Comment by sneed-oil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneed-oil | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that the main purpose of having a college degree is signaling that you're not too stupid and too lazy, although it depends on what degree you got, in which college and which country. Of course you're supposed to have learnt something while you were there, but for the vast majority of my peers, what they learned about physics, electronics and control theory while pursuing our computer engineering degree, was mostly useless. All my acquaintances ended up working as software developers, and I know only one who writes firmware and needed to have some electronics knowledge.

So I don't get why many companies still require a degree for software developers. Some of my best colleagues don't have college degrees. Companies could use IQ tests to filter out stupid people and then proceed with a regular interview for those who passed the IQ test. Lazy people are very few in my experience and they would get filtered afterwards, but companies could just pay people less for the first few months to compensate. Maybe they could apply the process I described just to applicants without degrees.

I think a lot of what you're speaking to is the result of people undervaluing liberal arts degrees.

I work in a technical role, but I have a liberal arts degree. Liberal arts helped me learn how to think, learn new things, synthesize different things into a coherent argument, and more. People ask how I RCA problems so quickly. It's because I'm used to taking a set of facts from pile A, another from pile B, etc. and bring it together to a cogent argument.

Meanwhile I'm interviewing people with CS degrees who can't even explain the difference between symmetric and asymmetric encryption.

I think some of this (not being able to tell crypto types apart) is the emphasis on specialization. I helped with some intro infosec courses years back, and these were smart students but they had not much exposure or understanding of basic CLI tools. They had interacted with Windows with a mouse for their entire life, so using a prompt was something new and strange. Most picked it up, but it took a bit of time.

In my experience (granted, I'm in a research lab, so there's likely a bias compared to regular industry), CS/CE are somewhat unique in that way. Most CS/CE people don't have to touch most of what they've studied, as a CE I took classes on lasers, radio, convex optimization, quantum computing, op amps etc but haven't had to use the detailed knowledge from the classes at all. Many professors even commented in the classes themselves that most of the content was not likely to matter in industry.

My most useful classes have been math as they gave me the fundamentals to pick up enough of other fields to work with them. To the point that I often joke that I got an applied math degree rather than computer engineering.

But, in comparison, the physics, EE, mechanical engineering etc people I work with frequently use the stuff they learned from school.

Society needs knowledgeable people that aren't software developers too.

Also, CS isn't about programming; it's a branch of applied mathematics. It's the difference between science and engineering. Though in truth, many programmers are to software engineers as electricians are to electrical engineers.

I mean speak for yourself I guess, I learned a ton of programming fundamentals in pursuit of my CS degree and that laid the foundation directly for my career in web engineering.

I entered the job market already experienced with the tools, languages, and then-popular libraries and frameworks - I learned exponentially more on the job, of course, but that learning was built my college education. It would have been a struggle to get right to work without it.

The same is true for me, but I could have learned those things without going to college and without wasting time studying subjects that have never been useful in my work.

Yeah I know I could have, but to be honest, outside of a classroom setting, and perhaps especially lacking enthusiastic peers to engage with and co-operate with - I am really not confident that I could have done a better job learning on my own terms in 4 years than I did at college.

I suppose, one nuance might be - I wasn't 'just going to college to get a degree' - I was there specifically to learn skills that would make me hireable. It helped that I liked the subject matter, undoubtedly.

Also that I had to borrow all the money to pay for it myself.

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