The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s (2011)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
That young man doesn't need a master's degree, he needs a lesson on how to find a job. Taking people with a proven inability to make real money and adding another 100k of debt on their backs for an equally bogus masters degree is completely irresponsible.
Speaking as a hiring manager (for jobs that pay more than $50k/year), most of the real skills that get people hired have aren't part of a degree.
- Coding? Most of my guys got their knowledge on the job. I did as well... not saying a CS degree doesn't help, but for many basic IT jobs, you don't need it....
- Sales / client mgmt? Learn by doing
- Project management? Go run projects
- Soft skills? Go work with people for a while, under the eye of someone knowledgeable. Get coached. Coach others.
- Writing? Go write something that gets edited by a pro and published. Feedback is good.
- Product knowledge or big blocks of local history? Here's a book, go read it.
Sure, go set the standard of requiring a master's degree to get hired. Know what? The smart folks network their way up.
Proof.
My #3 guy has an MBA
My #2 has a high school degree
I'm just a BA...
Explain this degree thing again?
All programmers do not need masters degrees and there are many good programmers that do not have a BS/BA, but most of those, that are not just whipping out JS, are extreme autodidacts and represent a small part of the population.
Also an MS in CS is not going to put you 100K in debt, in most cases you will have a tuition waiver and a small stipend in the US (TAship).
I think for many an MS in CS would be beneficial but sure it's not necessary .... with more and more JS "monkey" type jobs, it may become an expectation for non Anders Hejlsberg autodidacts that want to make > 100K (though yes this depends on cost of living, but I'm just comparing to your number).
Fry: Good old Coney Island College! Go, Whitefish!
Leela: Don't take this the wrong way, Fry, but you don't seem like the educated type.
Fry: Oh, yeah? [He takes a piece of paper out of his pocket with "Notice of Failure to Graduate" written on it. The CICC logo is a Ferris wheel.] Read it and weep. I'm a certified college dropout.
Leela: Please! Everyone knows 20th century colleges were basically expensive daycare centres.
Farnsworth: That's true. By current academic standards, you're merely a high school dropout.
Fry: What? That's not fair. I deserve the same respect any other college dropout gets. By God, I'm gonna enroll here at Mars University and drop out all over again!
Leela: You won't last two weeks.
Fry: Aww, thanks for believing in me.
Matt Groening: The secret of designing cartoon characters — and I’m giving away this secret now to all of you out there — is: you make a character that you can tell who it is in silhouette. I learned this from watching Mickey Mouse as a kid. You can tell Mickey Mouse from a mile away…those two big ears. Same thing with Popeye, same thing with Batman. And so, if you look at the Simpsons, they’re all identifiable in silhouette. Bart with the picket fence hair, Marge with the beehive, and Homer with the two little hairs, and all the rest. So…I think about hair quite a lot.
Source: http://austinkleon.com/2007/08/28/silhouettes-and-profiles/
But there is far more demand for standard development/architect roles and even those roles command a generous salary.
You can easily hit a wall even with all the books and MOOCs at your disposal, due to having to do all your learning after work when you're tired or on weekends.
To have to go into debt in order to work on interesting things is unfortunate; just how many people who could have made interesting contributions in a variety of areas never do so because of that?
Studying yourself into web dev and such is eminently possible, but if you want to do, for example, deep learning work at even one-half the Richard Socher-level, you almost surely need to go for an advanced degree. It might be different if you're a superhuman autodidact rather than just a "standard" one, but there are a lot more of the latter (a set that I include myself in) than the former.
In software, more supply = hiring people who can just get the job done and not worrying so much about credentials.
And yet, we keep hearing about the constant shortage of programmers. Hmm, I wonder why that is . . .
Some others in this thread have noted that there might be a credentials "arms race" going on—I would add, in particular, in healthcare, education in government, per Tyler Cowen's book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will( Eventually) Feel Better. Parts of big business may have signaling / credentialing disease too.
Bryan Caplan is writing The Case Against Education, and he argues that too much of education is a signalling arms race. Here is one introduction to his thought: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/04/educational_sig_....
Also, you should not that in many cases consultants in other professions often give full resumes including education (even pictures) in their proposals to RFPs, I would think you would be familiar with that in your work.
Anyway, as far as the "can you do it" stuff .... I think HN too often writes off university as a place one might learn "how to do it" .... Oh well. =)
This lack of signal is causing me problems - not only in career progression, but with my actual job! Stakeholders will occasionally look me up online and express their concern with superiors that I'm not from a Go8 university (Australian Ivy League equivalent) and that my formal education is underwhelming.
It's gotten to the point where my employer is considering (and is likely to) enrolling me in the nearest Go8 and giving paid time off from work to attend part time. They'll also pay for the degree.
And the weirdest part yet - the subjects closely correspond to my undergraduate subjects. This isn't an exercise in improving myself - this is solely to act as a signal.
Under this arrangement, I'm clearly the one that benefits. It costs me little in time, and no money. But the whole thing makes no sense. Surely we can create a better signal.
As a grad of a Go8 uni and someone who has worked a couple of decades, I wouldn't worry about this signal stuff. If you want to improve yourself you can do study but it doesn't mean as much to employment as you think.
Maybe in a government job you have a lot of BS from higher up idiots but not in private industry. A year of relevant full time work is like double the value of a year of study when we are evaluating job applicants IMO.
I am saying I would rather employee someone who had worked for a year in my field than someone who had done a Masters straight after their Bachelors.
It's another form of social proof, and it affects not just whether or not you get hired, but how people view you, speak to you, and whether / how much they listen to or consider your opinion. Of course, many people don't give degrees a second thought, but for every one of those, there are plenty who do.
Do the people in power expect everyone to know everything ?
Knowledge is important - but society will stop working if everyone spends their lifetimes studying.
I read it in hacker news a while ago - the amount of new information we are introduced daily in 2015 was equivalent to what humans received in their lifetimes - for most of human history.
We need better methods to organize information - ( this is why google has its insane valuation - and no its not a bubble )
It should not take me 20 years to understand mathematics at the level of newton - how am I supposed to understand another 400 years of maths before I am homeless ?
Its a difficult question to answer but I think its a question my generation has to find an answer - and fast.
You can also just search the internet many types of information and methods instead of having parallel invent it. Making you more effective.
My grandfather had a good standard of income with only apprenticeship (3 years). My father needed apprenticeship + trade school (3 + 2 years) and my generation will probably need a master degree to have the same income level (3 year of preparation + 5 year at the university).
I can only wonder how long my grandchildrens education will be.
[O]n my reckoning, the fraction of human knowledge that is in the curriculum is well under a millionth and diminishing fast. I simply cannot escape from the question: Why that millionth in particular?
Hell, I've heard of professional adults not knowing how to use a linear function to estimate basic financial costs from a baseline and a per-unit cost.
The intellectual standards we expect from people are appallingly low compared to what they're actually capable of.
y = mx + b
("basic financial costs") = ("per unit cost")x + ("baseline")It's a bit hard "confessing" that sort of stuff in a forum like this amongst loads of people who likely are all demonstrably smarter than me in multiple disciplines, and many of whom are self-taught as well. I feel like I should have a 'kick me' sign on me at times - perhaps this is the famed "impostor syndrome"?
FWIW, I wrote "I'm in mensa" not to brag so much as ... I got in through test scores, and (obviously) have some raw measure of ability in cognitive areas, but still wasn't able to immediately get that algorithm from the english. I get what it means, and understand the implications of the algorithm, but couldn't make that immediate jump. The older I get, the harder it is for me to tell when someone is sharp and maybe just can't grasp something immediately, and when they truly can't get it. I probably make more allowances than I did in my youth, precisely because I know my own shortcomings more now than 20 years ago.
If you told me what those words meant, I could probably figure it out ;-)
"Linear function": f(x) = mx+b, or y=mx+b. You know, from 8th-grade algebra.
"Baseline and per-unit cost". So your "baseline" cost is how much you have to pay before you get the first unit of your item. Like, if your buying, say, chocolates, the "baseline" is the cost of the box, with no chocolates in it, or of shipping-and-handling. Then the per-unit costs is just how much you pay for each chocolate.
We then map those onto the math:
"Baseline" -- that's the y-intercept, or "b".
"Per-unit cost" -- that's the multiplier for the number of units, or "m".
And voila, we've got y=mx+b: a simple formula for how much your Christmas chocolates are going to cost you.
We can. But it requires a lot more teachers. And nobody is willing to pay for that.
The public education system in the US is at a rough optimum relative to the amount of parental resources that people are willing to spend. If you want to overcome that, then you need to spend a dramatic amount more on teachers and schools (the Gates Foundation data is quite clear on this--25% expenditure increase only begets about 1-3% student achievement increase--you need nearer to 100% increases to get significant levels of student improvement).
Every year, the H1B quota is 85000 for B.S degree holder and higher (or the equivalent of experience).
In Silicon Valley, I'm hearing 50%+ H1B use in almost all companies. This is also my anecdotal experience in companies outside of DOD. If you don't think this gives mgmt. huge leverage over the workers, I've a bridge to sell you.
BTW, 85,000 is not the actual number. Let's not forget all those other visas like L1, the loopholes for universities, etc.