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Comment by Bucephalus355 | Hacker News Reader

You make very good points above.

I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes.

That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive?

If you were a 22 yr old who studied from zero-level computing knowledge for 12 months and got the AWS Solutions Architect Pro cert (somewhat possible assuming 2 hours / day) I can already guarantee you’d receive a written offer for 100k plus within days from my current company (in Texas so that’s quite a bit of money).

Again don’t think colleges are going to compete well against that.

Last thing, here in Texas high schools can now issue Associate Degrees usually. Also the whole model of high school has shifted from test-focused to job-placement focus. Starting this year you can get an Associates in cybersecurity out of high school...

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==I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes.==

I think this highlights the true question. Do colleges exist to promote education and intellectual curiosity or to train workers?

According to PEW, Americans believe colleges are for work training:

"Americans are split on the main purpose of college, with 47% saying it is to teach work-related skills and 39% saying it is to help a student grow personally and intellectually."

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2011/06/02/purpose-of-c...

It'd be hard to justify the costs - both actual college costs and opportunity costs if it was purely for intellectual curiosity.

What if increased intellectual curiosity has a high enough ROI over someone's lifetime to cover the costs? What if the higher education allows them to enjoy life more and thus increase quality of life over the long-run?

I'm not saying either of these are the case, but it is worth exploring before we outright dismiss.

Especially since intellectual curiosity can be easily satisfied in other ways these days.

> Do colleges exist to promote education and intellectual curiosity or to train workers?

When college cost in the US what it did in the 1960s this sort of little bit false-dichotomy, little bit navel gazing question was at least fairly harmless. Now it's just fucking ridiculous even for most public schools.

This. For what is costs in 2019 college had better be opening a door to a lucrative career path.

Or it is a luxury good for those who can afford it for their children, like in the old days.

The state school school is the interesting issue. California has the CSU system that offers education for about 280 a unit or about 3000 before financial aid with over a dozens campuses throughout most of the state in both rural and urban areas. The Cal States have become the primary options for any California residence below upper income. Most states don't have a system similar to this set up with at most 1 or 2 major state schools per state. The cheaper state schools often are key to bringing the price down.

Well, the plebes can't afford to take classes to further ones academic horizons. When a class at a community college (read:too poor to go to a proper uni) is $900 and 30 students and no equipment needed, that class had better have strong income assurances. Else its a waste of money and further burdening of student loans.

And taking classes also means giving up time wise something else. Opportunity cost is also a thing.

So yes, liberal arts are the higher forms of education, which are also further from the rest of us who need a credential because of credentialism so we can merely live. (Food, water, electricity, housing, medical, internet are effectively all required to live these days. )

What community college is charging $900 for a single class? That really is highway robbery. I just looked up costs at the community college classes I took, and its $76 per credit hour for in-state tuition.

Also your characterization of community colleges only being for those too poor to attend a 4 year school is totally out of touch and frankly a little stigmatizing towards an important pieces of public education.

I know many people who graduated with 4 year degrees after getting an AS at community college, which requires the exact same core liberal arts + math and science course requirements that state schools require. These people didn't do it because they were poor, they went because their high school GPA didn't let them get admitted to the schools they wanted right away. The fact that they got to save a ton of money, pick schedules conducive to part time work, amd get a real credential after 2 years (I know many employers who prefer an AS degree holder to someone who dropped out of a 4 year degree 2 or 3 years in) is just icing on the cake. And it didn't hurt long term prospects for career or education either, one of them even has a graduate degree from a school that is extremely respected in the field he studied.

Community colleges are awesome things, both for people studying specific trades and careers and for eventual 4 year school attendees. The more we can destigmatize them, invest in them, and keep them affordable and accessible to working people - the more we'll all share in the benefits.

My wife and kids are all taking one class at the local community college. Tuition was nearly $400/student, plus a $200 book and a mandatory $200 online program. You can find the book used, and we economized by only buying 2 books for 4 people.

You can usually google the book and find a pdf on the first page of results. The online codes some of the professor's require is highway robbery.

WaMAP and similar open source offerings are finally starting to eat into this market, and they work significantly better than Pearson's MyLab & ilk.

I wholeheartedly agree. I went to a community college for 1 year before transferring to a top regional technical university. The upshot was I obtained a $14k/year scholarship for transfer students just for getting a 3.7 GPA. I would not have been accepted right out high school, and I had the privilege of avoiding dorms.

The higher cost, the more college has to directly justify itself in terms of better prospective earnings.

Wasn't "education and intellectual curiosity" a way to increase people's productivity? (Not even a way, wans't it supposed to be the best way?) Because that's the reason colleges are funded by the government.

There's something very broken with our modern society.

I always thought that college was not to increase your typical office worker's productivity by X% but instead to be a long term bet on massive gains for society through academic research.

If that's the true, we should make colleges more intellectually elitist and put most of the funding on places that provide that better worker's productivity, or simply cut funding if there is no better option.

We also should make it easier for those academics to bring those massive gains, because academia isn't organized for that.

I still think this is not the real goal, but maybe it was at some time. (Is there more than one goal? The system appears to not be optimized for any reasonable goal.)

That's probably not the (only) way to do it. There are two interrelated but distinct types of breakthroughs that happen in research: the kind that occurs well within expectation, the next step in a well-understood plan; and the kind that is serendipitous, usually by way of uncommon or novel interpersonal or intellectual communication. For the latter, you need... diversity. Expertise, too, of course, and some amount of common ground. However, the most interesting and creativity-enabling interactions require people who aren't all aiming at the same thing before they initially interact.

On top of that, it can be difficult to separate the people who are actually intellectual elites and the people who are good self-marketers.

I kind of think we should just be committing a lot more funding to those interested, who meet some reasonable, objective level of expertise.

> Do colleges exist to promote education and intellectual curiosity or to train workers?

I don't really think the teaching part at most universities oriented toward training workers. If they were oriented toward training workers, then the administration would be worried about what skills are in demand by employers...probably training students on particular software, computer languages, jargon and techniques that are common. There would be more emphasis on getting various certifications while still in undergrad. I can't speak to promoting "intellectual curiosity" because it seems hard to define and if you did I bet it would depend mainly on the nature of the student...probably his/her genes, peer group and childhood role models...not on the actions of someone the student sees three hours per week during adulthood.

As it is, a professor can (very often, though not always) be totally incomprehensible and irrelevant to work, as long as they are not offensive, without any repercussions nor even any gentle communication that he/she explain things clearly. Humans tend to craft stories favorable to themselves, so even if the student evaluations are negative, the professor can just blame e.g., short attention spans in the era of marijuana and fortnite...or the professor just might not look at the student evaluations if they don't want to. Over time, some professors even develop a sort of perverse joy at confusing students...their confusion being the sign that the professor is very smart and that he is "challenging" them, when in all likelihood he is just asking them things he never explained clearly in the first place. In my undergrad, an EE professor bragged that the class average was a 23%; he also used his TA as a translator because he could not speak english.

It is expected most everywhere that students will learn work skills on the job and in internships...not at school. Professors at research universities spend all their time thinking about hard frontiers of a topic, and that frontier might have little to do with what you do on the job.

Does it matter in practice? College is ridiculously expensive, forcing many (most?) people to go into massive debt in order to get a degree. If you come out with a master's in art history you're going to be feeling the economic pain for quite some time, and that's not good for society. Until costs come down, college needs to be about job training (which is a shame; I think many aspects of the system need to change.)

The American college question is always a jobs question dressed up.

There’s no jobs for people.

Therefore people try to get college degrees, even if they aren’t suited for it or going to be happy with it.

This drives up the demand for college, and specifically for degrees that lead to jobs.

This degrades the image and purpose of college (students aren’t here to expand their mind. They’re here so that recruiters won’t ding them.)

All of which leads invariably to Downstream issues, like credential inflation and growing student debt.

Eventually, college = jobs, and one of the greatest achievements of America, its liberals arts education, will tarnish and crumble.

To be clearer, the issue is the hollowing out of the job ecosystem in America.

Economic value now comes from fewer roles, which require specific skill sets to perform.

With more lopsided reward structures (few people corner most of the gains), there is increasing pressure for people to move into the few places where rewards collect.

This ties into the issues like " History majors can't get a job that will help them hold down a house or family".

The societal cost of it is that society becomes a monoculture of a few degrees and sources of information.

The greater advantages of a modern first world society in terms of societal achievement, art, culture and so on weaken.

This is because college majors people do can be broken down into half as being generally viewed as practical or career focused such as STEM, business, education, agriculture, communications, ect. Where as the other half tend to be more enriching fields, Psychology, Visual and Performing arts, Humanities and other social sciences. (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_322.10.a...)

The other point I think worth adding isn't that many of these humanities and arts fields are unemployable, but largely that they are some of the most popular majors and in turn their economic value is diminished as such. If there were twice or three times as many graduates per year in Computer Science, I'd expect the perceived economic value of a CS degree to decline as well.

"That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive?"

Colleges shouldn't be in the business of training people for jobs - that is what tech schools are for. If you just want to get a job, go to a tech school, don't go to college. College is (or should be) about expanding your mind, your horizons. It should be about exposing you to new ideas and thoughts you hadn't been exposed to before. There is a reason why University and Universe have the same root.

Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 1780-05-12:

> I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

This.

If we're doing our job as a generation we are moving the focus of human education from the gross to the subtle.

What proportion of Americans now have the ability to study topics of less directly monetary connections as compared to those of Adams' day?

I imagine the answer to that question would be interesting and nuanced.

There were only a ~dozen colleges at the time, and women couldn't attend. 90% of colonists were farmers. I don't see where there can be much nuance. American's today have vastly more ability to study a bunch of nonsense.

So narrow the lens a bit - compare only those with the ability to attend university.

And the great grand children don't get to study because they have to get a job right away. After a few generations they finally save up enough that some kid can can study "Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture" and the cycle repeats.

Nothing wrong with the arts, but the fact is very few can support a reasonable lifestyle on it. By burning the inheritance you can produce art but nothing remains for your children. Study art by all means, but make sure you have something to support yourself on without burning up the hard work of your ancestors first.

I fully agree that you can't ignore the broader education that college provides, even when that diverges from marketability.

But then you have to be clear-eyed about what we're talking about here: from the perspective of a college student, is it worth paying 1-200k[1] to become more worldly, with some auxiliary benefits to their income potential? I would probably still send my (future) kids to such a place, but then I'm in a pretty high income/wealth percentile. I suspect that many people (including my family when I was a kid), looking at this clear-headedly, would rationally decline this deal. If you think the pricing of college reflects the "broaden your horizons" aspect instead of the perception that it's "protection money for a middle-class career", you're sorely mistaken. Which means there are and can be far, far, far more cost-effective ways to broaden your horizons, particularly in the era of Internet communities, cheap travel, and all of humanity's knowledge at your fingertips at all times.

[1] I'm aware that there are ways to get through college more cheaply, like starting in community College. But a system in which the majority of people are going through ccs first is a very different system, so the thrust of GP's point still stands.

Today it’s hard to make an economic case for a well-rounded liberal arts education — but I’d bet that in ten years, computers will be pretty good at everything except the stuff you get from a good liberal arts education.

Ten years? Do you really think software development as we know it will be gone in ten years? I think it’s important on hacker news that we have perspective on our place in society and history and that we don’t think of ourselves (speaking for software engineers mostly here) as gods or something, but it seems very extreme to suggest that what we do will be gone or severely reduced in ten years.

The timing is a guess. But I do believe that we’re not far away from a point at which computers are much better at generating a CRUD app, or finding the most efficient algorithm, etc, but are still far from crossing the uncanny valley of making a truly moving piece of music, or work of art.

I don’t think programmers will be obsolete; but I think the skill set will shift away from the analytical and mathematical traits that set programmers apart today, towards the fuzzier knowledge of the humanities. (Though my personal belief is that liberal arts educations must include science and mathematics as a core pillar.)

Specialization in algorithmic and mathematical thinking will still be of extremely high value, but the level of achievement required to be successful in that area will likely be crushingly competitive.

But, this is just a fun guess — let’s check back in ten years so we can see how utterly off base I was :)

In regards to art and music, it is more about artificial scarcity and popularity. The few artists at the top make a lot of money. As for the rest - the term "starving artist" describes them.

Also, given that computers can test stuff on billions of people, I would say there is a good chance that you could have popular pieces of music and art that are produced largely by algorithms in the very near future.

Actually, it's becoming increasingly less difficult to make a living in art by finding a niche, because the niche that any given person can access has grown.

The timing is a guess. But I do believe that we’re not far away from a point at which computers are much better at generating a CRUD app,

People thought the same thing in the 80s....

Colleges sell themselves as providing remunerative employment training when it suits them, and hide behind this excuse when kids (esp. Humanities majors) can't garner gainful employment. "What, you thought you were paying $200k to increase your earning potential?! Crazy kids---this is all about personal development. Life is about more than money!" (Try not paying your student loans back, and you can see exactly how little they care about money.)

Even if we pretend that the majority of people attend college not for the purpose of increasing their value to employers and getting out of their parents' house, but for personal edification, colleges don't even accomplish this ostensible goal! Most students are more ignorant in most subject matter than the day they step foot on the campus - https://www.nysun.com/new-york/students-know-less-after-4-co... ; https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-c.... Often they're propagandized for four years, saddled with debt, and told that they got an "education", so it's nobody's fault but their own if they can't find a decent job.

Three cheers for the AWS certs and modern-day educational options and good riddance to the corrupt university system (propped up by taxpayer-subsidized monies, of course).

the colleges are guilty of a motte and bailey argument

the motte being the liberal arts/wholistic focused learning (only a philistine would be against that) and the bailey being the economically useful learning salesmanship.

What is it with this attitude that somehow learning new things is only honorable when those things are useless in the job market? Do you really think that anybody is taking up 4 years of their life and 200 thousand of their (probably borrowed) dollars just for the purpose of "expanding their horizons"?

Who is paying 200,000 for college? That's crazy. I have 2 kids attending a private college and each one pays $2000 a semester. They both have academic scholarships - so their tuition is covered - but even if it wasn't, that is less than $20,000 over 4 years. You can get a good education without attending an ivy league university.

It's terrific that you've found a private school that would cost $20K total for four years but everything that I've read indicates that such a school is a tremendous outlier. The average tuition for a public school last school year was $5500 for in-state students and $12K for out-of-state students; private schools tended to be substantially higher.

https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/statistics/

Anecdotally, the college I went to, New College of Florida, is a public liberal arts school whose costs aren't too far out of alignment with other state schools in Florida. According to their fees page, in-state tuition fees, room and board would total $16K a year; for out-of-state students, that would be $39K a year.

https://www.ncf.edu/admissions/tuition-and-fees/

Actually, I'd like to gently question your figures: you're indicating your kids are paying $2000 a semester -- so that would be $4000 a year, or $16,000 over four years. And you're saying that doesn't include their tuition, so that's just room and board, right? (That's under half the cost of New College's, which again sounds like quite a deal.) Further, room, board and tuition at this private college would still be under $20,000 over four years? Unless I'm missing something, that would mean tuition at this private school is less than $500 a semester. I can't help but suspect that either one of us has our math wrong, or you have the best school deal in the history of ever.

I didn't say anything about room and board (their housing is about $1300 a semester). The $16,000 would be the tuition cost. I was saying that they have academic scholarships which is covering their tuition. But, if they didn't have those scholarships, the 4 years (8 semesters) of tuition would be less than $20,000. I know of at least 3 private colleges with similar tuition. I imagine there are lots more if I bothered to look.

> Who is paying 200,000 for college?

I too am very interested in the answer to this question. if you're spending that much and not going to a top 30 school, you're a chump. if you are going to a truly elite school, you're not paying anything close to the sticker price unless your parents are quite well off.

I'm not saying college isn't unreasonably expensive these days, but I often see this number for undergrad and I always wonder where the hell it came from.

I just googled the current tuition at the school I went too and roughly multiplied by 4. The exact number isn't my point just that it's a ridiculous amount.

Costly signaling.

>Colleges shouldn't be in the business of training people for jobs - that is what tech schools are for.

Whatever it "should" be for doesn't really matter. The majority of people (in America) operate under the assumption that going to College helps you get a job.

> If you just want to get a job, go to a tech school, don't go to college. College is (or should be) about expanding your mind, your horizons

This is patently false. Colleges compete and advertise based on their job placement rankings. Just a few years ago, law schools were sued for misrepresenting their employment statistics.

Whatever ideal, romanticized version of university and college experiences are touted, the reality is that they are marketed to parents and kids as the way to a better lifestyle.

Sure, "Liberal Arts" are largely about enriching the mind, but that doesn't change the fact that very, very few people can afford the luxury of going to get a 4 year degree just to "expand your horizons".

At the same time, maybe college shouldn't charge that much for a major/profession that might not pay off the student out of his/her student loan back, in like decades?

I keep seeing this on HN. Only the privileged can afford to go to college to “expand their minds”. The middle class and even the upper middle class are not spending tens of thousands of dollars a year to go to college to “expand their minds”. They are doing it so they can get a job.

Where are all of these students with “expanded minds” going to get a job? I specifically told both of my sons that I would not support them in getting a degree that didn’t have an outlook for a decent paying job. I specifically had them look at the starting salaries of graduates, the placement rates, and the five year salary averages for the school and the degree they choose.

> There is a reason why University and Universe have the same root.

Where did you get this idea? The term "university" (as an Anglicization of "universitas") refers to its guild-like corporate organization.

In my view, there's some survivorship bias going on there. Somebody has to know that the cert is in demand, and that they have a good chance of getting it. We think it's easy because we're the ones for whom learning computer skills was in fact easy. But it's not easy for everybody.

>That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive?

Well, colleges used to be for the elites (either rich or very talented) to learn science and to do research.

It wasn't meant for vocational training for the general salaried worker. Now it's mostly that.

This

And if you just take the cert without the understanding of the underlying technology, or any practical skills you will be embarrassed when you interview. Certs by themselves are worth next to nothing.

I ask one simple architectural question that weeds out many of the paper tigers:

“We need to deploy a website that is fault tolerant, secure, can handle one AZ going down and scalable. How would you do it using AWS technologies?”

I’m saying this as someone who has 5 AWS certs and interviews AWS Devops candidate. But I also have 20+ years of professional software development experience, a degree, and before that I was a hobbyist for 6 years.

I really wouldn't compare learning a very specific technology with college. The idea with college level education is that you get the foundations of what you study and a learning method, so that you can adapt to changes (eg new technologies) faster and better.

Of course you can learn the foundations without college and not learn them with college, but on average it's much easier to do so with that.

Yes. Technology and business environments change. Students will only succeed if they become self-motivated, life-long learners who can identify the key problems/technology that their employers need solved/developed and rapidly build upon their skill-set to solve those problems and implement the solutions. Ideas/technology are like Legos - the point is to know how to assemble the pieces you have to build what you need.

When I started my career as a scientist in a corporate analytical lab 36 years ago, corporate funding for travel and continuing education was plentiful. When budgets got tight, that was the first to go. Those of us who were self-directed learners survived the downsizing and cost-cutting much longer than those who didn't.

In my experience undergrad programs can fail hard in this too because of the limited time to cover the subject matter.

14 chapters of Digital Signal Processing in 12 weeks w00t!

For many of my engineering courses at a top tier public university it was in-one-ear-out-the-other.

Though, the most of stuff I learned at community college (pre-engineering) did stick.

Even if it does stick unless you use it you will likely forget.. but I think it's still useful to have learned since you hopefully retain enough that you know things exist and can look them up

That’s all well and good until they find themselves competing with people from other countries who are being trained to hit the ground running and are willing to work for less....

Who on earth employs a "solutions architect" whose only qualification is some random certificate that tests AWS trivia?

Backwater IT orgs deep in the heart of Texas that have heard that they have to move everything into the cloud?

No, startups in Silicon Valley are starting to look at these certs because they realize how expensive poorly configured cloud infrastructure can be. It’s a skill that few people have at this point.

As a hiring manager for an infrastructure engineering team in a startup in the Silicon Valley, I have some opinion about the value of these certs.

I'd likely never hire an engineer with one of these certs and no relevant experience into a full-time position. I might offer an internship, but that's not a six-figure position.

I agree. Work experience always comes first. Anyone obtaining AWS certs without work experience should be a huge red flag.

Maybe not a "red flag" but I wouldn't be desperate to hire anyone with no experience, even in the Silicon Valley where competition for engineers is fierce. A headcount is a headcount as far as investors are concerned, so I'd rather have someone with more experience that also costs more.

Even still, I agree with the parent up above. A degree isn't strictly necessary, and if someone had the motivation, the talent, and the cert, I'd be willing to give them a chance as an intern.

lots of people.

In the Salesforce consulting world the Certified Technical Architect (CTA) cert means you walk in the door at any of the big consulting firms at managing director or equivalent rank and that comes out to around $200k/year. The cert isn't that easy to get, it requires a dozen or so prerequisite certs and then an exam plus a board review but you could probably do it in a year and a half.

Also, i think over half of all CTAs are employed at Salesforce itself so you could always go work for them if consulting isn't your cup of tea (it's not for everyone that's for sure).

Granted, I know little to nothing about the IT industry, but is a "managing director" someone who has a high school diploma plus some technical skills?

The best I’ve ever had never went to college. I was extremely productive under this person because there was a high level of trust and ownership. This was at a company whose CEO also didn’t finish his undergrad at Yale. Prior to this company I worked as an engineer at Google and had some launch/promo obsessed managers who lacked basic management skills.

So no different than a high-level Cisco, VMware, or Redhat cert.

More employers than you would think. The professional certs are legit. Also, 50% of some cloud native DevOps and infrastructure engineering roles are covered by the pro certs.

Covered pretty poorly. I've let my AWS certs lapse because they're not worth the time to keep them up. The hard parts of my job have very little to do with "these AWS services exist", which is the extent of what I've gotten out of AWS certs.

(Nobody cares about SWF.)

Yeah, a serverless certification would be great. These certs are more foundational in scope.

I don't see why it would be, to be frank. "Serverless" is a how. It's a tool, not a solution, and you should be expected to pick up new tools without waving around a piece of paper saying you know a tool.

Except for button-pusher roles I've always hired for whys, not hows, and certification programs seem to never care about the whys. College degrees don't assert that you know how to learn, that you know how to derive the whys--but, in my experience, they correlate better than cert-hunting does.

AWS certification exams test for basic and foundational AWS knowledge. They don’t try to do anything other than that. The “whys” are learned in the field, certified or not.

It goes both ways.

Who thinks they're ever gonna do any cloud service right employing some dude who only has worked with traditional servers?

You'd be surprised how many insanely expensive and dorked up cloud setups out there that honestly could have been solved / way cheaper by some guy with a random AWS cert.

I'm not talking former barista turned AWS guy in a couple weeks, some background is required for that and random server guy of course, but the barriers are dropping.

Quite a few people. The returns are generally poor, which is why I chuckled at the post to which you replied; as a consultant I consistently found myself doing more work (and costing more) coming in after such credentialed-but-not-taught folks to fix the mess of "well, I know AWS, so all I'll use are AWS-recommended AWS solutions whether or not they actually fit what my project needs. AWS!". Which isn't, I stress, a knock on AWS--AWS is fine. Its managed services aren't appropriate for every situation, but the AWS certs that I've taken have never-not-once entertained the idea of not using a proper-nouned hosted service at any point. There are plenty of places where those services are fine, if sometimes overpriced even taking into account people costs...but there are plenty of places where they're not and no AWS cert I've seen has even nodded at the idea.

As it happens, I use stuff I learned in my distributed systems courses--in that oh-so-awful university, hiss--on a weekly basis, if not daily, to solve those problems. (I use stuff I learned in my microeconomics and my political science and my sociology classes daily, but you can't put that on a resume, so obviously it doesn't exist.)

The more I learn about Texas, the more it seems like they're doing everything right.

Hear hear. I found the “Draw Mohammed Contest” particularly amusing.

Edit: I see we have some touchy SJW-types in the house this evening :)

I downvoted you not to express disagreement, but because I think your comment detracts from this particular conversation. I suspect others did for the same reason.

However: Some of your other recent comments are spot on. The upvotes are on me. Try not to spend them all in one place.

Until Texas is overwhelmed by migrants from CA and Mexico that is, that joint-force is changing TX from red to purple, and to blue soon. At the moment, Austin is more liberal than most CA cities already.

When TX is taken the US will officially turn into a social/welfare state, the US is doomed already, similar to what happened to Rome in the past.

People from CA or Mexico are running from there for a reason, however when they arrive TX, their first to-do is to make TX look like where they used to live. They are virus.

I couldn't hear you over your dog whistling

No kidding, wait until he finds out Texas was formerly Mexico and many of the brown people are descendant of US citizens when Texas became a part of the US.

that's like you saying most Americans should return to Europe because what they have done here was so evil, unfortunately you can not roll back history

No, it's not like I said that at all. What point are you trying to make?

Are these certs actually worth anything? I usually see tech certs as a red flag. I couldn't imagine hiring a highschool grad with an aws cert and expect anything close to someone with a cs degree.

I didn't know about these courses, and have been contemplating getting some certifications for a while. This looks like it might really help. Thanks for posting this!

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