking four years of time / 120 credit hours is a reasonable and good target around which to structure degrees, regardless of what amount of knowledge must / should be imparted
* Training on the job cannot replace any meaningful amount of what four year degrees can offer
* Anyone can get a degree, and should be encouraged to do so regardless of whether or not they actually can or will
It's a supply and demand problem.
We've inflated the supply of college graduates, so when a company decides to hire someone, they choose the person with a college degree over someone without.
To fix this problem, you would need to stop the supply of overqualified people. You can do this by having more jobs, or by getting rid of the government guaranteed student loans.
Or you could teach the people about the hardships that come from accepting government-guaranteed loans to purchase an education that does not ensure income proportional to the size of the loan. But, yes, definitely get rid of the government meddling in student loans that has warped the market for education.
Generally speaking, cutting off educational opportunities for people that desperately need them is probably a bad idea.
Even if you did get rid of government guaranteed loans, companies would happily step in to grant people guaranteed loans in exchange for servitude over the rest of their lives. If they don't find a well-earning job well that's even better.
There were multiple non-government loan options back when I was in college that were just that.
As a reminder, high education in Europe is basically free (well, as compared to the US, I've met a few low-middle class people whose parents refused to help them pay the remaining costs involved).
Well, this depends a lot on the country. University obviously requires some minimum level - for instance you'll have to learn to read/write before you're accepted. The best students often get bigger grants than others.
> Or you could fix the real problem and stop the lunacy of requiring four year degrees for positions that can be thought while on the job.
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.
Which is nonsense, as college can NOT, by its very definition, teach you a job!
(I guess some very specialized community schools / community colleges can.)
> No one teaches at the jobs anymore because those people then leave.
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.
I bet if the federal gov mandated a higher minimum wage (say, $50k) for any position that required a college degree, they'd stop that nonsense pretty quickly.
This is exactly where the phenomena of "college-educated person who loses out on low-level job to a GED-holder because they're overqualified" comes from.
Yeah, I'm sure you've never made a typo on a phone. You really believe I confuse 'taught' with 'thought'? You made a throwaway account just to leave this brain dead comment?
Positions in factories are changing. My friend works in robotic welding. The old job of welder, a skilled trade that you learned as an apprentice on the job, is being phased out. It's being replaced by more complicated and more technical jobs, such as my friend's.
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.
You probably won’t need to know about Descartes specifically. However, making persuasive arguments and writing clearly are parts of many jobs, and liberal arts classes are excellent training for those skills.
Many jobs require on the job training anymore because every company has proprietary systems or hardware, do things their way, etc. For my job, which ultimately becomes glorified data enry on paper, requires 3 full weeks of classroom training and a 6-12 month learning curve before you're considered at normal production levels. But hey, for new hires now 13.5 years after I hired in they want a degree and I can't move up because, they want a degree!
Can I fix it though? Is my unemployment somehow going to fix the multi-trillion dollar pipeline that the education and business sectors have carved their way into?
For the individual I would just recommend you play the game. Just like with leetcode questions in SWE interviews, its stupid but you have to get a job so..
But how is this not a simple rephrasing of the broken-window fallacy? When employers require four-year degrees for jobs that don't, is any value actually being created?
Actually it's not. An ISA can save a ton of debt and it's more efficient (less than a year versus 4 years) to get a good job. It's up to you to show you can execute. I know people at lambda school who work weekends and week nights building their portfolio, and have online followings already and are creating awesome projects. No need for a degree. I'd hire the best of them in a second if I were a manager.
I agree, but what may be individually rational may be detrimental from a societal standpoint.
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.
A thought experiment. Would you rather have a Harvard degree without ever attending Harvard or attend Harvard but have no provable record that you did so?
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.
Education has obvious value as a signal. I’ve never understood the step in the argument that leads to the conclusion that it has no other value, and therefore should be seen as “waste” to be minimised.
What people mean by value here is murky. Some people are talking about intrinsic value in terms of education. Others, about market value, or overall value. If companies required four years of watching paint dry, would you call that experience valuable? It depends on how we're defining value.
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).
College is fundamentally a positional good, it lets you skip to the head of the line for a lot of jobs. Not everyone can be at the front of the line. So while it's still good advice to go to school, it's the height of insanity to try to elevate large segments of society via subsidized college education.
I’ll never cease to be amazed by the number of people who think it’s obviously true that nothing of “fundamental” value is imparted by education. It’s a flawed system, sure, but people do actually learn things and that’s good.
The confluence of lots of degree-holders looking for work and the decline in companies investing in internal training programs has (IMO) rendered the 'firm handshake and a job for 40 years working your way up the ladder' boomer story just about a fantasy on par with a Disney film at this point.
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.
The President, Sect'y of State & Defense, FBI Director, US Atty General, Supreme Court Justice, House Speaker, Senators, Governors, Mayors, and local police have all been bribed to protect and or be child rapists. WTF do we do now, sir? Here is all of the unequivocal proof to put them all away.
Discussion
\\Who arrests high profile and ranking criminals, such as the President, when the FBI Deputy Director, Attorney General, all the way down from Senator to Governor, to Mayor, to local police, have all been bribed?
Download the video/audio file, put on headphones and turn up the volume. You will hear these people committing these crimes. Audio was broadcast into my apartment by outdated surveillance equipment illegally embedded witihin my walls. This very same technology was being used to broadcast me to the internet for five years without my consent. I own this footage. Please use this to prosecute all found within. Note: I am obliviously speaking throughout the video, and it can be quite loud at times relative to the desired content. The are dozens more links, including these, that can be found in this PDF last updated 7Dec2019 132 pages:
Also "preps" boys with First Lady Melania Trump, as in she performs oral sex on the boys’ penis and anus, as a child rapist like Henry Porter would, while trying to remove fecal matter from the boy prior to handing them over to be raped and subsequently murdered, for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who decides he would rather just have ten billion dollars instead....
By french laws, “carrying heavy weight” («port de charges lourdes») means “up to 55kg” (for male workers). Doing so on a regular basis is way above “physical fitness” and constitute a serious health hazard in the long run.
While I agree with your point, firemen are a particularly bad example here since in France most of them are volunteers and there is no such restrictions on physical abilities.
Sure, and in France too, but I'd bet “carrying an average male” (almost 200lbs in the US, and 77kg in France) isn't part of that requirement, otherwise you'd barely see any woman firefighter.
> In 2017, 77,900, or 7%, of the firefighters were female. Of the career firefighters 13,400 (4%) were female firefighters. There were 64,500 volunteer firefighters who were female, 9% of the total number of volunteer firefighters.
Oh, that's interesting. That means there is a cultural difference between France and the US when it comes to firefighters. There are 16% female firefighters here in France, and among the young generation the radio is more like 1/3.
I think the idea is that if you don't want to carry heavy weights as your day job, you get a college degree. If you don't mind, it's easy enough to find work doing that without getting a degree.
Infantry officer is a fairly specific and niche roll. Let's be real about it, too - the main function of the degree on an officer's wall is to differentiate them from the hoi polloi, the common soldier.
I think companies just want to make sure you are not so out of shape that you will have health issues. They can use that as an excuse to get rid of a person with health issues so they don't have to deal with a person having medical leave.
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.
I think homeschooling is an excellent hack given the current constraints of the system. Homeschooled students can move at their own pace (which can be much quicker than the standard curriculum schedule) and take courses at community colleges that double as high school and college credit (or just college credit - but that’s still time and money saved). I’ve seen smart homeschool students graduate high school years early with GE college credits already earned.
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.
Homeschooling as a 'hack' requires your family to be able to afford having one person become a teacher at home as their full time job essentially. For families working two full time jobs, this isn't really an option.
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.
Yes. This usually only works in an US household where one parent earns six-figures or more. Most people simply are too indentured to five-figure jobs (money and healthcare) to pull this off.
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.
Public schools employ eachers that teach at more-or-less the speed of the slowest student, where the time of the teacher is divided n-ways. If a student can learn more quickly than that of the slowest student in the public school or with anything-but-the-least-divided-attention, then the home-schooling adult would not need to be 'full-time'.
Is the socialization problem for homeschooling solved?
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.
> Every kid I knew in University that had been homeschooled had pretty serious issues with social skills
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’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
I don't think you're contradicting fossuser's narrative. Being correctly socialized (evaluated as an adult) is being maladjusted (evaluated as a student). By this theory, homeschooled kids are well equipped to interact with the world, but unsuited to interact with college students.
Homeschooled mid-life adult here (graduated high school in 2001)
Socialization is an issue because, depending on the size of the community you interacted with and how integrated your parents let you be with the rest of America, many of us who were more sheltered are literally from a different culture that people who live in the same country. I have worked long and hard to be able to socialize with people from ‘Regular’ America, and I still, nearly 20 years after I graduated high school, and more easily socialize with people from a Midwestern conservative homeschooled background.
I sometimes tell people I grew up the in the same geography as you, but not the same place.
> I have worked long and hard to be able to socialize with people from ‘Regular’ America, and I still, nearly 20 years after I graduated high school, and more easily socialize with people from a Midwestern conservative homeschooled background.
There is no "regular America". It's a big diverse country. We only think that "coastal elites" aren't part of "real America" because the effect of the Electoral College in the 2016 election is fresh in our minds. Change a few historical decisions about state lines and we'd be talking about how the election of Hillary Clinton proves that middle America is out of touch with real Americans from California and New York.
I tend to think it's a good thing when people from one part of the US are able to socialize with other people in different situations. Insularity is a lot of the reason we're in the mess we're in today.
This. I think acting like an adult is construed by other children as a lack of social skills, when it is actually great preparation for the 80-90% of their lives when they won't be children anymore. As adults, we remember all the "weird" homeschooled kids we knew as kids. But look around your office and see if you can identify someone as homeschooled (as opposed to any other, regular old kind of weird).
We're in the very early stages of homeschooling our kids and all we've noticed is that kids on the playground who go to school are surprisingly mean (obviously not most of them, but on average). Thanks to the internet, our kids aren't missing out on pop culture, but they're also not taking their social cues from the coolest 7 year old. Seems like a win-win.
The kids I knew weren’t “acting like adults” in college - they were off.
Didn’t know how to hold a conversation, they were uncomfortable, and had a hard time with social cues and basic listening/including people in conversation.
If I had to speculate I’d guess they had a harder time modeling other people’s mental states along with just generally knowing less what to do - which I think comes from having less peer social exposure to learn from. This creates a feedback loop of social anxiety which can be limiting.
Part of the reason it may be hard to distinguish homeschooled people in the workplace is because they’re largely not there.
It’s hard enough to develop comfortable social skills even with siblings and a lot of exposure. I’d be worried that removing your kids from an environment where they’d get a lot of exposure makes this even harder for them in the long run.
Anecdote for anecdote, all of the homeschoolers I knew when I was younger (N of about 5 or 6) who I thought were fatally weird turned into perfectly normal adults and I'm ashamed to have been so judgmental.
As for homeschooled people in the workplace, my hunch is that there are more than you think there are, and you don't notice because they look like regular adults, but I have no proof! I happen to know a few professionals who were homeschooled, but I never would have known without having had a conversation about our kids and mentioning homeschooling.
That's cool - I'd hope that's generally the case. This could also be more evidence that it is an exposure issue and it takes longer for them to catch up.
I'd be curious to ask adults that were homeschooled if they would want to do the same for their kids.
I'd wonder even if it's the common case they end up perfectly normal adults if it's hard for them prior to that.
I think I'd be nervous about being able to do it effectively for my own kids (both for the social and academic reasons).
That doesn't mean I don't think it's a solvable problem and there is probably a way to create a community of people to do this well, but that might just end up looking like a secular private school.
Don’t have immediate plans to homeschool our children (4 and less than a year). We have found that the 4 year old does much better with outside authority than with us, plus he is a highly social creature who will benefit from the relationships at school, we think. He has done great at preschool, although no plan survives contact with the battlefield. Plus, my wife, while an educator, has no real desire to homeschool, and my career is the more lucrative one so I am likely to be the primary wage earner for now. We are open to homeschool if circumstances seem to dictate it.
Anecdote of 1. I have many friends who were homeschooled who homeschool their kids, and many who refuse to.
Also anecdotal but I was the first child of young parents with no siblings, cousins, or children of parents' friends around for a lot of my life. When other kids did come along in our social circle they were much younger so I spent a lot of time socializing with the adults instead. I had to consciously context-switch my behavior to a huuuuuuge degree whenever I spent time with my friends at school and such because acting the way I did in a lot of my life outside school just didn't work. Nobody would have understood how to relate to me. I've always been very social and never had any anxiety around it but I still had to put in some work to act normally around other kids/teenagers after spending so much time with adults. And I went to a normal public school and did a zillion activities with other kids!
A family I know just decided to home school their daughter because the school didn't have adequate support for her disability. (Tourette's)
The home school group will always include more unusual cases that didn't fit the public school mold. So the entire group gets labeled, when we really should just probably avoid stereotypes for that group.
There are just too many vastly different reasons someone could be home schooled. They could be preforming at a higher level than average, or lower. Yes in general they have less access to peers their own age, but I don't know what percent of "poor social skills" is due to lack of social exposure.
> They carry themselves like adults and interact with adults as a peer at 16 or even younger.
This is exactly the problem. They can relate to adults but not to their teenage peers. I'd bet they feel terribly uncomfortable at social events with only kids their age present.
I'm not sure that's very important. I cringe at a lot of my behavior as a teenager, and I was very good at being social. I mean, I'm still good at being social, but I had to unlearn a lot of the behavior that made me good at being social in school.
But imagine you didn't do any of those things and therefore weren't as social in high school. Would you be as well-adjusted as an adult? Or would you have felt isolated in ways that affected your development and left you worse off in adulthood? All the teenage cringe is pretty developmentally appropriate even if it's awful in retrospect.
I don't think I agree with that. I'm a big fan of Sasse's "the Vanishing American Adult." He points out that what you call "teenage cringe" is a fairly modern construct. For most of human history, teenagers were integrated into the adult world, not set apart and left to their own devices in the modern context of "school." It's a malign symptom, not a necessary developmental stage.
Yeah, I tend to think the world would be a better place if we made more room for young people in the adult world. I think kids are capable of a lot more than we give them credit for and I think setting them apart, as you say, erodes their ability to participate in the world and makes us want to set them even further apart. If we treated them like whole people who can do things, I think they would start acting like whole people who can do things, much, much earlier.
I totally agree with you on this. Kids can take on more responsibility than they're given today - see any generation that came of age before the last 15-20 years. It would benefit many of them enormously to do so (jobs, babysitting, driving, etc). I just think it's too easy as an adult to look back on your teenage years and project your current level of social and emotional development onto your younger self or teenagers in general.
I don't really mind the embarrassing things, I cringe about the times I acted like a jackass in pursuit of social approval. I was relatively well-behaved as far as it goes, but I still wasn't as compassionate as I should have been and I think I would absolutely have been better off if I had never been tempted to seek status among high schoolers.
Purely anecdotal of course but the kids I met in college who were nerdy and studious and sat out that kind of social jockeying in high school were the biggest jackasses in college because they hadn't gotten any of that out of their systems yet. I kinda think we need to learn a lot of this stuff from experience - we don't learn compassion by being told to be compassionate, we learn compassion by looking back with a more mature perspective on our own actions and how they affected other people. Middle school and early high school made Mean Girls look like a documentary and while it wasn't the best time in my life I learned how to be a much better person from those experiences where I was on both the giving and the receiving end of the teenage nastiness. People are going to learn these things one way or another because we're not all born saints; in my opinion it's better to do so alongside immature peers when the stakes are lower than to do it later on as an adult.
Edit: this is in reply to ksdale, not sure why I can't reply to your comment
The need to be a "jackass", "party"... in college and high school seems uniquely American (probably a couple other 1st world countries as well). Not only have we extended adolescence nearly indefinitely, we've invented a desperate need for people to embrace self-destructive behavior to better match pre-adult societal expectations. The 20th Century did a real number on people's personal and social philosophy. It's going to take generations to shake off "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll" as the primary motivator.
All of this is to say, that just because school better aligns an individual's behavior with that of their expected peer group, it doesn't mean that's a good thing.
While I don't share your opinion on "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll," that's not really what I'm talking about here either. I'm referring to learning how to navigate complex social relationships in a low-stakes environment. It's easy to roll your eyes at high school friend or relationship drama (because it's usually stupid) but you learn a lot about how to treat other people, how not to treat other people, how to expect other people to treat you in this world etc etc. It's a crash course in the complexity of social relationships that will heavily inform how you act in adulthood, like it or not. The context goes from "Susie and Bobby kissed at the dance and I was jealous so then I kissed Bobby and now Susie won't speak to me" to "I'm jealous of Susan's relationship with Bob, but I know that hurting Susan isn't going to solve anything because the problem is my unfulfilling relationship and acting out like that will only cause me to lose a friend." Silly example but I'm tired and I hope you get the idea.
None of this is stuff you learn by spending your teenage years exclusively with siblings (homeschooled) or chilling out playing video games 24/7 with a couple other quiet kids (nerdy/sheltered). When I say "jackass" I'm specifically referring to the guys who were like this in high school, who were invariably the ones in college doing stupid things at parties to impress their new friends and also treating girls like crap because they were suddenly thrown into a social whirlwind they couldn't handle with any level of maturity.
> None of this is stuff you learn by spending your teenage years exclusively with siblings (homeschooled) or chilling out playing video games 24/7 with a couple other quiet kids
To be fair, I don’t think anyone learns much that is important by being socially sheltered like you describe. When I advocate homeschooling, that is not what I mean.
Sadly, our culture has lost many of the (adult) social constructs that used to bring people together, leaving school as one of the only viable options for kids to be social with one another. Healthy homeschooling necessarily involves intentionally finding social outlets for kids and teenagers, which is harder than letting school stand in—but, I would argue—is much easier when the adults in the family are pursuing healthy relationships and social outlets with other adults in various walks of life who are raising kids of their own (and I don’t mean at bars, dance clubs, etc.; there are still some non-kid-hostile places where adults and kids can both socialize with peers and be involved in something they enjoy, like churches, volunteering, fishing, hiking, biking, sports, etc.).
> Sadly, our culture has lost many of the (adult) social constructs that used to bring people together, leaving school as one of the only viable options for kids to be social with one another.
I think you're onto something here, especially because teenagers these days reportedly spend less time with friends than any previous generation. As a 2010 high school grad I always find these stats pretty alarming: http://theconversation.com/teens-have-less-face-time-with-th...
Feels like kids get home from school and immediately get online - they mainly interact with peers through social media and video games, which is totally different from being face to face. That has to be detrimental in some way. Most parents probably work so much they don't have time to have their own hobbies to share with their kids so unless the kids are on sports teams year round they're likely not doing a whole lot of IRL socializing outside of school. I think more kids are being socially sheltered these days, homeschooled or not.
Homeschool kids don't have to be isolated though, and as you say the nerdy kids at regular school are the ones that exhibit this type of behavior (which isn't bad btw, people mature at different rates). I think it's not as difficult to socialize as a homeschooler as you think it is. In fact they're often at a distinct advantage for socialization because they're usually not burdened by hours of homework so have more free time to hang out with their friends. They also can have more unstructured play time during the day if their parents choose to go that route.
Good point about homework, honestly I didn't even consider that angle. The only homeschooled kid I know is my cousin, whose parents homeschooled him because they considered him some kind of special genius (he's smart but no smarter than your average high achieving kid). He's in college now and a nice kid but just feels a bit off. They didn't homeschool either of his siblings and both of them are much better adjusted socially. Tiny sample size and definitely biased but all three grew up with the same parents, same level of extracurricular activities, etc and the only one who's not all there socially is the homeschooled one. Obviously I'm a bit biased though!
You're absolutely right. I was homeschooled K-12 and grew up hearing praise because I was good at "carrying myself like an adult" and socializing with adults, but I had no idea how to make friends or socialize with PEERS. Homeschool kids don't have the opportunity to have "cringe" moments that other posters here seem to regret and feel are unimportant to kids (or should avoided altogether) because they're often admonished to act like small adults.
Which, I'm guessing, just leads to cringe moments as adults? Sounds like you've turned it around nicely though! Do you feel like you caught up eventually?
It can lead to cringe moments as an adult, but more crucially I think it leads to fear of cringe moments, so you never really get the chance to fail, look like a goober, and reorient and try again. It also makes it easier to constantly judge other people for social slip ups or for not having a perfectly predictable personality.
I think I've mostly caught up. I moved to NYC for college, which was sort of my socialization boot camp. I learned how to start and maintain relationships VERY quickly. If you don't learn to like (or at least tolerate) just about any kind of human, the city can become very lonely and difficult.
A very stubborn part of my brain still judges Very Extroverted people and, weirdly, athletes. I'm working on it.
I was homeschooled until sophomore year of high school. While there were certainly some benefits and I don't totally resent my upbringing, I do feel like I've had to work extra hard to develop my social skills. I know dozens of other homeschooled kids and I would say that the vast majority of them ended up having major social deficiencies.
I don't regret being homeschooled through elementary school as it gave me plenty of opportunity to explore areas that I was interested in, only mildly regret missing middle school since many of my friends consider it a miserable time of their lives, but I absolutely regret missing freshman year of high school.
I would very highly recommend that any parents thinking about homeschooling their kids very thoroughly consider their choices. So many of the parents I knew taught their kids at home out of fear and ended up negatively impacting their children's lives dramatically.
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.
I guess that depends on what you mean by 'social challenges'. What are the expectations?
We participate in a homeschool community which gives weekly (if not more often) opportunities for both structured and unstructured (i.e. play) social interactions. Balance this with home-interactions between their siblings, kids in the neighborhood, and folks at our church, they interact with a pretty big array of people, and we end up getting to work with them on issues a lot more diligently and quickly.
Our group has a wide range of social skillset folks. From kids who are very hard-to-manage to visible gifted and talented people.
IMO, the "problem" only exists if you, as a parent, don't get involved in the raising of your children.
The cumulative effect of wasting (more or less) 8 hours a day 5 times a week is also dramatic. You can work to improve the social life of a homeschooled child, improving the education of a publicly schooled child is a much bigger challenge if for no other reason than the amount of time they're "stuck" receiving a rote and mediocre (at best) education.
No, at least not universally. My cousins growing up were all homeschooled, and all creepy to be around. One basically never grew up despite pushing 30, another went off to college and OD'd the first week. The other two are nice people who still live at home but feel a little 'babified' to be around. Fast forward to today, just moved in next to a home-schooled family. Parents are really nice people, but their kids remind me exactly of the eldest cousin...something just 'off' when you interact with them. I hope for their own sake they grow out of it.
If done the right way I think home schooling is the way to go. I would occasionally run into home schooled people when I was in the Marine Corps. They were often times a little awkward but I think that that comes mostly from their lack of recognizing authority figures.
Recognizing authorities and hierarchies are what most people mean when they talk about socializing I think.
>Every kid I knew in University that had been homeschooled had pretty serious issues with social skills
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.
Keep in mind that the reason people homeschool has changed a lot in the past decade. It used to be primarily religious reasons, but there's been a massive uptick of non-religious parents moving to homeschooling to better their child's education and get them out of the toxic school environment.
Unless you're quite young, it's doubtful that you've interacted with many of these next-gen homeschool kids.
>To be fair this is a pretty small sample to draw conclusions from.
I think it's pretty likely given that statement and the small population of home-schooled kids to begin with, that confirmation bias explains your entire experience.
But let's assume it doesn't. Home-schooled kids who do have good social skills are likely to realize that there is a bias against them and thus they aren't likely to advertise that they were home-schooled.
I was homeschooled in a similar way described above, starting community college at 16. I was relatively sheltered and never attended any sorts of sports clubs or any other activities that would involve socializing with people I didn't know. I would say it definitely had a negative impact on my social skills, as if I was learning how to socialize 5 years later than everyone else my age. Working jobs helped develop these social skills to a point, but I'm not great at making friends outside of work and I still deal with social anxiety. I believe homeschooling is a great idea, but social development should definitely be considered. Not sure about the best way to handle it though.
> never attended any sorts of sports clubs or any other activities that would involve socializing with people I didn't know
There’s a big part of the problem there. If you know ahead of time that your kids will need lots of socializing with other kids, you can mitigate the relative isolation of homeschooling pretty effectively. Sports clubs, co-op groups, church groups, etc. — all are great places for kids to make friends and socialize.
Sure. We homeschooled our kids. When we worried about socialization, we grabbed them, dragged them into the bathroom, and beat them up for their lunch money.
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.
I’d argue there’s a difference between socializing and being bullied - the former is just more general exposure to social interaction. I suspect the more you get of that the better, I also suspect you need it from peers too (adults are not the same).
There’s also some value in learning to stand up for friends and handle complex social dynamics which don’t go away when you become an adult.
Being removed from this entirely is probably not helpful, though obviously there are limits.
> handle complex social dynamics which don’t go away when you become an adult.
In my experience, most of the social dynamics of childhood completely disappear in adulthood. Adult generally don't spend most of their waking time with 30 or so other adults who were all born within 6 months of each other.
But most adults do spend most of their waking time with 30+ other adults (at a point in life when the differences between ages start to flatten out quite a bit). It looks quite analogous to me.
I would not describe a world comprised of 20 somethings straight out of college, 30 somethings with kids, 40 somethings with teenagers, 50 somethings with college-age kids, and 60 somethings with grandkids, nor people at any of these ages without kids as possessing anywhere near the level of homogeneity as you see in a K through 12 classroom.
> I’d argue there’s a difference between socializing and being bullied
And if you could get the socialization without the bullying, that would be great. But I'm not sure there's a way to do that within the existing school structure, so your point seems to be a purely theoretical one.
> 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?
True. Unfortunately, a lot of the dysfunctional socialization in school actually gets carried into adulthood.
Right, children shouldn't be socializing mainly with children. That trains them to interact with children. Children grow up to be adults, who interact mainly with adults. Children need to be socializing with adults. That is what most children lack today, but is much easier to do with homeschooling.
> Is the socialization problem for homeschooling solved?
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.
That may have been the case in the past, but recently there's a trend for non-religious parents to move their kids to homeschooling to better their education and remove them from the toxic socialization that is public school (in the US at least). Many of these parents are well off professionals who can afford to support a family on a single income.
It isn't "solved" in the sense that there isn't a newly found method of making somebody who stays at home with siblings all day automatically more social.
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.
People meet partners at all sorts of places. Sure, some meet them in high school, but I don't think that's the norm. College is far more common a place to meet, and homeschoolers still go to college. Or work. Or parties. Homeschooling just replaces most of your school years, which to be honest, isn't a great time to be making decisions about choosing life partners.
> Is the socialization problem for homeschooling solved?
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.
> I think homeschooling is an excellent hack given the current constraints of the system.
Maybe you are the exception, but homeschooling is generally centered around religion and churns out students who are FAR worse academically than if they went through even a really poor public school.
I've never heard of that before. Many homeschooled kids I knew were very smart, but definitely lacked social skills. I've never heard of them having FAR worse educations, especially compared to bad public schools. "Really poor public schools" are an incredibly low bar.
Socialization is a hard problem to fix. I know they try with after school sports/activities/clubs, but that's not quite the same as being around peers for 8+ hours a day. In non-homeschool, the children are around other children more than adults/parents.
It might vary by location. I grew up in rural British Columbia and homeschooled for a year due to a family feud with the local grade six teacher.
The other homeschooled kids I interacted with were homeschooled for religious reasons or so they could help on the farm. They were poorly socialized and poorly educated as best as my then eleven year old self could tell.
I was homeschooled for a while and saw a lot of the other homeschooling families via the school district resource center thing, which even the real extremists interacted with at least some. From my perspective, it was broken into three major groups: religious conservatives concerned with the moral purity of their kids, upper-middle class professionals interested in accelerating their kids as much as possible, and a grab bag of students from various socioeconomic stripes who'd had trouble with the standard school system for various reasons.
I was one of the second. My mom has advanced degrees in education. My dad's an attorney. I did fine, as did basically everybody else in that cohort. Even then, the impression my friends and I had was that the religious kids spent an awful lot of time on literal bible study and weren't so hot on "actual" education. These suspicions were borne out when it was time for the state standardized tests they wanted homeschooled kids to take - every kid from the second of those cohorts (and many from the third) blasted though them, while those from the first visibly struggled. The religiously-motivated cohort also managed to out-weird a bunch of kids who spent much of their time on mid-2000s 4chan as young teens, which is actually pretty impressive.
Anyway, I agree that the reason a student is homeschooled (and by proxy the resources and pedagogical methods available to them) is a much better predictor of overall outcomes than a simple homeschooled/not binary. When there's such significant clustering in a category, trying to make judgments only utilizing knowledge/stereotypes regarding the category as a whole is a good way to be misled.
My experience was that what passes for "socialization" in k-12 school is extremely weird compared to the same among adults. I wouldn't rule out that it is nonetheless somehow important to kids' development in a way other approaches aren't, but my gut feeling is that socialization among adults and a range of peer students of many different ages rather than mostly the same age +/- one year (how the hell, exactly, is one supposed to model the behavior of socially-successful older kids when one is rarely around them, or easily notice one's own failings when not exposed to amplified versions of the same in younger kids?) would be far better at turning out well-adjusted people.
I have a small sample size, but the two homeschool kids I met were brought up in a secular house by a Ivy League lawyer (at a nonprofit for farm workers) and a stay-at-home mom/homeschool teacher (which is two jobs). Although, the teenage girl did runway and elope with a 30-year-old for a while.
Maybe raising kids in the city makes them more streetwise, informed and cautious by sheer number of social experiences in the real world, and rural maybe more Turnip Truck? Like socialized and unsocialized pets? So goes the stereotype. Dunno.
> "Mean ACT Composite scores for homeschooled students were consistently higher than those for public school students" from 2001 through 2014, according (PDF) to that testing organization, although private school students scored higher still.
Which is not surprising, since religious schools get to pick their students. I'm the product of 12 years of Catholic education, much of it supposedly high-quality, and expulsion and removal to the public school system was an ever-present threat. Not to mention, I'd already been implicitly selected into the school by dint of my parents being able to afford it, and opting to spend the money.
Selection bias due to "Of homeschooled who took the ACT and/or SAT":
1) The most religious are the least likely to be college bound.
2) "Regarding ethnicity, for example, 72 percent of the homeschool students were White, 5 percent were Asian, Asian American, or Pacific Islander, and 4 percent were Black or African American, while of all college-bound seniors, the corresponding percentages were 49, 12, and 13. The average highest level of parental education was notably higher for the homeschool students than for all students."
Same study also points out that 60% of homeschooling in North Carolina is for religious reasons.
The studies without selection bias show that homeschooling is inferior in almost all cases. The big problem being that the cases of poor schools where homeschooling would be most helpful are also the same places where the parents are least likely to have the bandwidth and resources to homeschool properly.
HN has an extremely high selection bias because they are 1) the most likely to homeschool for quality-of-life reasons and 2) the most likely to be earning enough money that a parent can drop completely out of the workforce to homeschool.
The tone of the comment is a little harsh but the idea is right. Moving to another continent, to another country with different traditions, history, and culture is not a simple decision.
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.
It stops mattering after about 5 years, being overtaken by where you've worked in the past - although there's a slight ripple effect there, since where you work right after college depends a bit on your GPA. I do wonder how big a difference really GPA makes in the long run, but a higher one is definitely better than a lower one ; )
I suspect it's like a lot of things. That first job ripple effect helps out in the beginning and then the differences between high and low gpa average out over time.
Like kids in headstart or Pre-K programs. They start out ahead of their peers in kindergarten, bit those differences are completely gone by second or third grade.
College isn't two years (some vocational courses are two years, that isn't college though). Not all MSc are 1 year. And you will still need 4/5 years for a PHd if you do a MSc (in almost no cases is one year of a MSc a substitute for one year of a PHd).
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.
> College isn't two years (some vocational courses are two years, that isn't college though).
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.
Back when I went into the vocational track in the UK at 18/19 it was 4 years doing day release to get to HNC level - that was specialist thermo fluids for the turbine/ aerospace industry - ironically all but one of us on the course was working for world leading RnD.
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.
Absolutely, though a lot of colleges do a terrible job of explaining that.
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.
> STEM majors regularly complain, loudly, about the fuzziness of the classes that teach those skills.
It is easier, for some people, to be precisely wrong rather than roughly correct.
I agree generally that most universities are bad at producing students who can think for themselves (to be clear, my reference was to Scottish universities that do a four-year degree versus three-year in England). You don't need any extra classes though. Just create classes that test for this and doing classes from other areas will probably help to. Also, clearly, universities try to create courses in a way that limits complaining from students and makes it all about grades...which isn't helpful.
Not everyone can or should homeschool. My wife and I were both homeschooled our entire lives, and we are absolutely not going to homeschool our child.
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.
Humans are social animals. Those silly side effects of school, "having fun together and bonding" with people outside of your family, are critical to growing up to be a well-adjusted adult who can maintain relationships and friendships - which are ultimately the things that make life worthwhile.
I always wonder about qualifications and if anyone is paying attention what is really required to do a job.
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.
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'd be surprised if companies have a CS degree requirement for that job.
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.
I worked tech support for years and completely agree with that statement. I work in test automation these days and try to meet regularly with support to figure out what usage patterns are like and what pain points people are actually having in the field. My current company is too small to have a dedicated support team so I just get all the emails for the engineering team, but as we grow I plan on implementing something similar. Good support people are worth their weight in gold and I feel like they get dismissed too often in the field. It seems like that's starting to change though as I see better pay at startups for support positions.
It's good to hear startups care, although my experience from company to company is support is largely seen / treated as an expense. Lots of talk about support, but the quality of leadership and resources tell another story in my experience.
Mmm, I would not expect big-tech Silicon Valley to be the place where the best technical support comes from, nor would I expect holders of "fancy" CS degrees to be particularly good at or motivated by that work. Not many people who want to be big shots someday are digging into what makes support tick. For better or worse.
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.
I’m a techlead who is in charge of mentoring the juniors on my team, most of who have a CS degree.
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).
Young people don't understand that succeeding in college and succeeding in the real world are two different things. Nobody cares if you graduated from mit with a 4.0. We care if you can succeed at the job and are worth the king's ransom great developers get in this market.
We find it "hard to understand" because job opening descriptions tell us that a degree and/or an excellent GPA are minimum requirements for anything that doesn't pay minimum.
And to pre-empt the inevitable "5 years experience is just as good," that 5 years can't come unless you either a) got that degree 5 years ago to get a job for that experience, b) managed to befriend a hiring manager, or c) started a company.
What an applicant can or can't do means nothing if they don't make it to the part of the hiring process where they can demonstrate it, at least without blatantly lying on their resume.
I think the other option is just networking and having a good portfolio that shows off your skills. Granted that leads you to point b that you made as you will likely befriend people who are in positions to hire you or suggest to others to hire you.
My path was working minimum wage while doing side work for people, eventually I had more coming in from the side work than the day job but kept doing both because day job at least covered the rent/bills eventually someone I was doing side work for offered me a full time job at enough to match both day job and side job, three years later I moved on and have kept moving every 3 years or so since.
At this point with my CV no one even asks about academics and hasn’t for a decade or so, the work/references speak for themselves.
I’d hate to be young in this market though which is why I’m so happy a good chunk of my time is/will be spent on the mentoring side.
Helping people get started in a rewarding career is itself rewarding.
Applicant A (me, the following scenario is literal copy pastes from email exchanges, with identifying information changed):
No degree, 13 years direct experience
Company: "Hope all is well, Ryan! I wanted to extend a virtual wave and thank you for your interest in joining our team. You obviously have many of the skills we're looking for. However, for the -job title I applied to- role we require a BA/BS degree as well as previous experience in a broker role doing entries and customs classifications."
At this point I forward the email to a friend
Some days later, after friend shot the CEO an email semi-chastizing him for demanding degrees
Company: "Hi Ryan,
My name is -name-, I run Commercial Recruiting at -company-. I was hoping that I would be able to connect with you next week as I would love to chat about the -job title- role in -city-. We have made so recent changes to our role requirements and looking at your background, I think you could be an excellent fit!"
Applicant interviews: asked "what is your superpower?" "what sort of major projects have you worked on?" "What major career accomplishments have you made?"
This was for an entry-level position that I've been doing longer than the company has existed...
Company: "Hope you're doing well, Ryan. I wanted to drop you a note to let you know that after discussions with the team, it seems we’re not quite the right fit for your skills at this time. " email received WHILE I was on the phone doing the interview, minutes before it concluded.
--
Hypothetical applicant B: successfully exited a company unrelated, with no degree, and no experience in the field
Company: "hey, you sold your company for xx million, well you're probably not right for this position but congrats you're our new president of enhanced quantum user AI learning experience! Congrats, uh, you're the first person in that division, we were really impressed with the AI company you sold to Megacorp, here's 20 million in VC money, make is some AI!"
--
Hyp0thetical applicant C: has a degree, has no experience, has unrelated experience in CS
Company: "hey, could you describe that project you mentoned in your CV, it sounds really neat. We see you also dod coding for XYZ Company, well you don't have any experience doing the job but that's ok we can teach you and it'd be great because you can go ahead and tell us how to improve our systems and possibly even do some of the coding yourself, congrats you're hired! Seriously though, don't worry, the complex legal paperwork and ever changing regulations isn't that big of a deal we'll just have someone help you for 6 months and check all of your submissions"
>It’s a surreal experience to be teaching people who on paper blow me away on academic qualifications [...]
Can corroborate this experience, however I do not think it has much to do with having a degree as much as it does with having the motivation to learn and excel. Our industry has people who are in it to just coast through life as safely as they can, and it shows in the interview and the day-to-day work life.
In my limited experience, the feistiest of developers have been those who have learned how to code well, and ship software at an age before they set out to do their degrees (and still went and did a traditional, 4-year CS degree).
I have had a great pleasure of working alongside some of them, and to this day I have yet to see this level of aptitude be matched by people who got into CS as a matter of course for a job.
To be clear I don't mean to criticize the skills that a CS degree provides, nor anyone with one.
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.
>I knew dozens of people who could do that job at a third the cost, but they'd never hire them.
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.
they didn't seem to learn from the dot.com era, it if anything they learned better to pass the bucket to small investors right before the collapse to retain most profit from the bubble while hiding toxic investments into derivatives
> 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.
> 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.
>I wonder if their creating a high barrier of entry actually backfired and caused them to hire less competent people?
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.
Interesting. I've heard the opposite. Charge more money assuming that higher income individuals tend to have more to lose when it comes to apartment damage or getting evicted.
A poor family can make better tenants because they need the place to function and need a stable home. A rich college student with rich parents will sue you to death over anything if they choose to break the lease or a dispute arises.
Anybody who's heard or increased the rent like that must be in a rather prime location, definitely not in the country side for sure (little jobs and little tenants there).
I'm pretty sure I've observed this exact phenomenon. The tricky part is hiring unconventional candidates requires an unconventional process, which requires figuring it out, getting everyone on board, and being able to defend it to upper management. Requesting the standard resume and doing the standard interview allows everyone to throw up their hands and say "we did everything we could".
My hypothesis would be that the type of person that gets a CS degree does not tend to be the type of person that likes dealing with customer support issues or that is even necessarily good at it.
> Fascinating.. I wonder if their creating a high barrier of entry actually backfired and caused them to hire less competent people?
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.
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 believe.
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).
IMO the 'testing' done these days for CS interviews is just a by-product of the "big" "OG" companies starting out with a lot of "top university" grads/students. So when those guys needed to hire new recruits, they wanted a way to screen them that resonated with what they were used to: rigorous testing and exams. So they replicated the kinds of tests they needed to pass to get into Stanford/Ivies/MIT/etc. and the ones they had during coursework and produced the basic idea of what SDE interviews are now.
And since that became the standard from the beginning, it's what remains now.
Few real world programming problems are straight forward enough to test on. Or at least I don't expect computer science to turn into a physics/chemistry/math level of science.
I think it's hovering around medicine. Where there is a seemingly art form to deal with the realities of our too complex biology.
There are pretty clear differences in what a BS in Computer Science represents from different schools.
1st Tier schools a Bachelor's degree holder has most of the fundamentals of mathematics within computer science. Complexity of algorithms, complexity of operations on various data structures, models of computation, problems that can be solved with different models, etc..
20 years on from going to school it took me a long time to figure out a lot of schools don't cover almost all of that until you're working on a Master's degree or Ph. D. It's really surprising.
I think some of CS questions in interviews are because the degrees are so variable. I don't think this is a problem when you're hiring a Mechanical Engineer or a Civil Engineer who is licensed. All the schools need to teach to a uniform enough standard that their graduates can pass the licensing requirements.
CS is a mess. The Top Tier schools seem like they may be so much better that a Bachelor's degree is worth more than a Master's degree from other places.
Its a club, sv has always been a smart boys frat. They like you ir they dont, skills come second. They are important, but frontend dev can always be taught.
This is complicated by PERM process for green cards. While many companies might not give damn about college degrees it is safe for them to advertise the job as if it requires college degrees. Just open the San Jose Mercury news and see all those job postings. There will be ads like "Want an individual with Masters Degree or Bachelors degree with 2 years of experience with courses in AI, Database and Web Programming".
There might be artificial factors requiring the factories to hire people with white collar education.
I was in your same position until I decided to just get the degree. It was a positive experience that I now recommend to anyone in the same position, because:
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.
The same thing happens if interested in a graduate degree. The work is not nearly as hard as it is claimed to be, and ones real world work experience dwarfs graduate school projects. When completing, one gains confidence as well as realizes what a load of BS these degrees really are.
I don't really agree with this for all people. I'm sure it's true for some, but I'm less sure that it's widely applicable. I got a CS degree from a fairly well ranked (somewhere in the 25-50 range) school.
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.
Wondering whether it was a second grade company and a low paying position in SV?
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.
Reading the first few lines of the paywall makes it seem like the WSJ is trying to have its cake and eat it too.
>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.
Ironically the managers in the factory are probably baby boomers who started working their way up from the factory floor straight after high school. Which is the way it should be today.
College is only partially about getting educated directly - it's also about proving you can adult on some level. Can you get to classes on time and manage a schedule that's more complex than "be at this building for 6 hours a day"?
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.
Tbh, there's so much variance between colleges / unis - hell, even between classes at those school - to use it as any meaningful predictor for such things.
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.
To echo this sentiment, I probably only attended ~45% of my classes throughout all of college.
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.
I met a fellow at a Google I/O event who was working for a very large, well-known company here in Canada who was living in Ontario working for the company full time while he completed his CS degree at UBC. He would just fetch the coursework, complete it, and never attend a class until there were finals then he would fly out and complete them before returning to work. Attendance can even be an inhibitor as his employer hired him knowing his situation and because he was going to graduate with a degree. Granted this guy was clearly very smart so I can imagine why they accepted those conditions.
> College is only partially about getting educated directly - it's also about proving you can adult on some level. Can you get to classes on time and manage a schedule that's more complex than "be at this building for 6 hours a day"?
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.
I really liked the graph at the end showing output rising as total numbers of employees decreases. To me it was a good logical illustration of why you would need more specialized/educated workers
True. Bringing back manufacturing jobs looks a lot different than what your average person might imagine. You won't have 100 low-skilled but highly paid people manning an assembly line, it'll be 5 engineers and robots.
Exactly. Like IG Metal instead of AFL-CIO. Organized labor pushback is the only way to get fair pay, benefits and conditions. Furthermore, workers need to be members on the Board of Directors, as in most advanced economies. Finally, if you want to have a really good company where people care about their job, quality and the company, make it a co-op to where workers attain ownership and profits too.
The universal problem might be most tech workers stereotypically can't see the "big picture" of the value/power of solidarity, especially when many assume they're being well-compensated, when if fact they're being cheated along with everyone else except the owners and the extremely rich.
Most people will normalize and accept their current situation, including slavery, and keep doing the same thing while believing nothing can be done about it (learned helplessness).
Old guy trying to put things together ahead:
I think that this mentality may have started as a result of the Griggs vs Duke Power Co case from 1970. Griggs was a black man who was turned down a promotion because he failed a company aptitude test, which was later determined to be racially biased against him . . . something to that effect. Companies were hesitant to continue using such tests, so they started requiring college degrees instead. Higher demand for higher education led to higher costs.
... requiring college degrees, of course, being a nice way to wash your hands of any controversy while still effectively enjoying the same biased applicant filtering
Important to note it was only determined to be biased on the basis of disparate impact, which I think is a baloney concept. In other words, if one group of people doesn't do as well on something as another group on average, the thing can be considered a violation of the 14th amendment.
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.
I think the problem is that there's no way to tell if it's just an unintended correlation or if the test was chosen intentionally because it favors the racial majority. In that case, the only way to prevent the latter is to ban all of them.
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.)
It's a bit more complicated than that. Duke Power Co had an explicit policy restricting its black employees to "labor" positions. It changed its requirements exactly 1 day after the 1964 Civil Rights Act took effect, and added a mechanical proficiency and Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test to its requirements. The Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test itself isn't a terrible good measure of fluid or crystal intelligence, but it does a good job of measuring how much you remembered from high school... although some of the questions are word problem versions of "How many tablespoons in 2.5 cups" which IMO is just rote crap.
Yes, we were taught SI in middle school (and I think even a little in elementary school) -- for a country which would be all SI by the time we graduated. So that was basically the worst of all possible outcomes.
That case actually covered disparate impact of high school degrees as well, and the trend towards requiring college degrees is also exhibited outside the USA.
Could some of this be due to increased amount of automation meaning the factory floor jobs are actually more technical because you're fixing/troubleshooting robots, rather than doing manual labour?
Just about everything is require a 4-year degree or 5-10 years of experience for entry level work anymore. As someone without a degree, it sucks.
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.
When you have a dime a dozen ______ Studies majors it makes it pretty easy to find. And having a _____ Studies degree is a good indicator of someone who is willing to sit and do administrative level work for at least 4 years without getting bores
60 years ago you could hire plenty of bright, talented high school graduates, especially those with poor English/History grades but good Math/Shop grades. Now the high school counselors push all of the bright, talented students and then some to go on to college. So you have to wait a few years and hire then after college.
It's a result of a much higher proportion of HS graduating classes going on to college.
It's criminal. They are forcing working class people to take on student loans. We are being forced to become slaves to the Government. We are all sharecroppers now. We can't recover from this level of exploitation. The US is dead.
Edit: Hackernews has manipulated the title from "American Factories Demand White-Collar Education for Blue-Collar Work" to "College-educated workers are taking over the American factory floor." Can you guys be any more lame in your attempt to shape the narrative? Truly disgusting.
The people of this country are on the verge of going to war. I think it is quite substantive to express the sentiment that requiring college degrees for jobs that do not require a degree is an exploitative practice that is bringing us closer to a complete meltdown in this nation. People need to stop pussyfooting around the issues. The people of this nation will not be turned into slaves by any convoluted schemes. If you want to push comments like this under the rug, fine. It will end up in your face eventually.
I don't agree that America is getting ready for Civil War 2.0 -- but there is a huge problem of 'Despair' in the US. There are, it seems, more and more 'roadblocks' to achieving the Good Life (tm). Working hard -- by itself -- is not enough. A lot of folks -- for whatever reasons -- will not get college degrees. Should that mean they are forever unemployed and unemployable? Or be stuck in dead-end jobs? If so, that's damning those folks to a life filled with Despair and Uncertainty - who may turn to drugs and liquor to mollify the pain. I've not seen a single viable solution to this problem so far. It is this unsolved problem that is mostly the cause of strife in the USA today -- and, unless solved, will indeed shred the fabric of society in the USA.
It's not complicated. Wealth has been stripped from the people and is now held primarily by a few oligarchs. Much competition is fake. The bargaining power of workers is constantly undermined by monopolies and exploitation of overseas labor often working in inhumane conditions for meager pay.
It seems like we live in a post reason world. The reason for all this despair is right in front of everyone's face, but they refuse to acknowledge it: corruption. This corruption will not back down and our government has ceased to represent the people.
I hear people like you speak all the time. You are so insulated from the people of this nation it seems. You are probably in some ivory tower somewhere. You probably don't know that there are militias forming all over the nation or that the American people have a larger arsenal in terms of guns than any army in the world.
It's clear to me now that all the surveillance and reduction of freedoms pushed through after 9/11 was in preparation for the inevitable uprising the government is anticipating. Patriotic citizens may be pushed to a point where they become terrorists. Everyone wants to live in peace, but they keep pushing down on our throats. There will be a breaking point where people snap.
I pray things can be turned around politically. I don't advocate violence and hope it never comes to that.
HN is not for political and ideological battle, and certainly not flamewar. It's for intellectual curiosity. Those things can't coexist; flames will quickly take the site over completely if allowed to, so we can't allow them to. Please use HN as intended.
That's not a statement about political and ideological concerns being unimportant—on the contrary, they're more important than most of what gets posted here. It's just a statement about what kind of website this is.
This is a discussion about corporate hiring requirements, not government hiring requirements.
I completely understand the anti-bureaucratic standpoint, but it is good recognize that bureaucracies can be found in organizations that are not "the government". I'm sure you can even find them in large enough families.
There is no distinction between corporations and the government in America. The corruption is not even a secret anymore. The people of this nation are run through so many debt pipelines in the pursuit of a simple life. Everyone is profiting off the people because our corrupt government no longer protects us. Wealth is being stripped away from citizens like never before. The student debt pipeline is just another aspect of this corrupt systems complete control of the people.
I know people in silicon valley are caught up in a mania and don't give a shit about their fellow countrymen, but the corruption will come for you too. You watch with complete indifference as your fellow countrymen die from despair all around the country because their jobs are being taken from them, often leaving them no options. That corruption will come for you someday too. And there will be no one left to hear your screams.
This "fuck you, I got mine" attitude will doom us all.
This mentality keeps on going right up through high-paid white collar work. All job postings inflate the minimum requirements and everybody wants someone else to train their employees.
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.
Isn't that true of any market though? Everyone wants to pay less for everything, and will shop around and haggle and negotiate to find the best deal. I don't see how that alone is a problem, if you get an offer and the salary is lower than you want to work for, don't take it.
> 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.
I mean, if you can't see that there is something different about the current market space we are in now vs the one in the 70s/80s I don't know what to tell you other than to read more or talk to people who lived through it.
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.
It is the same way the market has always been, everyone always want to pay the best bang for the buck. Back then college dropout is the best bang fror the buck, not many people has college degree. Now more people has college degree, why would company hire someone without degree if they can good hire those who has?
That's kinda dodging the issue though. Is the market still functioning with the same principles it always has? Yes, absolutely. But where does a market where employers generally have more resources and power than employees (even if it's just a little bit) necessarily slowly gravitate towards? A market where prospective employees try to qualify as much as possible to stand out (whether that is actually required or useful for the job doesn't matter, what matters is that it increases the likelihood of getting hired), and in a world where you can essentially "buy" qualification for a lot of money, and go into debt for that money, that results in a lot of (often unnecessary) debt.
> if you can't see that there is something different about the current market space we are in now vs the one in the 70s/80s I don't know what to tell you other than to read more or talk to people who lived through it.
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.
> Everyone wants to pay less for everything, and will shop around and haggle and negotiate to find the best deal. I don't see how that alone is a problem, if you get an offer and the salary is lower than you want to work for, don't take it.
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.
Right, but from the thread for this post it seems like it’s much harder to even get to the point where you can talk to an employer, and instead you won’t even be able to pass the set of hard requirements that seemingly didn’t exist a couple decades ago. And that just makes it hard for people to really show what they’re good at. (Personal anecdote: I think every job I’ve had has little to do with what I’m actually good at, because I’ve found it hard to sell that sort of thing convincingly on a resume. So I never meet the people who’d be able to judge me appropriately in those topics.)
On the other hand, I go to nwcpp.org meetings, and there's always an outfit there stoning every tern looking for C++ programmers. I've been contacted by Symmetry Investments with 20 D programming positions to fill. Tech companies sponsor and attend tech conferences for the purpose of finding engineers to hire.
Giving an hour presentation is a fantastic way to sell your abilities. Tech conferences are often desperately looking for someone, anyone, to give a talk. Meetups, and nwcpp.org, are always looking for presenters. I often fill in at nwcpp and give a D talk because they couldn't find a C++ speaker. I often get contacted by conference organizers looking for speakers.
Employers will troll through github accounts looking for recruits. Want to get noticed? Contribute to a significant open source project. There is no gate there. Anyone can contribute.
Shotgunning out resumes is generally the most useless way to get hooked up.
I assume you mean “worthwhile” from the selfish perspective of a worker competing in the labour market. Overall, writing résumés and “selling yourself” is a waste of time that is necessary to deter bad actors. People who believe in the “signalling theory” of education think this extends to the whole education system.
Then why is everyone insistent on importing cheaper labor from India and China? They're more willing to do the work for less.
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.
> 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.
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:
Thanks for pointing this out, and you're right that there is good information out there. I meant the popularly reported unemployment numbers which show things as "better than ever". They don't match people's actual satisfaction with the job market.
Silicon Valley is full of new grads. People routinely make Senior in two years; at some companies, there's something wrong if you go more than two years between promotions (e.g. you must be senior by four years).
You are spot on about requirements. Businesses are unwilling to simply be honest a lot of the time with job posting sites. It is enough to turn to twitter DMs/networking just to avoid all of the bullshit.
>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.
My company does a good job of recruiting college students as interns, and then converting them to junior engineers when they graduate. Unfortunately they all leave within a couple years and generally double their salaries when they do.
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
Are they doing exit interviews. I’m not talking about the day before or day of exit. But they should be done 30 days after to allow the employee to reflect.
This is not true at all, every large Silicon Valley company hires new college grads by the boatload every year. Literally thousands and thousands every single year. It’s mostly only the smaller underfunded companies that refuse to hire new grads because they don’t have the resources to indulge someone who can’t hit the ground running and needs time to ramp up.
Salaries in programmer are really high compared to practically any other field that requires as little experience as programming does. If you want to verify this, put an ad in the paper for a junior position and say that you only require bootcamp experience, a related degree, or demonstrated experience with open source software. Offer the median salary for a software developer in your area. I bet you won't have enough time to interview even 1/10th of those people. And with the complete lack of credentials you are asking for, you will have practically nothing to help you narrow down the candidates. You might as well interview random selections.
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.
You are 100% right that my view is clouded by the relative youth of the software industry. Achieving seniority is a much longer road elsewhere.
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.
I agree with that. My best advice is to look for work where you are doing meaningful work and don't worry so much about salary until a few years in your career.
when will the reverse happen? College seems to have very little value added these days, so you would expect people with blue-collar educations to be able to take over white collar jobs.
Take this from a hiring manager: college degree alone is not worth the paper it's written on. What counts is what you've actually learned. Easily 8 out of 10 people who nominally have "CS degrees" can't implement fizzbuzz on a sheet of paper. It's nuts. I don't get how they even graduated.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadI’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.
Once blue collar work starts paying more than white collar work, it will become “cool” again.
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.
Nursing is the only field on there that could be considered well compensated. There's this mystique around nursing that it's some crazy well-paying position, but it's really not. When you consider the education requirements and the work involved, it's alright. $35/hr is pretty good, except you have to maintain a license, clean up peoples' shit, be nice to assholes, and get berated by doctors. Or you can take a huge pay cut to go work in a doctors office. (source: married a nurse that couldn't make it 10 years before changing careers)
Teachers make a bit more than the median wage, but most jobs require a masters degree to progress beyond a certain point. Hair dressers require licensing and a surprising amount of education (up to 1,500 hours) to work in mostly flat-rate jobs, sometimes without benefits. And clerical work is basically the lowest tier work in an office.
Not listed: dental hygienists. Also a traditionally female job which has crazy education requirements for mediocre pay.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes395012.htm
And back in the day the entry requirements for Advanced apprentices where high - more stringent than Nursing or direct entry to a bank
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.
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.
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.
People go to graduate school to learn new things and, specifically, to learn to discover new things. A PhD is essentially an apprenticeship for researchers. You spend very little time in the classroom, maybe a half dozen classes or so over as many years.
If you go for the title or for the money, you're going to be very disappointed, very quickly.
Not everyone needs to go to Princeton but everyone who wants a degree and is willing to do the requisite learning should be given the opportunity at a solid degree.
Further, outside of some niche circumstances, most of the people who wouldn't "thrive" would be much more able if the earlier systems hadn't failed them so spectacularly.
>most of the people who wouldn't "thrive" would be much more able if the earlier systems hadn't failed them so spectacularly.
Most? Maybe, maybe not. Some amount of them absolutely, but that's once again a different problem to solve, not something to band-aid over later.
Personally, I'm totally ok with making college just as mandatory as high school as long as it doesn't place an undue burden on individuals.
Some food for thought: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/11/educat...
Also, we know that education rates skew heavily with SES. It's much more an issue of availability and quality of education than it is some kids being dumb or something...
We need to start questioning bad assumptions about education. Shuffling money around isn't going to do it.
Yes, but it's the same question. Initial schooling is implicitly accepting a working age adult contributing no income for four years. We're just accustomed to it.
> what assumptions do you think need to change?
* 18 year olds are capable of making decisions about what career they will want for the rest of their lives
* Leaving (or pushing back entering) the work force for four years in pursuit of a degree is a nigh-universal good
* Taking four years of time / 120 credit hours is a reasonable and good target around which to structure degrees, regardless of what amount of knowledge must / should be imparted
* Training on the job cannot replace any meaningful amount of what four year degrees can offer
* Anyone can get a degree, and should be encouraged to do so regardless of whether or not they actually can or will
I mean, there are more, but that's a good start.
Even if you did get rid of government guaranteed loans, companies would happily step in to grant people guaranteed loans in exchange for servitude over the rest of their lives. If they don't find a well-earning job well that's even better.
There were multiple non-government loan options back when I was in college that were just that.
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.
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.
See, education is worth something
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.
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'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).
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.
Download the video/audio file, put on headphones and turn up the volume. You will hear these people committing these crimes. Audio was broadcast into my apartment by outdated surveillance equipment illegally embedded witihin my walls. This very same technology was being used to broadcast me to the internet for five years without my consent. I own this footage. Please use this to prosecute all found within. Note: I am obliviously speaking throughout the video, and it can be quite loud at times relative to the desired content. The are dozens more links, including these, that can be found in this PDF last updated 7Dec2019 132 pages:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJ...
Members of the "Illuminati"; "...an underground organization of homosexuals and child rapists..." (page 26 - Obama, Dorsey).
President Donald Trump:
Accepts a four billion dollar bribe here at 10:18am 4Jan2019:
3JanCh3_900-1100.avi
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77...
3JanCh2_900-1100.avi
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LUmVygl_q0XVs8h2cWr8jZl-24f...
3JanCh4_1000-1100.mp3
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZpP1pJbJakBgg-y-MWNozTxp3wJ...
Rapes and kills a dozen boys, including five in a who can rape 5 boys to death the fastest' game:
14JanCh3_600.mp3
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ufPmglde9Mep0m6xYMJ9c4TWTjj...
14JanCh2_600-700.mp3
https://drive.google.com/file/d/136qLJdEn8eCs9tI4QtIxl4opW_L...
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi:
Accepts a $3 billion dollar bribe at 10:33am 17Jan2019 to ensure Asian boys can get through the border undocumented to be raped:
17JanCh3_949-1100.avi
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eodHu4o5Cm3xEWhDqipSuTj-M1C...
17JanCh4_1017-1100.avi
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-nWEQbempkVZSz230j9wTyduZN...
Also "preps" boys with First Lady Melania Trump, as in she performs oral sex on the boys’ penis and anus, as a child rapist like Henry Porter would, while trying to remove fecal matter from the boy prior to handing them over to be raped and subsequently murdered, for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who decides he would rather just have ten billion dollars instead....
- undergraduate degree
- ability to carry heavy weights
Which struck me as antithetical, but it looks like it's now the norm.
> In 2017, 77,900, or 7%, of the firefighters were female. Of the career firefighters 13,400 (4%) were female firefighters. There were 64,500 volunteer firefighters who were female, 9% of the total number of volunteer firefighters.
https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Data-research-and-too...
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.
Right - and I disagree and think that doesn't match up to reality - plenty of jobs legitimately and have always required both.
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
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.
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.
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 don't think you're contradicting fossuser's narrative. Being correctly socialized (evaluated as an adult) is being maladjusted (evaluated as a student). By this theory, homeschooled kids are well equipped to interact with the world, but unsuited to interact with college students.
Socialization is an issue because, depending on the size of the community you interacted with and how integrated your parents let you be with the rest of America, many of us who were more sheltered are literally from a different culture that people who live in the same country. I have worked long and hard to be able to socialize with people from ‘Regular’ America, and I still, nearly 20 years after I graduated high school, and more easily socialize with people from a Midwestern conservative homeschooled background.
I sometimes tell people I grew up the in the same geography as you, but not the same place.
You're not missing anything.
I tend to think it's a good thing when people from one part of the US are able to socialize with other people in different situations. Insularity is a lot of the reason we're in the mess we're in today.
We're in the very early stages of homeschooling our kids and all we've noticed is that kids on the playground who go to school are surprisingly mean (obviously not most of them, but on average). Thanks to the internet, our kids aren't missing out on pop culture, but they're also not taking their social cues from the coolest 7 year old. Seems like a win-win.
The kids I knew weren’t “acting like adults” in college - they were off.
Didn’t know how to hold a conversation, they were uncomfortable, and had a hard time with social cues and basic listening/including people in conversation.
If I had to speculate I’d guess they had a harder time modeling other people’s mental states along with just generally knowing less what to do - which I think comes from having less peer social exposure to learn from. This creates a feedback loop of social anxiety which can be limiting.
Part of the reason it may be hard to distinguish homeschooled people in the workplace is because they’re largely not there.
It’s hard enough to develop comfortable social skills even with siblings and a lot of exposure. I’d be worried that removing your kids from an environment where they’d get a lot of exposure makes this even harder for them in the long run.
As for homeschooled people in the workplace, my hunch is that there are more than you think there are, and you don't notice because they look like regular adults, but I have no proof! I happen to know a few professionals who were homeschooled, but I never would have known without having had a conversation about our kids and mentioning homeschooling.
I'd be curious to ask adults that were homeschooled if they would want to do the same for their kids.
I'd wonder even if it's the common case they end up perfectly normal adults if it's hard for them prior to that.
I think I'd be nervous about being able to do it effectively for my own kids (both for the social and academic reasons).
That doesn't mean I don't think it's a solvable problem and there is probably a way to create a community of people to do this well, but that might just end up looking like a secular private school.
Anecdote of 1. I have many friends who were homeschooled who homeschool their kids, and many who refuse to.
The home school group will always include more unusual cases that didn't fit the public school mold. So the entire group gets labeled, when we really should just probably avoid stereotypes for that group.
There are just too many vastly different reasons someone could be home schooled. They could be preforming at a higher level than average, or lower. Yes in general they have less access to peers their own age, but I don't know what percent of "poor social skills" is due to lack of social exposure.
This is exactly the problem. They can relate to adults but not to their teenage peers. I'd bet they feel terribly uncomfortable at social events with only kids their age present.
Edit: this is in reply to ksdale, not sure why I can't reply to your comment
All of this is to say, that just because school better aligns an individual's behavior with that of their expected peer group, it doesn't mean that's a good thing.
None of this is stuff you learn by spending your teenage years exclusively with siblings (homeschooled) or chilling out playing video games 24/7 with a couple other quiet kids (nerdy/sheltered). When I say "jackass" I'm specifically referring to the guys who were like this in high school, who were invariably the ones in college doing stupid things at parties to impress their new friends and also treating girls like crap because they were suddenly thrown into a social whirlwind they couldn't handle with any level of maturity.
To be fair, I don’t think anyone learns much that is important by being socially sheltered like you describe. When I advocate homeschooling, that is not what I mean.
Sadly, our culture has lost many of the (adult) social constructs that used to bring people together, leaving school as one of the only viable options for kids to be social with one another. Healthy homeschooling necessarily involves intentionally finding social outlets for kids and teenagers, which is harder than letting school stand in—but, I would argue—is much easier when the adults in the family are pursuing healthy relationships and social outlets with other adults in various walks of life who are raising kids of their own (and I don’t mean at bars, dance clubs, etc.; there are still some non-kid-hostile places where adults and kids can both socialize with peers and be involved in something they enjoy, like churches, volunteering, fishing, hiking, biking, sports, etc.).
I think you're onto something here, especially because teenagers these days reportedly spend less time with friends than any previous generation. As a 2010 high school grad I always find these stats pretty alarming: http://theconversation.com/teens-have-less-face-time-with-th...
Feels like kids get home from school and immediately get online - they mainly interact with peers through social media and video games, which is totally different from being face to face. That has to be detrimental in some way. Most parents probably work so much they don't have time to have their own hobbies to share with their kids so unless the kids are on sports teams year round they're likely not doing a whole lot of IRL socializing outside of school. I think more kids are being socially sheltered these days, homeschooled or not.
I think I've mostly caught up. I moved to NYC for college, which was sort of my socialization boot camp. I learned how to start and maintain relationships VERY quickly. If you don't learn to like (or at least tolerate) just about any kind of human, the city can become very lonely and difficult.
A very stubborn part of my brain still judges Very Extroverted people and, weirdly, athletes. I'm working on it.
Thanks for asking!
I’d have mentioned it if I had anticipated this response.
I don't regret being homeschooled through elementary school as it gave me plenty of opportunity to explore areas that I was interested in, only mildly regret missing middle school since many of my friends consider it a miserable time of their lives, but I absolutely regret missing freshman year of high school.
I would very highly recommend that any parents thinking about homeschooling their kids very thoroughly consider their choices. So many of the parents I knew taught their kids at home out of fear and ended up negatively impacting their children's lives dramatically.
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.
We participate in a homeschool community which gives weekly (if not more often) opportunities for both structured and unstructured (i.e. play) social interactions. Balance this with home-interactions between their siblings, kids in the neighborhood, and folks at our church, they interact with a pretty big array of people, and we end up getting to work with them on issues a lot more diligently and quickly.
Our group has a wide range of social skillset folks. From kids who are very hard-to-manage to visible gifted and talented people.
IMO, the "problem" only exists if you, as a parent, don't get involved in the raising of your children.
In this comparison weekly is just the weekend piece. The cumulative time difference is dramatic.
Recognizing authorities and hierarchies are what most people mean when they talk about socializing I think.
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.
If there were a lot of homeschooled kids with good social skills I’d still expect to have met some.
Unless you're quite young, it's doubtful that you've interacted with many of these next-gen homeschool kids.
I think it's pretty likely given that statement and the small population of home-schooled kids to begin with, that confirmation bias explains your entire experience.
But let's assume it doesn't. Home-schooled kids who do have good social skills are likely to realize that there is a bias against them and thus they aren't likely to advertise that they were home-schooled.
There’s a big part of the problem there. If you know ahead of time that your kids will need lots of socializing with other kids, you can mitigate the relative isolation of homeschooling pretty effectively. Sports clubs, co-op groups, church groups, etc. — all are great places for kids to make friends and socialize.
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 also some value in learning to stand up for friends and handle complex social dynamics which don’t go away when you become an adult.
Being removed from this entirely is probably not helpful, though obviously there are limits.
In my experience, most of the social dynamics of childhood completely disappear in adulthood. Adult generally don't spend most of their waking time with 30 or so other adults who were all born within 6 months of each other.
The only place that was even remotely similar was when I worked retail during college.
And if you could get the socialization without the bullying, that would be great. But I'm not sure there's a way to do that within the existing school structure, so your point seems to be a purely theoretical one.
True. Unfortunately, a lot of the dysfunctional socialization in school actually gets carried into adulthood.
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.
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.
Maybe you are the exception, but homeschooling is generally centered around religion and churns out students who are FAR worse academically than if they went through even a really poor public school.
Socialization is a hard problem to fix. I know they try with after school sports/activities/clubs, but that's not quite the same as being around peers for 8+ hours a day. In non-homeschool, the children are around other children more than adults/parents.
The other homeschooled kids I interacted with were homeschooled for religious reasons or so they could help on the farm. They were poorly socialized and poorly educated as best as my then eleven year old self could tell.
I was homeschooled for a while and saw a lot of the other homeschooling families via the school district resource center thing, which even the real extremists interacted with at least some. From my perspective, it was broken into three major groups: religious conservatives concerned with the moral purity of their kids, upper-middle class professionals interested in accelerating their kids as much as possible, and a grab bag of students from various socioeconomic stripes who'd had trouble with the standard school system for various reasons.
I was one of the second. My mom has advanced degrees in education. My dad's an attorney. I did fine, as did basically everybody else in that cohort. Even then, the impression my friends and I had was that the religious kids spent an awful lot of time on literal bible study and weren't so hot on "actual" education. These suspicions were borne out when it was time for the state standardized tests they wanted homeschooled kids to take - every kid from the second of those cohorts (and many from the third) blasted though them, while those from the first visibly struggled. The religiously-motivated cohort also managed to out-weird a bunch of kids who spent much of their time on mid-2000s 4chan as young teens, which is actually pretty impressive.
Anyway, I agree that the reason a student is homeschooled (and by proxy the resources and pedagogical methods available to them) is a much better predictor of overall outcomes than a simple homeschooled/not binary. When there's such significant clustering in a category, trying to make judgments only utilizing knowledge/stereotypes regarding the category as a whole is a good way to be misled.
Maybe raising kids in the city makes them more streetwise, informed and cautious by sheer number of social experiences in the real world, and rural maybe more Turnip Truck? Like socialized and unsocialized pets? So goes the stereotype. Dunno.
> "Mean ACT Composite scores for homeschooled students were consistently higher than those for public school students" from 2001 through 2014, according (PDF) to that testing organization, although private school students scored higher still.
Graduates of religious schools also outperform public school graduates on the SAT: https://www.capenet.org/pdf/Outlook399.pdf
1) The most religious are the least likely to be college bound.
2) "Regarding ethnicity, for example, 72 percent of the homeschool students were White, 5 percent were Asian, Asian American, or Pacific Islander, and 4 percent were Black or African American, while of all college-bound seniors, the corresponding percentages were 49, 12, and 13. The average highest level of parental education was notably higher for the homeschool students than for all students."
Same study also points out that 60% of homeschooling in North Carolina is for religious reasons.
The studies without selection bias show that homeschooling is inferior in almost all cases. The big problem being that the cases of poor schools where homeschooling would be most helpful are also the same places where the parents are least likely to have the bandwidth and resources to homeschool properly.
HN has an extremely high selection bias because they are 1) the most likely to homeschool for quality-of-life reasons and 2) the most likely to be earning enough money that a parent can drop completely out of the workforce to homeschool.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
Like kids in headstart or Pre-K programs. They start out ahead of their peers in kindergarten, bit those differences are completely gone by second or third grade.
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.
It's not what people mean when they ask if you went to college though.
>Many engineering programs, for instance, are intensely focussed on the central focus from day one.
If they are accredited, they still have a substantial liberal arts component.
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.
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.
It is easier, for some people, to be precisely wrong rather than roughly correct.
I agree generally that most universities are bad at producing students who can think for themselves (to be clear, my reference was to Scottish universities that do a four-year degree versus three-year in England). You don't need any extra classes though. Just create classes that test for this and doing classes from other areas will probably help to. Also, clearly, universities try to create courses in a way that limits complaining from students and makes it all about grades...which isn't helpful.
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 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.
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.
That is partly why I changed careers.
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).
And to pre-empt the inevitable "5 years experience is just as good," that 5 years can't come unless you either a) got that degree 5 years ago to get a job for that experience, b) managed to befriend a hiring manager, or c) started a company.
What an applicant can or can't do means nothing if they don't make it to the part of the hiring process where they can demonstrate it, at least without blatantly lying on their resume.
I also assume that very few places are actually verifying educational credentials.
At this point with my CV no one even asks about academics and hasn’t for a decade or so, the work/references speak for themselves.
I’d hate to be young in this market though which is why I’m so happy a good chunk of my time is/will be spent on the mentoring side.
Helping people get started in a rewarding career is itself rewarding.
Minimum requirements
- 4 year degree
- 5 years experience
Interview:
- What are some of your major accomplishments?
---
Applicant A (me, the following scenario is literal copy pastes from email exchanges, with identifying information changed):
No degree, 13 years direct experience
Company: "Hope all is well, Ryan! I wanted to extend a virtual wave and thank you for your interest in joining our team. You obviously have many of the skills we're looking for. However, for the -job title I applied to- role we require a BA/BS degree as well as previous experience in a broker role doing entries and customs classifications."
At this point I forward the email to a friend
Some days later, after friend shot the CEO an email semi-chastizing him for demanding degrees
Company: "Hi Ryan,
My name is -name-, I run Commercial Recruiting at -company-. I was hoping that I would be able to connect with you next week as I would love to chat about the -job title- role in -city-. We have made so recent changes to our role requirements and looking at your background, I think you could be an excellent fit!"
Applicant interviews: asked "what is your superpower?" "what sort of major projects have you worked on?" "What major career accomplishments have you made?"
This was for an entry-level position that I've been doing longer than the company has existed...
Company: "Hope you're doing well, Ryan. I wanted to drop you a note to let you know that after discussions with the team, it seems we’re not quite the right fit for your skills at this time. " email received WHILE I was on the phone doing the interview, minutes before it concluded.
--
Hypothetical applicant B: successfully exited a company unrelated, with no degree, and no experience in the field
Company: "hey, you sold your company for xx million, well you're probably not right for this position but congrats you're our new president of enhanced quantum user AI learning experience! Congrats, uh, you're the first person in that division, we were really impressed with the AI company you sold to Megacorp, here's 20 million in VC money, make is some AI!"
--
Hyp0thetical applicant C: has a degree, has no experience, has unrelated experience in CS
Company: "hey, could you describe that project you mentoned in your CV, it sounds really neat. We see you also dod coding for XYZ Company, well you don't have any experience doing the job but that's ok we can teach you and it'd be great because you can go ahead and tell us how to improve our systems and possibly even do some of the coding yourself, congrats you're hired! Seriously though, don't worry, the complex legal paperwork and ever changing regulations isn't that big of a deal we'll just have someone help you for 6 months and check all of your submissions"
Well, besides the hordes of employers who would jump at the chance to hire somebody who graduated from mit with a 4.0 you mean...
I suspect it is small as a % of employers, but their interest / pay may make it very much worthwhile.
Can corroborate this experience, however I do not think it has much to do with having a degree as much as it does with having the motivation to learn and excel. Our industry has people who are in it to just coast through life as safely as they can, and it shows in the interview and the day-to-day work life.
In my limited experience, the feistiest of developers have been those who have learned how to code well, and ship software at an age before they set out to do their degrees (and still went and did a traditional, 4-year CS degree).
I have had a great pleasure of working alongside some of them, and to this day I have yet to see this level of aptitude be matched by people who got into CS as a matter of course for a job.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
A poor family can make better tenants because they need the place to function and need a stable home. A rich college student with rich parents will sue you to death over anything if they choose to break the lease or a dispute arises.
Anybody who's heard or increased the rent like that must be in a rather prime location, definitely not in the country side for sure (little jobs and little tenants there).
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
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.
I think it's hovering around medicine. Where there is a seemingly art form to deal with the realities of our too complex biology.
1st Tier schools a Bachelor's degree holder has most of the fundamentals of mathematics within computer science. Complexity of algorithms, complexity of operations on various data structures, models of computation, problems that can be solved with different models, etc..
20 years on from going to school it took me a long time to figure out a lot of schools don't cover almost all of that until you're working on a Master's degree or Ph. D. It's really surprising.
I think some of CS questions in interviews are because the degrees are so variable. I don't think this is a problem when you're hiring a Mechanical Engineer or a Civil Engineer who is licensed. All the schools need to teach to a uniform enough standard that their graduates can pass the licensing requirements.
CS is a mess. The Top Tier schools seem like they may be so much better that a Bachelor's degree is worth more than a Master's degree from other places.
There might be artificial factors requiring the factories to hire people with white collar education.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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".
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.
That's why.
The universal problem might be most tech workers stereotypically can't see the "big picture" of the value/power of solidarity, especially when many assume they're being well-compensated, when if fact they're being cheated along with everyone else except the owners and the extremely rich.
Most people will normalize and accept their current situation, including slavery, and keep doing the same thing while believing nothing can be done about it (learned helplessness).
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.)
I'd fail that one today. My high school never taught such things, and I never learned to cook.
Come on. It's not difficult to learn either system. Takes about 10 minutes.
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.
It's a result of a much higher proportion of HS graduating classes going on to college.
Edit: Hackernews has manipulated the title from "American Factories Demand White-Collar Education for Blue-Collar Work" to "College-educated workers are taking over the American factory floor." Can you guys be any more lame in your attempt to shape the narrative? Truly disgusting.
It seems like we live in a post reason world. The reason for all this despair is right in front of everyone's face, but they refuse to acknowledge it: corruption. This corruption will not back down and our government has ceased to represent the people.
I hear people like you speak all the time. You are so insulated from the people of this nation it seems. You are probably in some ivory tower somewhere. You probably don't know that there are militias forming all over the nation or that the American people have a larger arsenal in terms of guns than any army in the world.
It's clear to me now that all the surveillance and reduction of freedoms pushed through after 9/11 was in preparation for the inevitable uprising the government is anticipating. Patriotic citizens may be pushed to a point where they become terrorists. Everyone wants to live in peace, but they keep pushing down on our throats. There will be a breaking point where people snap.
I pray things can be turned around politically. I don't advocate violence and hope it never comes to that.
Edit: A recent article by Chris Hedges that outlines the pilfering of the people in brief: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-great-american-shakedo...
HN is not for political and ideological battle, and certainly not flamewar. It's for intellectual curiosity. Those things can't coexist; flames will quickly take the site over completely if allowed to, so we can't allow them to. Please use HN as intended.
That's not a statement about political and ideological concerns being unimportant—on the contrary, they're more important than most of what gets posted here. It's just a statement about what kind of website this is.
I completely understand the anti-bureaucratic standpoint, but it is good recognize that bureaucracies can be found in organizations that are not "the government". I'm sure you can even find them in large enough families.
I know people in silicon valley are caught up in a mania and don't give a shit about their fellow countrymen, but the corruption will come for you too. You watch with complete indifference as your fellow countrymen die from despair all around the country because their jobs are being taken from them, often leaving them no options. That corruption will come for you someday too. And there will be no one left to hear your screams.
This "fuck you, I got mine" attitude will doom us all.
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.
Right, but from the thread for this post it seems like it’s much harder to even get to the point where you can talk to an employer, and instead you won’t even be able to pass the set of hard requirements that seemingly didn’t exist a couple decades ago. And that just makes it hard for people to really show what they’re good at. (Personal anecdote: I think every job I’ve had has little to do with what I’m actually good at, because I’ve found it hard to sell that sort of thing convincingly on a resume. So I never meet the people who’d be able to judge me appropriately in those topics.)
Giving an hour presentation is a fantastic way to sell your abilities. Tech conferences are often desperately looking for someone, anyone, to give a talk. Meetups, and nwcpp.org, are always looking for presenters. I often fill in at nwcpp and give a D talk because they couldn't find a C++ speaker. I often get contacted by conference organizers looking for speakers.
Employers will troll through github accounts looking for recruits. Want to get noticed? Contribute to a significant open source project. There is no gate there. Anyone can contribute.
Shotgunning out resumes is generally the most useless way to get hooked up.
I can't help but think that the fact that you're Walter Bright may have something to do with that ;)
> Contribute to a significant open source project.
Operative word being "significant". I work on far too many smaller ones…
> Shotgunning out resumes is generally the most useless way to get hooked up.
Agreed.
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.
Exactly, which is why I brought it up as a response to why you wouldn’t just reject any offers that are below what you’d like.
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...,
Ten years is Senior Staff / Principal territory.
>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.
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 mean, that’s an achievement in itself I guess, but ultimately you are mostly training them because you hope they will help you out later.
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.