Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers
insidehighered.com
insidehighered.com
For instance, Gallup has found that generally an employer believes that "critical thinking" is coming up with new, original thought. But in an academic sense, it can mean more picking apart ideas in depth, he said.
Given that their definition of "critical thinking" (which is incorrect,) differs from the academic one, employers are probably responding on a completely different wavelength. That throws this whole survey into question.
As an example, the payment system at my pub went down a few weeks ago and the staff where clueless on what to do, the accepted short term solution (at my insistence) to write down who bought what (we all have accounts) so they can be put into the system later. This is a simple, trivial example, but in jobs like that it makes you manager material.
For example, the skill of top lawyers is inseparably wed to critical thinking. They need to parse arguments and pore over monotonous tomes of legislation, regulatory paperwork, contracts, and case law to find areas of weakness or inconsistency to exploit/tighten up. They do this through slow, methodical analysis, consultation with other experts, and then have to distill and apply the essence of these points into language defendable against industry peers who are working for the other side. This work requires deeply critical thinking, but has nothing to do with "new, original thought".
Awful used to mean awe inspiring, which is clearly what it says, but now means terrible. I'm sure people pointed out that meaning was wrong at the time.
Many years ago, I worked in a photographic store. We developed film and printed photos, primarily. One of the women took in a film for development, wrote the customer's surname in the name box, then wrote "Matt" over the name.
It's fortunate that we would hand out the top slip so we would match the packet numbers, because when the customer came back into the shop we couldn't find her package. We did find one for a Matt Sullivan (or whatever the surname was). It turned out she was quite annoyed with us for not printing it in matte as they asked, so we reprinted it at no charge and she got to keep both sets.
The staff member argued that she had written matte ("See? It says Matt right there." "That's the name, not the paper type. The paper type has an -e at the end.") on it, it's just that language changes and we had to accept and adapt to it. Didn't matter what her argument was, though, because she screwed up and it cost the business money.
Kind of difficult to disagree with this one. I know it's passé these days to worry about trivial things like correct grammar, spelling, and usage. I've had fruitless discussions on this very site where people will argue that it doesn't matter how you use the language if, ultimately, the message somehow manages to get conveyed. Terrible language skills are not just found among new grads though, I've seen them across the workforce, including appalling spelling in communications from the SVP level. There's a non-zero cost, too: the cost of having to get people to repeat themselves, the cost of ambiguity when your manager poorly communicates their wishes, the cost of misunderstood information bubbling up the chain to decision makers. It adds up.
Most of the time terrible language does manage to hinder the message! But the writer doesn't realize this, because for them it's obvious. I had a coworker (who is almost 30 and a college graduate) with this very attitude. A lot of his code comments and documentation had grammar mistakes and quirks (Random periods. In the middle of phrases.) that made it very hard to read and thus understand.
At the same time, a cursory study of German, French, Hebrew, even Japanese would suggest that English spelling is needlessly complicated and ambiguous. Part of addressing this problem for future generations is a push for spelling reform.
It is harder than it looks to fix spelling because in the written language different words that sound the same are spelled differently. Making the written language phonetic would create ambiguity.
Phonetic writing could increase ambiguity but in many cases will not because:
(a) Many of the weird redundant spellings only show up in multi-syllabic words that are quite distinctive, as for example ti for ʃ in caution.
(b) People often can tell apart many shorter homophones, which are frequently mis-spelled by being substituted for each other: road/rode, or their/they’re/there. The fact they are frequently substituted for one another is a clue to the degree which context disambiguates them.
Of what you say and lots of things too. Much of the existing mess is caused by spelling "reform" of the ages past, such as when the Norman scribes half-replaced the conventions evolved by Anglo-Saxon scribes with French ones. It's not very different from https://xkcd.com/927/.
"Inflammable" is confusing because it sounds like the opposite of "flammable"; but the sad fact of history is that "inflammable" has meant "burnable" for centuries while the synonym "flammable" was made up recently -- so we are stuck with both.
But as far as I know, the word "regardless" has been around for ages, and that's fine because it sounds like just what it means: the opposite of "with regard". Whereas "irregardless" should be chucked in the bin as a confusing neologism that sounds like the opposite of what the speaker intends.
It's not in the same category as "for all intensive purposes". But that's just the way language evolves. "Intensive" in that case should be "intents and", which, I believe has the same heritage as "clear and present danger", "crimes and misdemeanors", and "cease and desist". All these phrases are redundant lawyer-speak that came about when the law was being translated from Latin to English in the, what, 14th century in England?
So, yeah, there are people who want to _sound_ educated, thinking they'll use a high-falutin' phrase like "for all intents and purposes", they get it wrong and say "for all intensive purposes", and instantly reveal themselves as the uneducated person they actually are. (But only if their present company includes an actually educated person, of course.)
But rather than passing judgment on uneducated folks for using eggcorns[2], it would be more compassionate to reserve that judgment for the actual content and meaning of their speech, and not the superficial form it takes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irregardless [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/irregardless-real-word-regard... [2] http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/
I am some what prone to that as well as a dyslexic but at 10 I had a reading age of 18+
However you could turn that around and say well maybe your reading comprehension skills are not as good as mine.
Saying its "six of one, half dozen of the other" is a colorful way of saying mistakes are irrelevant; sotojuan is wrong, they don't actually detract from the communication. But you provide no reason.
As for your reading skills, the subject is writing communications, but from your reading skill you can see the value of writing quality.
i myself am not the best at communication, but those problems do not lie in the fact i didnt bother to use caps in a hn post.
Some managers do care about spelling, grammar, and punctuation. I have a 2nd VP who cares about the colors on the charts and graphs delivered to him.
If you can't write in your mother tongue properly you probably can't code properly either.
writing creatively or with nuance is definitely an orthogonal skill to coding, but understanding and following grammar rules requires a very similar syntax-parsing ability to that which is required to write code that will compile. unless you struggle to get simple programs to compile, you very likely have the ability to write with proper grammar, assuming you are willing to make the effort.
I would even argue that the skill of technical writing, where precision and compactness are valued over creative flourish, maps very closely onto the same skills needed for good program design and clean coding style.
One experience that really change my life in many ways was writing a Masters Thesis under an advisor who was anal about explaining the ideas well and about eliminating typos and such. I found it very frustrating at first but I think overall it trained me to pay attention to what I say and write to try and be as clear as possible.
Poor reading comprehension is much more of an issue. Even assuming reading happens is a generous assumption given how often people clearly only read the headlines of stories.
I remember that when I was a new grad, there was a very large part of myself that held a realistic appraisal of my abilities and was therefore scared shitless about my ability to make it in the working world. I was very careful to never let that part of me out in interviews - or, for that matter, to anyone. Confidence only works if you keep up the illusion so thoroughly that it ceases to be an illusion.
And it worked. I got a job at a financial software startup, and then was put in charge of projects that no new grad should ever have been put in charge of. I grew into the role. I left to go found a startup, which is also something that someone with 2 years of work experience had no business doing. That worked too - I may not have been qualified to found a startup, but when I folded it up, I was a lot more qualified as an engineer than most of my other peers with 4 years of work experience. So Google hired me to work on the front page of the search engine, and I grew into that role too.
The majority of my classmates let their accurate perceptions of what they were actually qualified to do govern what they applied to do, and as a result, many were still struggling to get into a career 10 years later. By that point, your self-perception has become reality, and it's much harder to convince potential employers to take the risk that you'll grow into the position. Then they wake up and realize that everybody's faking it and their new manager isn't actually all that much more skilled than them, but (barring a career reset like going to grad school) it's difficult to reset people's perceptions.
Sometimes it actually works to be honest instead of treating it as a game. :)
I've noted here (quite) a number of times that I have a disability that impacts my ability to absorb chunks of written material. I've had an occupational therapist tell me that I shouldn't work in CS or IT (I have a CS degree in spite of that), and several doctors have told me I should stay away from the field, while others have told me that just go with whatever works and don't tell employers I have this disability.
I prefer to be honest, but at the same time I also like to eat most days.
I have an interview for a job in a few days, and no clue what I should do. If they don't ask, do I bring it up? What do I tell them? Most employers in the city are highly discriminatory against people with a disability, even if it means they're not hiring the most qualified one.
(I'm not actually seeking advice here, just musing online.)
It's exceptionally difficult having disabilities, especially when trying to relate it in a professional environment. Though, I've found my own disabilities have been very useful in figuring out what it is that I really want out of a career and life.
Cheers and good luck.
Most people without a disability would focus on their positive attributes, I can't see why you should be any different.
Career managment is code for people who can maintain professional qualifications without supervision, who book the course for themselves before something expires.
Know how to grow, know when to bite your tongue.
Your post suggests that either most people are capable of far more than work situations demand of them, or that you were more capable in practice than you appreciated at the time.
It's either that, or you were very, very lucky - which is possible, but not necessarily probable.
This was the same for me as new manager. I was less confident that I let interviewers see. But in the end I got that confidence for real. "Fake it till you make it"
Professionalism is tough, because we define it (roughly) as seeking the common expectations for the role, but one of those expectations is "professionalism".
And "work ethic"...Im a gen Xer and I feel like millennials are getting dumped on more than the normal generational strife, to a very unfair level. (Example: I see a lot more snowflakes and need for "participation trophies" among those complaining about such things than among the millenials themselves)
Which leads me to wonder, particularly with work ethic, is it the students or the employer that have the unrealistic expectation?
Graduates: I won't say all, but I do think many modern graduates allow themselves to be too easily distracted on a mobile computer they own.
Employeers: High expectations of engagement and 'loyalty', but low pay, low benefits, and lacking support in the environment at work. Somehow able to remain productive when in a highly distracting environment with no expectation of actual tranquility for focus. Is masochist the kind of professional they're describing?
Ultimately this is one of those issues where a clear set of expectations and some metric of measuring them should be set; then an independent review party should measure if just the metric was being met, or if things were normal but the metric was still being met.
While I think there’s some truth in this (and, ahem, not-so-modern grads...), it seems like measuring the wrong thing. If someone posts 50 times a day to whatever the current friendfaceinstabook might be and delivers useful code (or whatever) on a regular basis, isn’t that fine? Focus on the latter, don’t stress about the former.
Colleges try to teach teamwork, but few team projects in coursework are sufficiently complex that they genuinely require teamwork. Since everyone in a course project is taking the same course, no one has irreplaceable expertise. The consequence is that students never have to learn how to work as an organization instead of individuals. The exceptions are club activities like (inter)national engineering design team competitions in which, as in business, genuine failure is possible and success depends on everyone's contributions.
Is the news here that these numbers are much lower than they used to be? Or just that we know them.
People who have worked a long time are in part answering for themselves. They look back at how much they've learned, changed, and developed. How much they had to learn on the job that was never taught in school. Were they actually unprepared, or are they just judging new grads based on a viewpoint that's colored by several years?
When I was a hiring mgr, this could be one of the most frustrating things in a room. Trying to push to take a chance on a new grad, and having several others tell me they'd prefer the industry veteran who's lateraling. Even for "entry level" positions. Amazing how many people with really good CV's were applying for "entry level" jobs.
On a last thought, there also seems to be a strong lack of faith that people can learn on the job from hiring folks. Maybe its just the above mentioned flood of high CV talent. Software for example: You know: c, c++, java, javascript, haskell, and perl. Ah, but you don't know Ruby, and we're really looking for Ruby. But, I know 6 other languages, I can learn one more...
Then the person misunderstood what education is and reality is about to slap them in the face. I started a career before graduating college and now have two simultaneous careers. The benefit of having multiple simultaneous careers is that you can see the comparative strengths and weaknesses of each (things other people don't see) and adjust yourself accordingly.
Sure, but that doesn't change that it's heavily implied by the education industry and society as you grow up what OP said. If your entire life someone's been telling you an orange is an apple then when asked "what's that?" you'll answer an apple.
I knew this because I was interested in technology and I was find people who were already making it in technology. I didn't wait around for somebody to simply gift me with a job. I know not everybody has this. If you think jobs are just something you happily pull off a store shelf like shopping in a grocery store merely because you got some college you are in for a world of hurt.
I could feel sorry for people who had absolutely no way of knowing better. Whether or not I feel sorry for these people the reality of the situation remains the same. Bottom line: Don't waste your time feeling sorry for people with first world problems.
No. That's not contract, it's a dumb expectation, though shared by many. Vocational school is for training for a job. Universities have no sensible way to teach how industry operates, while industry does have the capabilities for teaching that.
I doubt you professionally know 6 languages. There's a lot more to learn about the runtime, frameworks and tools of a language than there is syntax.
I have, in the past 10 years, professionally and successfully worked with C++, Scheme, Ruby, a couple generations of JavaScript and Rust. And I've written a whole pile of shell scripts. These were all "first tier" languages in which I was up-to-date at the time. I've also, as a consultant, delivered projects in C# and Java. In these cases, I didn't know all the tricks, but my code met specifications, it had tests, and it was reasonably clear.
Oh, and I also wrote a bunch of Haskell on my own time, and it was stronger than a couple of the languages that I got paid to use.
But no, I'm not professionally up-to-date in all these languages. My C++ is out of date, JavaScript frameworks change every year, etc.
But if you dropped me in a new job with a new language, I could be delivering business value and clean code inside of two weeks, and I'd be reasonably current on whatever framework I was using within a few months. Yes, it would take slightly longer for Elixir or Erlang, and longer still for something like Coq, because there would be new paradigms involved.
But there really does come a time when genuinely unfamiliar ideas in mainstream tools become rare and special. I'm always happy to learn something new like React's virtual DOM or Rust's borrow checker.
And I know plenty of people who are far, far better than I am.
And this is why I'm generally happy to assume that competent developers can learn on the job if they show any interest in doing so. You really don't need more than one person on a team who knows the deeper trivia of a framework.
This is one of the things I consider to be a trait of a senior developer, when making hiring decisions. I understand why places post jobs that want X years experience with Y stack, because they don't want to feel like they have to teach "the basics" to someone at a high level, but I've found "the basics" is just what you've described in that sentence. Good professional software developers are language agnostic - even if they've spent the last 10 years on a single language in practice.
That is true but on the other hand, vast swathes of commercial work boils down to, use a language ultimately derived from ALGOL to process data structures that were in textbooks in the '70s.
All the libraries are ultimately written by people, and people who themselves have used other languages, so variations are pretty minor. The function you need to connect to a DB might be different but I bet the parameters you pass to it are in the order of username then password, in any language. Even Ruby, whose community delights in obscure, meaningless names, has patterns in common with everyone else...
Php, Java, ruby, python, javascript, SQL, perl, pl/sql, and bash.
And have been paid to write them all over my career.
Not saying I wouldn't need a day or two to brush up on some of them (perl was pretty early in my career), but 6 languages isn't that large a number once you've been around for a decade or two, especially if you consult.
And you overestimate the differences between the runtimes and frameworks. Most of them work in a very similar way to one another.
Fortran,BASIC,Perl,PHP,ASP,PL1/G Plus MySQL and the procedural languages T/SQl and PL/SQL.
And now, as per GP post "But, I know 6 other languages, I can learn one more..." you should have no problem learning C++ on the job after being hired for a senior C++ position.
That's what juniors do. Please don't use Stackoverflow professionally like that. You should consider reading a book on the subject which provides more context and better practices.
The increase of degree required jobs means that organisations that used to take highschool leavers at 16 or 18 and train them now think that university should do all the vocational training - they are also not getting the top quartile of grads either.
It really comes down to personality and whether a person's personality has allowed them to practice more and work harder to learn a skill. These people tend to be much better prepared without the delusions of their own awesomeness.
A college new hire isn't ever the rockstar their social reference group has indicated and the more humble personalities didn't need magic to figure this out. Yes, I have actually encountered college new hires who thought themselves as rockstars when in reality they seriously sucked. They cognitively knew they sucked, but somehow the arrogantly boasting rockstar self-persona was still there in very much a stereotypical millennial fashion.
That's why good hiring practices have to be used, even when you feel like it's a waste. Give everyone the same critical evaluation and don't allow yourself to skip questions in interviews because you like the person, etc. (I'm not accusing you, just saying as a rule)
If that's what you want to hire, go hire your rockstar coders.
I can train somebody to be a good coder, but I will not be their parent.
Incentives.
Overworked manager will take overconfident person over humble cautious one, because the illusion feels good.
Those overconfident people rarely do nothing and are completely incapable. That is strawman situation, basically. Oftentimes they eventually succeed, altrough it takes more time, is overall somewhat less effective, their code is harder to maintain or something of that sort.
By all accounts she seemed to be a great product manager, but product management isn't organizational leadership.
Likewise there is Hugh Jones - https://www.sabre.com/insights/releases/hugh-jones-to-head-t...
Hugh Jones was known for tenacious leadership in large volume business operations, but experience in retail and product was limited or absent.
Not that the fresh grads are awesome in any absolute sense, but there are so many awful developers out there who made it to "senior" level at their clueless company just because they stuck around for more than a year or two (really, because they were unable to find better work).
That is taking a horrid situation, lowering the baseline to compensate, and then filling to the lowered baseline. The result will be worse than the incompetence you already have. The positive resolution is to fire (or move) the incompetent people and change the culture of the team.
He probably thought I was an arrogant millennial too.
One time, walking into an interview for an entry-level position, the interviewer completely ignored me and continued to stare at my resume for two minutes.
The first words out of his mouth were, "At Lehman Brothers, we only hire winners. Are you a winner!?"
In retrospect, I'm glad that interaction happened and revealed what the company's ethos was; otherwise, I might have been tempted to work there.
Because education is only about job training so that workers are pliant and ready to to be directed by the system of hierarchy. Thus, turn higher education into the same factory training that high school is. This, in an era when profits are already soaring.
The problem is a level of personal fragility and lack of contrary frame of reference. Fortunately there is a minority population in that demographic that either studied appropriately or with the correct personality traits to see through, or utterly disregard, the dotting bullshit.
There doesn't appear to be any evidence that this has anything to do with students and employers specifically.
suppose that 90% of drivers have no accidents at all, while the other 10% have 10 accidents per year. Then the average (mean) is 1 accident per year, and fully 90% of drivers are better than average!
-> for student : "I will manage to have a job a do it"
-> for employer : "do the job as good as other employees"
So comparison is meaningless.
http://college.usatoday.com/2016/07/18/columbia-and-barnard-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/03/0...
https://www.fairtest.org/schools-do-not-use-sat-or-act-score...
Top schools are more competitive then ever. High schoolers need to adjust their whole life to have a chance to get in. Competitions are harder then ever.
Kids spend way more time in organized activities to get every bit of performance out of them - the only exception is likely football which is suspect of destroying their brains.
On average, kids have little time to just play around without working on something.