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Comment by jfb | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the feeling that the bias is particularly subtle. I wouldn't trade my time at Chicago for all the vocational training in the world; but, different strokes &c.

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The pro collage stance is something like:

Spending 4 years at ~19-22 living on your own without a job near a lot of other intelligent 19-22 year olds is a lot of fun. The skills gained are minimal, but the credentials are worth something so why not?

But, that's no reason to actually higher someone because they have a collage degree ed:In the computer field. So, yea I am glad I went to collage, but I don't care about degrees when looking for people and I feel little need to subsidize other people going to collage.

" skills gained are minimal " - Citation Needed. People keep saying that, but you would not want a self taught engineer.

It's ipso facto false. The argument as I see it arises in how much weight skills that are exclusive to or overwhelming present in a college education should be granted vis a vis skills that can be gained through on-the-job training. That's a perfectly reasonable point of disagreeance.

Compare the productivity of a recent graduate with someone with someone without a degree but with 4 years of job experience and experience is a clear win. Now, in the long term they tend to balance out, but that's hardly a 'win' for the collage degree.

PS: Granted, not a scientific study but my sample size is over 30 and the difference is fairly dramatic.

And then move person with 4 years of work experience slightly out their comfort zone. Say working on designing locks, to working on designing engines.

The mechanical engineer would have a better time. It's one of the reasons vocational/on-the-job educated people end up with lower wages; generally educated people can go where the money is.

People with good contacts, are good at networking, good at marketing, and interested in money go where the money is. A history of creating business value, and a bunch of people who know about it, are a lot better than a general education.

This is slightly complicated by the fact that people going to well-known colleges get a head start on the network. A decent education on its own has more dubious value. Most companies want experience. I know that when I evaluate someone, relevant experience is way more important than if or where they went to college.

That's the point. Relevant experience. Jobs are very specialised. If you have one mechanical engineering job, you might not have much knowledge to transfer to another type of mechanical job.

That's what a general education in the subject is for.

So experience > college degree in the short term and experience = college in the long term?

Thats not a win at all, its a loss.

The loss is that people equate people with a college education with no experience. Which is totally false.

Experience relies heavily on ones own bias judgement. It can also lead to doing things without understanding them (i.e. writing shit code that works vs. writing good and efficient code) and can lead to nasty habits. Experience is also a slow teacher.

College is advantageous is that you are taught why things are by an experienced individual. You are able to gain a fundamental knowledge base and terminology that can be applied rather than wasting time being taught on-the-job. Plus you are taught things that won't and can't work in your field and why. All a person with experience can tell you is that they won't work and give some superficial reason why. Thus, the experienced person opens a book and has to acquire fundamental knowledge that they could have learn in uni.

> Citation Needed. People keep saying that, but you would not want a self taught engineer.

I'm a self taught Engineer. I had no problem getting a job; my professional educational experience has not been an issue so far. I've taken over projects from CS graduates that break just about every solid design principle I've learned (when its actually capable of running, that is).

CS degrees are certainly useful, but in my experience they do not make a good engineer on their own. A self-motivated learner will always outpace one without such qualities, regardless of credentials.

I've taken projects from self taught people that just don't understand basic state machine theory. NFA-DFA equivalence? Thompson's Construction? Powerset construction? Probabilistic automatons and more exotic stuff like Petri-nets.

See we can all give anecdotal examples?

Besides I was talking about engineering, not programming which often more far more formal in industry then programming is.

This is part of the reason I'm so opposed to being called an "engineer". I'm not. I write software. Because I file my own taxes, I'm now an accountant? Ridiculous.

There is a difference between writing software and engineering software. There really isn't anything wrong with being called a software engineer because it follows basic engineering skills rather well.

And I knew (self-taught) more about compiler theory than my college lecturers.

Self-taught implies a lot of motivation. What people learn depends on where the motivation was directed. And on the other hand, I'd be willing to bet a majority of people going through college treat things like compiler theory and more advanced discrete mathematics as ordeals to be endured, rather than tools to be used in the rest of their career.

>I'm a self taught Engineer.

I think he meant an Engineer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer

The kind that build things that aren't made of computer code.

That is to say, the kind that build bridges or airplanes or automobiles or dams.

Programmers calling themselves engineers reminds me of chiropractors who insist on having people address them as "Doctor".

I have a degree in nuclear engineering.

Good luck teaching yourself that.

The skills gained are minimal

Depends what you do. One of my CS professors worked at JPL on some pretty significant projects. I doubt I would've ever had access to him and his knowledge anywhere else.

If you want to make Facebook, or Twitter, or Pinterest, sure you probably don't really need a CS degree. If you want to write high-end AI or an operating system you probably aren't going to learn that without some very smart people helping you out.

No, the pro-college stance is, you get skills and experience from being in a heterogenous environment that you just can't get through on-the-job training. There is certainly a selection bias that can devolve into sheerest credentialism, but people display that selection bias all the time; a go-getter who left school to found a company will sometimes display the same blinkered, aggressively close-minded approach that someone who got a PhD from Stanford can.

One experience in my life was good enough to massively value the time at college. This involved the ability to sit in any class that I enjoyed.

I sat in on ASL classes, sat in on a DSP course (because I needed it for a personal project and didn't have $250 whatever for the book) and the instructors were pretty cool with an unregd student sitting in.

Nothing after college has even come close to that experience (one where you will always find some guy/girl who breathes the stuff you need to know and is more than happy to share it).

The internet is coming close to that but there is something amazing about being around humans and learning from them that electrons/photons through wires/fiber can't capture.

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