PS: I don’t think a CS degree is just signaling, but it could be improved an order of magnitude if the incentives of the professors and the institutions were aligned with teaching people marketable skills.
PS: I don’t think a CS degree is just signaling, but it could be improved an order of magnitude if the incentives of the professors and the institutions were aligned with teaching people marketable skills.
Well, the best analogy I can think of is a black belt in karate. It takes 10 years or whatever to get that. It has no marketable purpose. Why do it? The answer is more than "to get a job". It's about Discipline. Focus. Intense research into fundamentals. Stretching your limit if what you can learn in a weekend. Writing half a page of assembly code on a piece of paper. Debugging a C program. Red black trees. These have no purpose, but when reflecting on these experiences, I would not trade them for a second for "Intro to Javascript and HTML".