‘How Do I Do That?’ The New Hires of 2023 Are Unprepared for Work | Hacker News Reader

‘How Do I Do That?’ The New Hires of 2023 Are Unprepared for Work

wsj.com

24 pointslxm44 comments

I know that this is yet another article about how an emergency shift to a novel form of education maybe wasn't ideal for a quality education, but when has school ever completely prepared someone for whatever path they take in life? Didn't for me when I graduated. There is so much to learn, so much specific knowledge out there, that it's impossible to cram it all into X years of schooling. Best you can do is teach them the broad, base level stuff, give them some opportunities and connections to get started, and help them build the skills to learn new things efficiently. Learning doesn't stop when school ends.

Exactly. This type of article is to make us believe school was ever useful. It was not much

Says the person that can form a sentence, likely thanks to instruction they received from a school.

I can form much more complete and eloquent sentences and I treated school as the re-education camps that they are. My mother taught me to read, then books (and later the internet) taught me the rest.

> I can form much more complete and eloquent sentences

much more than what?

> It was not much

Not a big deal and not something I would point our normally but it lacks punctuation and lands a bit soft for my tastes.

I was writing fast, and english isn't my mother tongue. But I'm sure it's about style and taste here. I've read dirty english in Bukowski

I spent 18 years in school. If the net result is "the student can form a sentence", then 99% of instruction was wasted

Did you also learn mathematics? Did you learn anything or were you exposed to anything that interest you and that you pursued more deeply? Did you make friends and learn social skills?

Everything I use in my career was self taught from the internet. I took many math and other classes that were a waste of time

So if you had children you would not send them to school?

I'd look into democratic schooling or private schools with alternative pedagogy. My criticism is not of all forms of school and learning, just the conservative, orthodox pedagogy found in public schools and most private schools

You definitely don't have children.

I do have kids.

The idea that school is just organized babysitting where you learn nothing is an absolutely ridiculous take.

Sorry about my presumption.

Could your children form sentences before they attended school? Almost certainly yes, so I don't understand your earlier claim.

Won't send them to public school

One claim of the article is that specific job focused training programs have failed to provide students with skills previous students had gained during their training.

I completely agree that education does not remove the need to gain real experience on the job, no matter the circumstances. But there are certain skill that should be learned before entering certain jobs and the article claims many students are lacking in those skills.

The title is really bad. "How do I do that" is the most normal response any new hire has about many things in his job and the rest of the article is not really about people having questions when entering the workforce.

The claim of the article is that around two years of social isolation and removal from normal methods of learning has significantly hurt the social and educational development of young adults and that employers now should focus more on training for new hires.

The worst kinds of companies

- will expect you to do the thing

- won’t tell you how to do it

- will ignore you or get mad if you ask how to do it

- will punish you for figuring it out yourself

It happened to me somewhat recently (I’m out of that place now) and I’ve been sharpening my proverbial knives ever since.

Can you imagine being confused how to do something on your first job out of college, and someone writes an article about it in The Wall Street Journal?

My thought exactly. This article might as well only exist so older folks can pop it open and feel smug and superior about something dumb.

The article argues that the pandemic is to blame and that it is not about decreasing quality of young people.

It reads more like typical investor entitlement syndrome.

The WSJ opinion pages are often a laundry list of gripes against the government that investor demands that are not being met.

The WSJ is a Murdoch rag. It's just slightly classier than Fox News.

Of course that assumes that they all knew exactly how to do everything day one on the job. The kind of people that will feel smug and superior probably like to tell themselves these lies are true, but after 20 years on the job most of them still need the junior on the team to show them how these new fangled computermibobs work every few days.

Yeah it’s a nice variation on ‘todays kids don’t want to work anymore.’ In this episode it turns out they’re too stupid!

This place is going to hell in a hand basket I tell you! In my day we learned to use a slide rule and that got me through 50 years of not using slide rules. Kids these days.

“I was burnt out, and earned every penny of my savings and social security and [getting to grandparents here] pensions!”

You kids are just lazy socialists who think 15-20 years of economic insecurity is worse than when we burnt out.

(General Patton tries to slap the young man with a case of nerves to “get back on the battlefield”—but his subdermal MEMS insulin pump is performing an OTA update, and he needs to check whether his granddaughter posted on instagram.

Personalized to the geriatric General’s situation, adrenaline is released from the implant, and he is able to slap the young man who wrote that exact code).

Correction: management expectations of the time costs of training up new entrants are vastly underestimated.

Even the intro example about designing an aluminum part to be milled with a lathe as a simple first year college thing… no, we had a manufacturing class where we briefly used a lathe in junior year, but most of the stuff in college was academic. We were doing linear algebra and sizing HVAC systems, not designing for production.

Just imagine how much worse it would be if the graduate had an art history degree. I mean, it's fascinating but it doesn't tend to be relevant on the job.

The idea that university is job training just needs to go. The academic material may be relevant for work later on but it often isn't, and on the job there is way more to learn.

I agree - college is a filter - not a tech tree.

In engineering school you solve problems similar to industry - but its more the difficulty than the similarity.

New grads can handle the difficulty your job provides. If you train them - they should get the hang of it.

Industry leads academia in undergrad - not the other way around.

Industry knew that new grads needed 6-12 months of niche education (this is the general operation of Turbo Encabulators https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag). It was in their budget. Now.... not so much.

When I started at my first job out of university in 1988 I was told it would be at least 6 months before my contribution to the business would be a net positive - which was probably an underestimate!

How is it a "correction" when the article explicitly quotes someone saying that hiring managers should focus more on willingness to learn?

Did you read the article?

Stop complaining and bring back apprenticeships. A university's objective is to create more professors and researchers, not industry workers.

... create more adminstrators, professors and researchers

Now don't be silly. No point creating professors and researchers when the funding could go to administrators instead!

https://archive.is/ORkht

News flash: college continues to be poor preparation for the workforce and remote work fails at creating an environment for mentorship and L&D, esp. among the inexperienced. If you're fresh out of college or looking for your first job in tech/engineering, do yourself a favor and find a company that works onsite. Ask recruiters and the interviewers about this. Make sure that senior/staff level employees don't have carved out exemptions to WFH. You have an entire career to work remotely, spend the first ~ 5 years being surrounded by people smarter and more inexperienced than yourself.

Regarding the example at the start of the article I haven't found that new design engineers are less capable than ones in the past. Hiring interested and capable of learning junior designers isn't a problem at all. If anything, with the availability of inexpensive 3D printers, more students actually build stuff in their free time since it is more accessible than needing to have access to machine tools. In the past you would have mostly been looking at the few who had joined a design team like Formula SAE.

I still do think it would be beneficial to any aspiring mechanical designer to spend some time working in a machine shop and learning how things are actually made. It is definitely one of the most beneficial experiences that I had during my schooling and made me stand out from the rest of my fellow graduates when finding a first job.

There is a difference between academic learning and vocational training. The UK used to have higher education institutions called Polytechnics, I went to one. These taught degree courses qualifying you for working life. Architects, chemists, computer scientists...

I did a 4 year degree, the third year was spent working for an employer. At the end of the final year much of what I'd been taught formally was outdated or irrelevant to the workplace. Many of the useful skills came from practical projects and that third year.

Polys got phased out and renamed Universities, a valuable distinction was lost and no one was fooled.

It took 3 people to write this beautiful fecalith.

Is this new? I distinctly remember this as my own experience starting out in the late '90's, and it basically feels like the experience of every new hire I've seen. Actually, with better tooling, Google, and the like, I feel like new hires are more able to fix and solve their issues. (in software, anyway)

I know! RTO /s

An environment that fosters collaboration and mentorship surely will address this. Not.

What a terrible article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com