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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Herd mentality: if everyone is getting a degree, i must too. If getting a degree is an investment, why don't put as much money in there as possible, if ROI is constant?

Both wrong. Most people who are getting college degrees nowadays simply can't make enough use of them to even break even. People have to stop! They are the only ones to blame; capitalism has no checks in place to prevent people from harming themselves, maybe that's bad, but ultimately, it is their decision to get a diploma they don't need and can't hope to put to good use, is to blame.

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This article focuses on someone who went into debt for dental school. I prefer the idea of an educated dentist to dentists without diplomas.

All that said, I agree with your sentiment, college is for many people completely unnecessary.

As per the article, we as tax payers are on the hook for the debt that will be defaulted on, so the fact that this system has spiraled out of control will hurt all of us.

Can't challenge your preferences, but I would encourage a bit of reflection on why you think that education is an advantage here.

I had some routine dental work done recently; some of my teeth were drilled out. It is a complete mystery to me why we think that a college level education is required for the man holding the drill. My body is very important to me, but it seems a tough sell that years of higher education would give a better outcome than years of, say, straightforward practice. I want a competent dentist, but their education isn't worth as much to me as the steadiness of their hand and their willingness to be gentle with my poor mouth.

In theory, any job could be done better by a more educated worker, but we could break it up into generalists and specialists like we do with electricians and electrical engineers. Save the education for people who deal with unusual problems.

> college is for many people completely unnecessary.

This part of your comment is completely out of touch with reality. Nearly every position that pays over $40k/year requires college credentials.

>Most people who are getting college degrees nowadays simply can't make enough use of them to even break even.

Which means, most of these positions are in fact 'tails' of the distribution, they don't really exist, they are a net loss vs positions that pay less but do not require diploma. Because more people are getting diplomas than there are jobs really requiring it. If employers CAN get away with requiring a diploma for a position which doesn't really need it - why not doing it? At least it guarantees getting an employee which will be more loyal as he has to repay college debt so needs stable income. And they can get away with it because people falsely believe that college is a path to success and burn enormous money and years of life there.

Maybe there's just too many people who want to become dentists; resulting in too much demand and too high prices for dentists diplomas, and too many dentists for prices on their work to justify these diploma costs?

Why not just allow everyone with a medical dimploma from a 1st world country to come, get GC at the airport, and get to job the next day? What are the downsides, except liberals around the world nagging again that U.S. were robbing them?

I come from a country with free education and the latter part is just plain wrong.

Autodidact people are nearly always terrible programmers because they haven’t learned how to think. The few of them that actually understand CS principles are typically unable to work in teams because they’ve never been taught the fundamentals of working together. If they do have the right sort of personality (extremely rare in CS) they wont have the business side of things, making them unable to work with the people they are making systems for.

Of course I lead teams in digitization where, self management, team work, business and customer interaction is part of what my programmers need to do.

I’ve hired a lot of people by now, back between 1995 and 2005 a lot of them didn’t have much of an education behind them, and we’ve frankly spent 5 years cleaning up their mess since.

Today we simply require a degree.

It’s a little different in the IT department, they prefer certificates over degrees, but a lot of university engineering programs know this and give their students the essentials.

We do have a mix of technical degrees. There is the candidate or bachelor(people typically never stop here) at the universities for the full education, but we also have various academy degrees that are “almost bachelor” programs, which focus less on the theoretical and science things and more on practical application. Both roads are perfectly fine, but you really need that piece of paper if you want a job that requires any sort of thinking.

> Autodidact people are nearly always terrible programmers because they haven’t learned how to think.

Going off of the StackOverflow 2018 survey, only ~48% of professional developers have a CS, computer engineering or software engineering degree. If you’re willing to write off over half of potential applicants because your interviewing process clearly didn’t work well enough to verify the applicant can code, then sure, help inflate the degree bloat, but just understand, that even in countries where education is “free”, it comes at a cost that has to be picked up somewhere.

It’s a cost benefit sort of thing, the most expensive mistake i can make is hiring the wrong person. By requiring a degree I minimize the risk and I also save a lot of money by not having to test for technical aptitude.

If you’ve completed a CS candidate degre at a Danish university, it tells me you would be able to write a quick search on our white board if I asked you to. Not because you’ve memorized it but because you’ve been taught problem solving. I’ll sometimes ask what candidates think if test-first or something like SOLID, but I don’t really care about their technical knowledge on it, what I’m evaluating is whether they give me an honest answer or if they’re telling me what they think I want to hear.

Sure I could test people, but that would require 2-4 employees who planned, executed and evaluated the tests, which is expensive, and the university’s or the academy you graduated from has already done that. So what’s the point of it?

A typical Danish job interview is 30 minutes of trying to learn your personality, because you’ve already given us your credentials. For important jobs, we’ll even test your personality and use that as a basis for the interview talks.

I haven’t made a bad hire for more than a decade so I’m really not worried about missing out. Because hiring isn’t really about finding the right match, it’s about finding a good match.

Where are you based? In many countries a CS degree is no guarantee of rigor, teamwork or even ability to program. Most universities just focus on the computer science theoreticals (after all, it's not a software engineering degree), while the programming is restricted to artificial toy problems.

If you come from a degree-obsessed country like Germany I would hypothesise that you are confusing correlation with causation - smart, competent individuals with the capacity to work in teams go to university because they understand the importance of the degree to increase their hirability, but a 4 year degree not change a cowboy coder into thr above.

I’m Danish and there is certainly a reason n the better programmers have educations, I mean, why wouldn’t they? Not only is education free, the state gives you $1000 a month to study and our culture expects you to have an education.

There would almost have to be something wrong with you not to get one.

That being said, I’m old, I’ve been around since before IT educations were really a thing outside of research and science, and people with degrees are just better at working in enterprise. I’ve had really excellent autodidactic people write marvelous stuff, that was horribly documented and full of hacks that made it really inefficient in the long run, and that just hasn’t happened with people that had degrees.

I still see and hear if the rockstar mentality today, from the manager networks I’m part if, and it’s almost always from employees who haven’t had any schooling.

My experience has been the opposite. The only people I've ever had to fire because they couldn't actually do their job has been people with CS degrees, and overall the people I've hired without degrees have done better than average.

Part of the problem is that most CS degrees are not software engineering degrees. Some will have modules that are relevant, but mostly these are not compulsory. As a result a CS degree is often a poor predictor of whether or not someone knows the processes around it, and even a poor predictor of whether or not someone can program.

A lot of people with degrees get sorted out if the screen prossee along with people who have no degrees. Because you’re absolutely right, university CS doesn’t necessarily make great programmers.

If I’m hiring for a programming job I typically prefer people with academy or engineering degrees though. They are taught less theory and more application.

A degree isn’t all we look at though, we’ll also look at your public code repository, but we won’t take a look unless you have a degree because we need you to do both theory and application, and we need you to have learned best practices in both.

I’m not saying people without degrees are useless mind you, I just don’t want to spend time finding the ones who aren’t, when I don’t have to.

What does learning to think mean? People who haven't gone to college can't think?

Part of an education is learning theory of science, analytical methods, best practices and scientific reasoning. At least that’s part of a higher education in Denmark.

I’m sure people without degrees can learn in this on their own, but they are much less likely to have done so. So why would I bother taking the risk?

It’s about probability. People with no degrees are a bigger risk than people with degrees. That doesn’t mean there aren’t people without degrees who aren’t better, but it does mean I won’t allocate the resources it takes to find them.

I’m not looking for the best candidate, I’m looking for a good candidate.

Not sure how well he's thought that one through.

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