As a Gen-Z also recently graduated (less than 5 years), I can assure you, the fact these platforms are so big is because being graduated isn't worth anything these days. You are lucky or you are not.
I don't mean this from an intelligence or skill perspective, some of the smartest people I know don't have college degrees. But when the big companies are recruiting from college career fairs or listing it as a job requirement, you can and will be passed over for jobs because you don't have one.
He did manage to arrange with them that they would pay for him to take a 1-year old masters in CS in his own spare time, and if he passes he would be promoted - and he was. Still, I'd say it was an absolute waste of time and he ended up switching companies a year later anyway.
We don't have an education lock on certain roles/levels at the company I work for, but we do have roles at certain levels that require a given certification no matter how proficient one is in the specified tech. This isn't a small-brain move that misses the forest of knowledge for the trees of credentials, but a recognition that it will be more challenging to staff that employee at a given level without it.
It is a second-order small-brain move: the clients are the ones missing the forest for the trees, while your company is just going with the flow. I get it, my company did the same thing, but in the end it's one of those "how business is done" things that add together to create a culture we all freely admit makes no sense.
I'm sure there have been exceptions to this, and firms that aren't as confident in the capabilities of their people may suffer more.
“This guy is absolute garbage, but he has a masters degree, so we charge more for him.”
https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors/
It does most of these kids no good to know that a given type of engineer can make 150k right out of college, if less than 2% of them are actually able to secure work in the field right out of college. In fact, I'd wager that prior to going into a field, most kids would rather know about the "less than 2% are able to secure work" part rather than the "150K starting salary" part.
Source: I know plenty of engineers without any formal degrees working for big money at real companies.
But it’s important to keep in mind that in many countries “engineer” is a protected term with qualification requirements and not simply a job title.
Software developers can be at least as highly skilled and intelligent as can be engineers, but, most of the time, they are engaged in a highly skilled craft rather than engineering. Making software is sometimes more creative and more integrative than engineering.
There's also ABET - Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology - which establishes formal requirements and standards for the teaching of Software Engineering as a discipline: https://www.abet.org/accreditation/
So I think those pieces are there, they're just not the norm yet.
Well, that's part of the job - are you able to figure out what needs to be done to reach the objective, and then do that? No? Well, no promotion for you.
> He did manage to arrange with them that they would pay for him to take a 1-year old masters in CS in his own spare time, and if he passes he would be promoted - and he was.
Seems like your friend did figure out what hurdles to jump.
Part of the reason that employers require advanced degrees is so that they are assured that the individual in question can figure out what steps need to be taken to fulfill an objective, and then take those steps.
The reason is probably irrelevant: the organisation tells you what steps to take to get a promotion. If you fail to take those steps they consider you unsuitable for the promotion, not because they consider those steps to prove your capability, but because you have demonstrated an unwillingness to meet the minimum requirements.
Why the minimum requirements are what they are is irrelevant.
it seems like if some individual has been working with you for years, you should probably have access to better metrics for this than degree/no degree, such as personal acquaintance and familiarity
But it isn't about the employee's competence, so how would metrics help? It's about the employee's compliance.
Look at it from the point of view of the organisation, not the point of view of an individual within the organisation: an individual literally gets told what steps are needed to reach some objective, and then they fail to take those steps!
That does not bode well for that individual in terms of making business decisions, hence they shouldn't be in a position of more power and/or influence anyway, because they are unable to achieve an objective even when it is spelled out to them.
Having a degree is not the objective, being able to do the work is. Confusing the two is an example of a cargo cult. I don't want people working under me who are incapable of understanding which objectives are important.
The objective here is getting the promotion.
> I commonly encounter people who have these degrees but are unable to figure out how to accomplish an objective unless every step is presented as a bullet-point list in the task description.
Irrelevant - the company isn't using the degree as an indicator of competence, they are using it as an indicator of compliance.
> Having a degree is not the objective,
You're correct. Getting the promotion is the objective.
> being able to do the work is.
Being able to do the work is irrelevant if the candidate does not meet the minimum requirements set by the organisation.
It's a bit silly for employers to focus on arbitrary educational credentials instead of actual ability. But on the other hand for large organizations managing thousands of employees it's challenging to treat everyone as a unique individual. Some level of forced standardization is the only way to make it work efficiently at scale.
Well, at least he scored a degree out of it.
I'm torn on this. I'm not sure I see it all that different than if they wanted to make sure someone they were moving into a managerial role had knowledge to back it up, and wanted them to take managerial courses. It's good that the company paid for the courses, a bit less good that it was in personal time (but it's also theoretically beneficial for the person and isn't tied to the company, so I don't fault that much).
If they outright offer this path in in this situation and it doesn't have to be brought up by the employee, I think that's a pretty acceptable solution to requiring that degree for the position, if the company thinks it's really important to have for some reason.
Having a degree is, as you've said, a requirement (I have a 2 year... I'm out on some jobs because of it)...
Not having a degree is bad. Having a useless degree is worse as you now (generally) have the debt of a paper that means nothing.
Do you mean a degree in weird subjects, or from non-famous colleges?
https://blog.prepscholar.com/worst-college-majors
https://www.salary.com/passages/8-college-degrees-with-the-w...
https://www.ownyourownfuture.com/most-useless-degrees/
What I find interesting in these articles (and others) is CompSci is listed as a bad investment... oversaturation and what not.
I’ve started to get the impression that even in software development there are certain domains or industries you would be hard pressed to get into without a degree, simply because majority of entry levels are done through campus recruitment.
- high school. - associate degree. - bachelor degree. - professional certificate. - postgraduate degree.
Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...
People need more of the intangible but true. A consumerist society is condemned to wallow in mediocrity and misery. It does not rise to the level of human dignity and maintains a level of existence better suited to worms than men.
Very obviously if you are working in a field that does not list that as a requirement, then of course you don't need one. But it's still not worthless. As someone pointed out in another thread, if you're trying to move up in a company, a degree can be the differentiator.
My favorite legal recruiter question: give them a topic to research online, one where you know the wikipedia entry is wrong. Not many without post-secondary research experiance would pass that one.
The problem is when jobs don't truly need the knowledge granted from a degree, and is just used to thin the heard, because hiding managers don't know what else to look for.
The value is thus generated by convenience to the hiring manager rather than possession of relevant job knowledge.
It's mostly about expanding the gravy train of administrative staff and shiny new dormitories and eating facilities and gyms, alongside a narrow ideological political indoctrination with little enthusiasm for debate or considering unpopular opinions.
Without the trade school aspect it's difficult to see what value they still provide.
You won't be able to do biotech or practice law or medicine without credentials.
I'm gen-X and it's been like this for as long as i've been around too.
Degree says "this one is reliable / knows how to finish stuff". That's it.
I feel like the job market has changed pretty markedly since I was a grad in the late 90's, and that it's just way more all or nothing.
You either can get a job with benefits and a career track and 4 years later you're better off, or you're literally going nowhere, every year of your job is the same as the year prior and you have nothing to show.
There's no more thing where you get a real, genuine, full time, but low-skill entry level job and try to prove yourself. You can't prove yourself in low-skill jobs any more, nobody is watching and nobody cares. In short "you can't get there from here."
I'm speaking entirely anecdotally for sure, but with that said it really does seem fundamentally not the same at all as what I faced as a new grad.
In finance, it is "tradition" for people _without_ certifications to dump on those with certifications, such as CFA & CPA, but most of these haters miss the point. It is really hard to motivate yourself to finish. Once you have the cert, it is a good indicator that the person can get things done! Interestingly, when I interview fresh grads, if they have anything that demonstrates tenacity, like sports or playing musical instruments ... or something that takes time and skill to accomplish, I am always curious to hear about their experiences of personal growth.
Especially at the beginning of the pandemic when nobody knew how long it might last and the stock market was free diving to what was seemingly oblivion.
I guess my point is that in mid 2020, it felt like there were no degrees that had plentiful jobs short of being:
1. A close-to-graduating worker in health or medicine.
2. A finance-compatible major from a Top 15 school with exceptional math, statistics, and inference ability. Likely, previous internships. And there really weren't that many of these.
Jobs at software companies that were typically not competitive were getting flooded by top grads and early career applicants w/ 1-3 years of experience who had offers revoked or got laid off. I fought tooth and nail for the offers I got, and the company I joined ended up being terrible -- so go figure.
Now consider that there are like, 500k students *not from top schools* graduating in STEM that same year. Suddenly the 'study something useful' mantra fell apart in the matter of months (weeks?).
As someone who hires devs, I could easily hire 2-3 devs right now. However I live in a tier3 city, and don't want to do the remote dev thing right now. If I post a remote job I get 5,000 candidates, if I post a local job I get 0-3.
As a new grad, I bet winning a remote job would be hard. But pick a city, any city. Always looking for devs. If still not landing jobs, its a matter of interview skills and non-school resume experience.
1) Bottom 5% tier grad who has less than zero social skills, thus would also be a low earner on OF
2) Extremely picky about jobs. Instead chose OF for lifestyle/earning reasons.
3) Serious health, legal, psychological, or family problems that would prevent them from any job and probably also would have made attaining their degree very difficult. This is MIT OnlyFans person I feel the saddest for.
4) Some other 1/1000 possibility
The idea MIT grads are on OF in mass just to make enough to eat and put a roof over their heads is some serious sympathy farming.
While I find this post witty and well-written ("some serious sympathy farming"!), I don't follow where the parent post was suggesting anything about MIT CS grads on OnlyFans. Do I misunderstand? (Zero trolling.)
I never prequalified it specifically with 'CS' -- by the way, a lot of the discussion in the thread has tunnel-visioned on CS, but I'm pretty sure that's not the only STEM degree HN would consider 'useful' (if we loop back to the comment I replied to).
There's physics, math, engineering, and much, much more -- and all of those had an even worse job market than CS with the exclusion of those jumping into quantitative finance. The point of the original comment is to highlight how you can do everything 'right' according to the poster and, by necessity or tragedy resulting from a global pandemic, may still end up relying on sex work to make ends meet for a period of time.
The circumstances of the pandemic are only further exacerbated for the hundreds of thousands of STEM graduates not coming from top schools or internships. Finally, I'd like to note that my original comment (way up in the chain) was neither about STEM nor top schools, so I hold that my observation there still holds weight.
TL;DR: the concept that Gen-Z job hunters can simply go to 'the good school' and get 'the good degree' for 'the good job' is entirely subverted in a pandemic, leading to an especially dire job situation for those who are less privileged in education or training. This, coupled with social distancing, was the perfect social context for OnlyFan's recent hypergrowth.
This point: "may still end up relying on sex work to make ends meet for a period of time". I grew up in a family and culture that shamed sex workers, but when I became an adult, I learned that that the truth is much more nuanced! I hope OnlyFans can continue to provide a safe space for sex workers when and how they wish to work.
Your tl;dr: I agree and experienced it myself, first hand. The year that you graduate is a roll of the dice in real life. If the economy is strong, you'll mostly do fine; if the economy is in a nosedive, most people are screwed, even hotties on OnlyFans with an MIT CS degree!
Yes! Absolutely, I tried a couple times to re-write that bit without getting too verbose and kinda gave up. I agree with you -- there are people who absolutely just vibe with sex work and they should be empowered to do it.
That creates a problem of incentives, where purely self-serving organizations will let other companies bear the expense of employing junior developers and helping them learn the ropes, and then hire them when they're worth it.
As an aside, professional soccer solves this by granting a team certain rights to the players it develops, so if a player is trained in Team A's youth academy, and Team B wants to sign them at age 18, Team B pays a fee to Team A. Team A may agree to reduce the fee in exchange for a share of any subsequent sale, so if the player develops into a top professional and is sold to Team C at age 22, both Team A and Team B benefit financially.
With juniors being able to be easily enticed away with a bump in salary at a well known company it becomes the situation that the only companies that can afford to hire juniors are those that pay enough to make it so that they aren't enticed away as easily.
This then leads to other companies not interested in hiring juniors - not because they don't want them or that they aren't willing to train them, but rather that they can't compete with the big tech company compensation.
The result of that is then that you see only job postings for mid and seniors... not so much because they will hit the ground with less training, but that they're likely more mature and less likely to be poached (they're stereotypically interested in settling down and raising a family).
Ultimately, if everyone and every organization is similarly self interested, there is no reason to hire a junior dev unless you can pay them top dollar to avoid the possibility of them getting poached by another org before they've been able to produce a positive return on investment... or that the overall income of the org is large enough that the loss in the ROI isn't substantial.
If you include associate degrees, you can add all the skilled trades to that list. To be clear, I'm talking about all the associate applied science w/[electricial|plumbing|pipefitting|welding] programs out there.
What is OF?
“What’s your OF?” “I setup an OF at blahblahblah”
Whenever I need someone more experienced, it’s either hired by recommendation, or we need a headhunter. Salary is never the issue, it’s just that senior devs complain about getting swamped with offers, so they don’t even have to look anymore.
It’s almost like a game theory problem: people have to apply to hundreds of companies to have a shot because everyone is also doing the same.
That, and some companies seem to be shifting towards preferring having a low number of experienced developers rather than a larger number of entry-level: I know of a few companies that paused junior and mid-level hirings after getting big investments.
A lot can change in the four years between enrollment and graduation. For example, I went to college in 2006 when the finance sector was booming. I graduated in 2010 when it very much wasn’t. By the time the jobs had evaporated it was much too late to change my course of study. And I certainly couldn’t go back and renegotiate the tuition or interest rate on my loans.
I’m sure the same could be said about people who went to school for anything relating to tourism or hospitality who have graduated into the pandemic. If you’re a new chef, pilot, hair dresser, massage therapist, looking to work in hotel management, etc. the job market that existed when you began your studies is entirely different from the job market you’ve just graduated into.
The fact is that some jobs will always be in demand. Some jobs will almost always be in higher demand.
And the rest of jobs... won't.
Get a degree linked with the former, you'll have more opportunities. Get a degree linked with the latter, and you won't.
And yes, this is coming from a guy who has been smacked in the face by someone else opening the door on me. Same with picking a poor career choice pre housing crash in 2008. Adapt and overcome.
I had to ask one of my old graduate project partners for a referral to my current (and first, at 27) tech job and I still feel dirty and guilty that I got it so easily and managed to escape the trap of being extremely qualified while making min wage in a dusty shithole of a warehouse.
“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” was a phrase of derision growing up, but it’s how the world works now.
Right now my coworkers like me, my manager gave me a glowing review, the company is willing to buy me certs and I have been assigned to the subteam responsible for our core functionality.
8 months ago I was self-harming and ready to off myself because of endlessly firing applications into the void and reaching the end of my finances.
I can clearly perform under the stress of work, school, achievement, things breaking but the way the labour market is structured almost broke me which has to tell you something.
Except historically, most jobs have been less safe.
You get crap jobs in your teens to have work history. You go to college to get a degree. You make friends at college, network, and maybe get an internship. You leverage all of the previous to get your first job. You leverage your first job and network to get your second job.
It's not easy. But it is how the world works. Why do you think so many people in white collar jobs have imposter syndrome?
I am sorry you experienced this. Many of us have experienced similar things in our careers. When I did, I had my brother's couch I could crash on while I figured things out, and to be honest, parents who could help me with rent when my post dotcom-bust job paid peanuts.
To the extent that your difficulties were exacerbated by an insufficient social safety net is perhaps the greatest indictment of our society. Incentive structures matter, and structures that put people at the brink between achievement and self harm do a lot of damage to our human capital.
Not everyone will be pushed to the point of self-harm, but the proximity between destitution and achievement is too close, especially for those without family and community safety nets.
It was always a phrase of derision for the naivete of those who think it has ever been different, because it has always been how the world works.
You just didn't understand it until it bit you, and then you mistook it for some recent change, even though you apparently grew up with people telling you how it is.
I got started with an unpaid internship in high school (every school should require that) and life grew out of that.
[edit] And my family was anything but "traditionally professional." I had no connections whatsoever through my family.
I got my first part-time tech support job during college via a connection. My aunt was a white collar professional, she ran the fundraising for a non-profit with an annual budget in the millions of dollars. Some software they used for managing donations was developed by a small local company, and she recommended I apply for work there because she was always in touch with their support and thought I could do the job. So I wrote a cover letter and name dropped my aunt's name, who they knew as a client. They interviewed me and hired me. I don't know how much my aunt helped but I can grant that this connection was a privilege many don't have.
After that, the rest of my jobs were without any connection. In the winter of my senior year at college I started applying to big companies through their websites. A big insurance company responded and flew me in for an interview. I was thrilled by this chance, I had never been treated so well. The recruiter told me to save receipts for food and taxis etc, I was so unused to this that I don't think u ever submitted them, I couldn't believe they'd pay for all that. Anyway they hired me.
After that my LinkedIn profile did most of the work. I responded to recruiter spam and got interviews.
One job-hop was driven by a semi-connection: I was moving cities and wanted to find a new job, so I went to a bunch of tech meetups. One was a python meetup, which has nothing to do with my tech stack and I know very little python. At the end, I approached one of the lecturers and told him that while I didn't understand anything he talked about, I got his joke and I thought they were funny. He said that he and some friends were going for drinks, would I like to join? "Sure." So we sat and talked, at the end he asked if I'm looking for a job, I said yes, he told me to send him my CV which I did. Then nothing... then a week later he responds telling me he posted on a forum for veterans of a particular military unit he was in, where he wrote that he thought I was a good candidate. Then suddenly my phone started ringing...I had interviewsin the new city and ultimately offers.
Bottom line: there are multiple ways to success. Good fortune is a common thread though, you do need luck and serendipity, and professional family connections certainly don't hurt.
Maybe an “affirmative action” type program for the socially disadvantaged is necessary, but I can’t see that gaining much support when addressing the more glaring disparities (racial, gender) is controversial enough.
But you can control who your friends are. And you can choose to surround yourself with motivated people.
>puts a bullet in the idea of meritocracy. I don't feel the same way, as this sits at the boundary of the workplace. My understanding of meritocracy is that, reward is based on performance inside the company. But until you have hired and had someone working for some time, you have no way of evaluating them.
We try to mitigate hiring bad employees with things like resumes, interviews and skill tests but those are not perfect. I, for example, suck at writing a resume. How many people have you seen on this site rage about "leet code tests"?
So, another "tool" companies use are personal connections. John, a great worker whom I trust, refers Frank. I still have to interview him but it give me another data point.
As a society, we have drifted away from the local community organizations (i.e. churches) that allowed people to build up good connections. We have tried to replace them, things like Linkedin but I am not sure how good of a job they do. Anything done on the internet gives me more of an ethereal feeling as opposed to the more permanent feeling of face to face personal connections.
We need more political education, especially among younger people just entering the job market. Period.
Close. It's not who you know, it's who knows you.
The median bachelor's degree in math or physics obtained in 2021 is basically worthless.
Off the top of my head CS is steadily looking like one of the only degrees worth anything and I’d still argue the value of that given the prevalence of self taught developers. Decent starting salaries for the most part, and very good starting salaries if you’re particularly good at certain things and an otherwise unheard of ceiling. Though I’m generalizing at the moment, I feel the industry is more complex than that.
Nursing seems ok. Salaries appear good at first, but the nurses I know also work ungodly hours.
Some traditional engineering fields seem ok in terms of employability, but wages don’t seem that great and many of the roles I’ve seen in those fields want a MS/MEng.
Physical therapy seems to be doing well too.
The other one in my head was pharmacy, but I guess one needs a Pharm. D to continue on. Being a pharmacy tech also sucks, objectively.
CS, maybe. Engineering degrees from anything less than a large state school or tier one are probably better off trying to get into one for their masters. That's why I said "median" BS degree above.
Law is entirely saturated and dead.
Ironically, I see a lot of humanities students doing well post-graduation because they went in with low expectations. But society continues to dunk on them for basically no reason.
A Pharm D is currently one of the worst investments. Their wages have been declining since at least 2015, and stagnant since 2010.
They have no ability to generate revenue other than hawking bullshit vitamins and supplements, because they have no negotiating power against the people that pay them (managed care organizations and governments). And a few big employers compose of most of the market that buys Pharm D labor (CVS, Walgreens, Kroger, Walmart).
Not to mention that you have to work evenings, weekends, nights, and deal with the general public. Checkout the pharmacy forums on sdnforum or Reddit, they are super depressing.
I have mentored math and physics students for six years now and even the good ones are having an increasingly hard time finding employment, and not for lack of trying. It's not uncommon to hear of seniors sending, say, 100 applications only to get ghosted on 99 of them.
A degree is nice but until someone has gained experience that person first needs a company to take a chance on them.
1. The company that hired the interns received a fantastic deal on labor. I think the company that hired me did it because they had an extra fully equipped desk that was going to waste without someone coding on it.
2. Not every student earned an internship, so gaining one was real feather in the hat.
3. Not every intern would have accomplished the same amount. Just like school and life, the more you put into an internship the more you get out.
4. It jump started my professional network of people actually in industry.
I just finished supervising the summer interns embedded with my team at work, and we definitely paid everyone, allowed remote work, and brought everyone into the HQ for a week towards the end (flights, hotel, transpo, meals all comped) to give presentations, network in person with the team, do field trips / team building stuff, etc. I like to think we do a better-than-average job, but it's pretty close to what you need to be doing if you want to attract good talent to your internship program.
I still can't understand how people can willingly choose any number of majors/careers that are very well known to have a weak job market and salary range, and then act surprised when it's tough after graduating.
You think they care I graduated at all? :D Be intelligent, know things, be creative and always end a job interview with the guys telling you you interviewed them.
Graduating is worth nothing. Whatever you learned while at university is worth a lot to get a free internship. Whatever you learned during the internship is worth a bit. Always been so, always will be.
The point is we all get dumb luck opportunities, not all keep them though