Hacker News Reader

To complete a four year degree requires a commitment, a life-altering personal financial cost

Only if you choose for it to be. There are cheaper ways to get a four year degree - like going to a state school or even cheaper, go to a 2 year school, stay at home and then transfer.

*It shows a willingness to submit to authority, a willingness to get often arbitrary work done on schedule with acceptable quality, and other traits and experiences that matter a great deal for becoming a functional employee in a corporate workplace.

All of that can also be learned by working on your typical minimum wage job that a lot of teenagers have.

Eh. A college student has a lot more independence and responsibility than a minimum wage burger-flipper. Moreover, they're given problems that presumably require a modicum of intelligence, literacy and numeracy, and other skills that go above and beyond following simple instructions. Minimum wage jobs tend to be structured so they can be done by functional illiterates/innumerates, and happen in closely supervised, time-bound environments. Contrast this to the freedom a college student has to do many things other than their homework.

edit: More to the point, even assuming four years of flipping burgers is an effective way to learn the behaviors for a corporate IT job (which is questionable), it is not perceived as useful by the hiring managers, virtually all of whom have college degrees. A college degree is a social leveling-up, particularly in liu of professional experience in the field.

For someone with 5+ years of relevant technical work experience, a college degree matters a lot less. For entry level, it's absurd to argue that four years of french fries is equally effective for social proof, and unwise to argue that it's equally effective for actual practice.

> It is, however, a strong social proof for other things that matter a great deal.

> a willingness to abide by the rules and procedures of a complex organization, even when they don't make much sense or directly contribute to the core competency. It shows a willingness to submit to authority, a willingness to get often arbitrary work done on schedule with acceptable quality, and other traits and experiences that matter a great deal for becoming a functional employee in a corporate workplace.

This is one of the main theses of the book "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt. I highly recommend it if you're interested in following this line of thought further.

"To complete a four year degree requires a commitment, a life-altering personal financial cost, and most importantly, a willingness to abide by the rules and procedures of a complex organization, "

In many countries it really doesn't involve taking on life-altering debt. For many other students, their parents can pay. As far as the aspects of formal discipline and authority are concerned, there are many programmes in which those just aren't an issue. Well prepared students will just experience the academic side of college as a continuation and development of their secondary education.

You make four-year degrees sound like a tough military boot camp that weeds out weaker candidates. That's probably true of some institutions, either from the academic or the disciplinary angle. But if you consider how many people overall successfully graduate, having a degree just isn't a very informative signal.

It's still informative. If someone wants a technical job but doesn't have a degree in the field, it's totally legitimate to wonder why. Especially when, as you point out, it ain't that hard to get one.

This matters a lot less for candidates with years of relevant experience in the field. We're talking about unproven candidates here.

I feel like this comment reflects a growing embrace of, for lack of a better term, state-ism in the tech industry that makes me feel really sad.

As an engineer working at my second job in the FAANG group, I always loved the tech industry because it was at least better than other industries about pursuing individuality, creative thinking, self-determination, etc., even if it couldn't always succeed in realizing true "meritocracy" or whatever.

Lately, though, it feels like all the money and attention on the industry is making it hard to distinguish Bigh Tech companies from Big Law. Who actually wants their hiring criteria to include "a willingness to get often arbitrary work done on schedule with acceptable quality"? Seriously?

Maybe that's inevitable, but that just makes me so sad if so. And honestly, having met a fair number of "industry pioneers" who were very early workers at some of the most important (and successful!) tech companies around today, I'm fairly sure they agree with me more than the growing conformist movement.

No company would actually phrase it as "a willingness to get often arbitrary work done on schedule with acceptable quality", but in all but the most raw of startups, that is what they mean. That's the reality of having a "job".

If you can't abide working that way - and it's totally reasonable to feel that way - you need to find a different career path through the industry than "Senior Web Engineer" or whatever the title is.

> It shows a willingness to submit to authority, a willingness to get often arbitrary work done on schedule with acceptable quality, and other traits and experiences that matter a great deal for becoming a functional employee in a corporate workplace.

And then some of us mess that up by going to grad school.

All those personality traits about following rules and doing arbitrary work sounds way better tested by McDonalds than a university, because university experiences are too diverse despite this portrayal of school life as rigid, capricious, and authoritarian.

Staying at McDonalds for four years is proof of lacking ambition and creativity...

As someone who worked at McDonalds for four years (from ages 16-20), I assure you that I do not lack ambition or creativity. Working such a job while going to college can actually show more tenacity, but mostly it was just about surviving.

I think my point is more about working four years at McD when you're 16, vs working four years at McD when you're 26. At 16-20, it demonstrates some commitment. At 26-30, it demonstrates complacency.

McD 'university' grads make a lot of money as managers and their school is free. Costco is another one of these companies where you can work at lowest level and move to upper mgt so staying there 4 years doesn't always mean burger flipping.

Many companies have incentives or a form of tuition reimbursement/schooling they're willing to pay for to put good people through a college or trade program, with the understanding that they stay at work for the company for X amount of years. It's been a thing for a long time, so the old school thoughts of "no ambition" often times don't have an applicability to today as it used to.

I've seen someone get put through management school for McDonalds and they went from 'order taker' to owning their own franchise in about 10 years. That's ambition.

Basically, the entire director level of McDonalds is immigrants and first generation Americans. The kinds of people who didn't grow up hearing "staying at McDonalds for four years is proof of lacking ambition and creativity".