Hacker News Reader

Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

Over the last decade or so I’ve seen more and more people dismiss the idea of universities, and more generally, dismissing the idea of learning anything that isn’t explicitly needed for the career they’re studying for. This always felt like a huge mistake to me.

Universities have their problems, but getting students to see the value in subjects on the fringe, or completely outside, of their primary field of study is not one of them. These are the places new and novel solutions are born. Even if someone isn’t an expert, knowing enough to bring in an expert and facilitating the conversation can pay dividends.

I was once tasked with getting a new team up to speed quickly in a new site we were standing up. The manager at the time wanted to forgo training entirely to just let them figure it out, in the name of speed. I dug my heels in and still ran everyone through it. With some, it was extremely fast, and there was no way they were going to absorb it. However, I wanted them to at least hear it, so if something came up, they may not know what to do, but they will hopefully at least know enough to ask, so we can then dive deeper and show them the right way. The company had its own way of doing almost everyone, so someone doing what they thought was right based on previous experience often led to a mess.

View on HN

Universities in the US are a giant clusterfuck because they confuse themselves between centers of status/prestige, a place for learning/training, and a semi-professional sports team.

Not sure why you're getting downvotes; I think this is quite accurate.

They did not mention research which is like the defining characteristic of a university. They seem to be condescendingly grouping research into the category of "status/prestige"

I was thinking of it from what an undergrad is trying to get out of college, graduate+ is an entirely different scene admittedly

Sure but I think it's an oversimplification to say that universities are unfocused and that this lack of focus is a problem because 1) the alternative already exists (smaller colleges are typically focused primarily on education with less research and less sports) 2) Universities doing a lot of things (including offering undergrads connections to research labs) is one of the main reasons that they are an attractive option relative to colleges.

I've heard similar arguments

1) if they were effective then we wouldnt see millions of students jumping into 60k a year private institutions

2) I don't buy this at all, I think students mostly select based on prestige. Academic rigor and research opportunities are mildly correlated to this but def not what high schoolers and their parents index on

When America was founded, universities were basically Bible colleges.

With the enlightenment, came enlightenment values. During this time, study of Greek and Latin were practically standard.

With the coming of industrialization, many adopted the German model of education and became glorified trade schools for the industrial age, churning out classics majors and engineers in equal measure.

Post WW2 with Vannevar Bush's influence, American universities became institutions of research and a crucial part of the military industrial complex.

Finally, with the advent of television, college football became immensely profitable sources of funding for many colleges and universities as well as a huge attraction source for alumni donations.

You say Universities are a clusterfuck, but in reality they have simply evolved with the times, and hence carry a lot of cultural baggage. I don't think that's a bad thing.

It's time to be unburdened by what has been and sharply divide the vocational school and the higher learning/research track like most other first world countries. It's very cruel imo to send mediocre students (who likely won't produce any meaningful research) down research paths while they drown in debt. The state is complicit in this too by guarantee'ing the loans.

And btw, I don't deny that there is value in intermingling vocational studies and cutting edge research - it very much makes sense for some STEM disciplines, but that's the exception not the rule imo.

You think Harvard is a vocational school? Or Columbia, or Stanford, or Princeton for that matter? You think parents like to shell out money presuming their kids are "mediocre"?

The elite schools are still elite schools. They just do cutting edge research now... research originally intended to win a thermonuclear WW3. Their humanities departments of these schools may very well still also stuffed with academics influenced by Soviet active-measures campaigns from the cold-war which actively seek to undermine the power of American institutions to win that long settled conflict.

The agricultural colleges of the 19th century now do research and have football teams now.

American Universities are incredible powerhouses of research. The impact of research efficacy is power law distributed, just like youtube influences, and American wealth. A lot of people in the tech industry seem to be jaded by Universities due to the fact that they've gotten outrageously expensive compared to the median income, that for the past 15 years you can make easier money doing webservices than Greek literature, and the majority of universities are not Harvard or MIT. But you can't deny the enormous contributions to society from American universities. Many people we hold in high regard started off as "mediocre" students.

And the truth is there are many colleges and universities in America that are vocational schools. They just don't want to admit it. How many community colleges in the states are really preparing kids to become nobel laureates? The anti-university sentiment is just another offshoot of the anti-elitism (and perhaps anti-intellectualism) running through American society today... a natural consequence of the situation where you have massively skewed wealth distribution and massively skewed success outcomes from that power law distribution I mentioned earlier.

You're definitely misreading what I wrote, and by the way, given that America has had first pick for the smartest people across the entire world for 100 years, the baseline is much higher than, produces a lot of good research (there has never been a higher IQ gravity well in history). The goal here is to produce amazing research without crippling the middle class with debt and wasting their time so that we have a functioning society that also advances.

Something extremely simple like a 1300-1400 SAT cutoff for university will get us half way there. University being an institution that qualifies for large research grants.

Wealthy parents often hire tutors and consultants to guarantee that their intellectually mediocre children get into those élite schools.

Universities are the epitome of institutional inertia. That is a bad thing.

Ironically, I think the biggest dissonance is between two terms you grouped together: "learning/training".

What universities were (and still are) really great at is being a place for intense learning. What 99% of their customers now want is vocational training to get a well paying job.

Exactly because of the status/prestige (+ government incentives + being very far from a free market), customers that don't really want what the university is selling are attending in droves.

Of varying importance for different groups/cohorts - going to college because it the rite of passage for adulthood.

Related to this is the death of vocational studies at the high school level. EVERYTHING is "college prep" and there is no other course. Huge numbers of people could avoid universities if we offered better vocational training.

I went to school in a more rural area. In high school we had the option to spend half the day at the vocational school in the next town over learning the trades. Our senior year they also had an assembly to tell us all that statistics were against us in college and only 15% would graduate, so we shouldn’t try.

My nephews are about to enter that same high school about 25 years later. From what I’ve gleaned, they still have the program for vocational training. I think the kids went on a field trip there is middle school.

> Huge numbers of people could avoid universities if we offered better vocational training.

Could they? This is a perennial HN complaint; however, the salaries for jobs that vocational schools would train your for show very little pressure to increase. That doesn't indicate some mythical pent up demand that a bunch of new vocational students could slot into.

Most people are going to college because they want to avoid working at the equivalent of an Amazon warehouse. If you can give them a way to do that, they'll happily skip going to a university.

Being an electrician or plumber is substantially less soul-crushing than an Amazon warehouse, and if you’re good, pays a hell of a lot better.

All the electricians and operating engineers in the data centers I work at do quite well. We aren't going to need less of that skill set.

Is the pay better?

https://www.sotxjatc.org/

The pay seems pretty comparable to an Amazon warehouse until you pass at least 3 years of training.

And not everybody gets to wire up air conditioned data centers. A lot of wiring is outside in the hot sun climbing up and down ladders.

If the salaries were significantly better, I should think we'd see a lot of people beating down the doors to be electricians, but we don't ...

The Amazon warehouse across the street from me pays ~$19/h (CAD). Minimum wage is $17.20.

Electrician apprentices make $20-28/h. Once you’re licensed you’re pretty much guaranteed $30+/h, most break $40/h pretty quick if they’re good. If you start your own company (which isn’t that hard here!) you’re probably closer to $60-100/h depending on skill, niche, client base, and luck.

Plumbing is pretty similar but the ceiling’s probably triple that of electricians.

Trade school is so cheap it’s almost free. (My brother just finished an automotive mechanic program, I think his total out-of-pocket cost was like $1500 for a few years of school + apprenticeship, and he was making $30/h by the end of the apprenticeship. He’s now at around $36/h iirc, less than a year out of the program.)

I don’t believe it’s possible to make even apprentice money as an Amazon warehouse worker here. Maybe as a floor manager. And yes, obviously trades aren’t sunshine and rainbows, but if you have even a modicum of motivation you’re better off there than packing boxes.

If the money is superior, then why aren't the people working at Amazon warehouses moving to the trades?

It requires some effort. You have to actually sign up and attend trades school (which requires a non-zero amount of money up front and you’ll go 6-12 weeks without pay - which also can be a problem for some people), then spend some effort finding someone to take you on as an apprentice, and you have to actually think and learn things. Nothing particularly difficult but still, you need some non-zero degree of critical thinking skills.

If you don’t have that level of motivation (which again, is really not that high), you won’t succeed. You can walk into an Amazon warehouse (or honestly, any similar warehouse job) and start working either that day or in very short order, and get paid in 2 weeks or less. It’s the least amount of effort possible to get a job, but it’s also the least rewarding (mentally, financially, etc).

There are also some people who genuinely cannot work in the trades. Almost any kind of physical disability and you’re at a severe disadvantage. Same with mental disabilities (to a lesser degree).

There’s real downsides too. Some trades are fairly dangerous (electrician comes to mind, especially if you’re working with oldheads who are happy to work on live unfused lines/etc) and almost all of them will result in you degrading your body faster than average (although this is also true for warehouse jobs). Buddy of mine caught a piece of shrapnel with his eye (while wearing listed wraparound safety glasses, mind you) while grinding some metal underneath a car, and has permanent vision damage in one eye at age 24. You also have to be pretty tolerant of more… abusive working environments. Aside from general tomfoolery (“boys will be boys” type mindset), there’s a substantially higher chance than average that your colleagues will be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or all of the above, which isn’t great if you fall into one of those categories. It’s a lot better now than it was even 10-15 years ago, but it’s still very much a problem. (I’ve never had an office worker casually drop a hard-r while at work, but I’ve encountered enough tradespeople doing so that I’ve lost count of how many. And not even in an even remotely acceptable way, just whites dudes straight up using it to refer to someone as a slave or similar uses. In the past ~3 years.)

And honestly, probably a lot of people working at warehouses are moving to trades. Warehousing in general is high-turnover (40-50%, if not higher), so it would not shock me if a non-negligible portion of workers are switching to a non-warehouse career. I don’t know how to find stats on that though.

In short, lots of reasons.

  > however, the salaries for jobs that vocational schools would train your for show very little pressure to increase.

Aren't "Code Camps" vocational schools?

I mean another perennial HN complaint is about how "off-topic" university CS courses are. Personally, I disagree. I'm with Knuth on this one:

  > People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.

To be fair, sometimes it really doesn't matter if the program is weird or not. A machinist or tradesman is different from an engineer. But clearly there is some value to those classes even if you don't end up using that knowledge directly. Doesn't make it off-topic or useless, but we definitely frame things this way.

I mean the major thing I would change about code camps is make it a 1 year or 2 year process and actually get some depth and nuance instead of being a cram school focused more on trying to get you to pass the test than trying to teach you what the test is trying to test.

I live in a prominent college town, and all of the high schools around here have a lot of vocational studies. There is a multi-year track where students actually build an entire house, for instance. I found it surprising and a really good thing. Now, none of it is required, which I think it should be a little bit. But vocational studies is definitely alive in this area.

> What universities were (and still are) really great at is being a place for intense learning.

Are they? A lot of professors hate and/or are bad at teaching. Especially at R1 research universities.

There are lots of problems, specifically for undergrads:

- Large class sizes

- Professors that don't like teaching

- Professors that can't teach well

- Professors that hand off teaching to TAs, RAs, doctoral students, etc.

- Poor feedback on homework, essays, projects, and exams

- Unnecessary classes

- Outdated classes and curriculum

- Sports programs that serve as recruitment and distraction that are orthogonal to learning

- Admin structures that care more about facilities, growth, and recruitment than learning and research

- Systems that are "too big to fail"

- Student loans that are disconnected from bankruptcy, which feeds a recursively growing monster in such a way that it isn't exposed to evolutionary pressures. There is no risk, so malinvestment doesn't bear consequences.

> What 99% of their customers now want is vocational training to get a well paying job.

You can want a curriculum rich in theory and the vocational training for a well-paying job. The problem is that universities are full of perverse incentives - the admin and faculty are at odds, and often even the faculty itself isn't aligned with teaching.

It's a weird org structure steeped in tradition, nostalgia from alumnus, and a faculty tenure system that doesn't always reward the right things.

I don't see why being interested in academic subjects like that has to be driven via universities. In fact, they might even get in the way of developing a genuine interest in topics outside of your chosen major.

Ideally universities were where you could go to research whatever the fuck you wanted.

Historically there was no publish or perish paradigm and you could do this. People did get kicked out for years of no production but it wasn't uncommon for researchers to take a long time to publish anything. Usually it was "hey, just show us what you've been doing". Getting researchers to communicate to the rest of the community. The problem wasn't people sitting around doing nothing, it was them being caught up in their work and not sharing their progress.

Now, things got flipped upside-down. You get fired if you don't publish fast enough. We missed the reason we started measuring publication rates in the first place.

So now we have the inverse problem. People are trying to publish too early. It compounded though. We now changed the peer-review process. That used to be you publish and then peers... review... Responding with papers of their own and such. Journals were less picky, mostly rejecting works for major mistakes or plagiarism. Other than that... well... you can't really verify the correctness of a paper just by reading it... The purpose of journals was that we didn't have the internet and it would cost a lot of money to send every paper to every library. Before, you'd literally just take your "pre-print" and put it in a section of the library at your university where your university peers would make comments. Now we don't talk to the researcher who's next door.

And we now have this thing of novelty that's completely subjective and compounding with how obvious something is only after hearing it and highly dependent on how well it is communicated. Frankly, if I communicate something really well it should be obvious and you should think that you could have come up with it yourself. That's because you understand it! But now that is a frequent reason to reject. We think we can predict impact of work but there's tons of examples where highly influential works got rejected for lack of novelty or seeming trivial. Hell, a paper that got the Nobel prize in economics got rejected multiple times for these reasons. Both getting called "too obvious" AND "obviously false"[0]. We're just really bad at this lol Those rejections don't make papers better, they just waste time resubmitting and trying to rewrite to figure out how to win at some slot machine.

Academia still works and is still effective, but that doesn't mean there aren't issues. Certainly there are often fewer pressures in an academic setting to do research than at a company. The Uni only cares that you produce papers. Even if it is a misaligned metric, the incentive is to just pick easier problems. The business needs you to make something with __short term business value__. Bigger companies can give more freedom, but the goals are different.

Really, the problem can be seen through the Technology Readiness Level chart[1]. Businesses rarely want to research anything below TRL 5. Really you want to be at 7 or 8. Where the problem with academia is the incentives make it so you want to be around TRL 3 or 4, which leaves TRL 1 and 2 vacant. It still happens, just less of it. Tenure can't fix this if you still got grad student who must publish or perish.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons#Critical...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level

> I’ve seen more and more people dismiss the idea of universities, and more generally, dismissing the idea of learning anything that isn’t explicitly needed for the career they’re studying for. This always felt like a huge mistake to me.

As usual, it's not black and white: there's no single answer that fits everyone or every field. That said, I'll give an example from computer science where I've seen many people struggle if they haven’t taken (and approved) a course on operating systems: topics like race conditions, mutexes, and concurrency.

While these aren't especially difficult concepts, they're not inherently tied to knowing a specific programming language. They transcend language syntax, even though some languages offer syntax for handling them. The problem I often see is twofold: either developers don't apply locking mechanisms at all (leading to unsafe behavior), or they use them excessively or incorrectly, resulting in deadlocks or significant performance issues. Clearly concurrency could be really hard but I am talking here about the basics.

Recalling key words and where or how to find out more has been my "superpower" when it comes to programming.

I can do this since I love reading about all sorts of random topics, a lot which pop up here, and while I seldom recall the details, I can recall enough to know when it might be relevant and how to find it again.

Sooo many diverse topics has suddenly cropped up at work, where everyone else is fairly stumped but I can say "I'm sure I've heard of this before" and with a few minutes have found back the resource which details the solution, or something to that effect.

Thus I too prefer getting blasted with info when starting a new job or new project, so I can recall the relevant key words when they pop up.

Are you worried that this ability will become less valuable because the AIs are also wide but shallow?

I noticed colleagues calling me a lot less with questions that only I can answer. Several admitted to me that they now use AI for the same kind of “find me some obscure vaguely specified thing”. It is one of the few things the AIs do really well.

I haven't thought hard about it yet, but perhaps I should be a bit worried.

My other "superpower" is digging into documentation and figuring out how to actually use stuff I've never seen before. Another thing that might be under threat from AIs soon. I've certainly used AIs for my own hobby projects in this regard, sometimes with good result, so it's surely a matter of time.

Though at least at my current job, my most valuable skill is being able to understand the customer's needs, and being able to come up with solutions that solve their problems well without breaking the bank. Part of that is finding out how to best utilize existing code, which means I like to work on varied parts of the code base. Part of it is probing the customers to understand how they operate, which limitations they have and so on.

I think part of that is thanks to the same drive that lead me to all these obscure topics, which drives me to want to understand the existing code and the customers domain, which in turn puts me in a much better position to help and guide our customers to a good solution.

Not sure if AI's will do that too soon, time will tell.

This is actually where I get the biggest benefits from AI. It's not really good at making those connections itself. But it is good at fuzzy searching. By that I mean I can describe things but not know the name or proper terms for that. So I describe to an LLM, it can figure that out, and then I go off and search for depth and nuance (don't use the LLM for that...). This is something that traditional search is really bad at. But LLMs are also really bad at traditional search.

I'm not sure why we aren't trying to make this more complementary. I really don't want my LLM to be direct search just as I don't want my direct search to be an LLM. Frankly, the context of what I'm looking for matters. Don't make it an end-to-end thing. Just give me a fucking toggle switch for direct search or fuzzy search (hell, throw in an "I don't know" and make it the default)

I'm not worried about the AI replacing me here because the "superpower" (and I assume the gp's) here isn't having broad awareness. It is the ability to abstract and connect seemingly unconnected things. Once the AI is there, it's going to have already been able to replace a lot more stuff. The "superpower" is creativity combined with broad knowledge-base. LLMs seem more complementary here than replacing.

While I’m sure AI will continue to improve, it still suffers from the same issue as the search engine, which is that you need to know enough to ask the right questions.

I have run into this countless times when using AI. I asked for ideas around a topic on how to solve a problem, and it seems to miss a really good solution. I bring it up, and it the says something like, “oh yeah, that is much better.” On the flip side, if I lead it with some ideas, it has trouble breaking free of that and it tells me I already have the best idea.

If the topics coming together are seemingly unrelated, it takes a good prompt to get the AI to link those ideas on the path toward a solution.

Just today I was asking Copilot about different ideas on how to structure a new project. I laid out some pseudo code with my initial idea, and it gave it back to me with a more complex syntax. I asked why, and if there were any advantages to the way it did it, and then it told me no, my way was better, cleaner, and the preferred way for the language. Though after pushing it some more it did suggested another alternate suggestion, which is tried to dismiss as worse, until I explained why it would actually be better. As far as I’ve seen, at least with Copilot (which is all I’m currently allowed to use at work), it’s no match for a person with some experience and knowledge when it comes to more abstract thinking.

Agreed, I can see fundamental flaws to many experienced peoples logic and knowledge, their suggestions often are missing key fundamentals. Often their ideas still work but they're either reinventing the wheel or overlooking something. Many things to them are relative, whereas it should be absolute (benefitting from past human learnings).

I mean it's on full display with social media, people these days are willing to chime in on things they have no understanding of and come to the wrong conclusions.

We're biased towards simplicity. But unfortunately, when you get better at things the small details and subtleties become more important. Literally by definition complexity increases. You can no longer ignore them and improve. Low order approximations will only get you so far.

The problem is we make these low order approximations, recognize that they (ideally) help and congratulate ourselves. It's just a matter of stopping too early. You see people say "don't let perfection get in the way of good enough." I don't think perfection is usually the issue, rather a disagreement about what's good enough. So sayings like that just become thought terminating cliches[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

Honestly, this has confused me too [0]. Replies to your comment also seem to highlight this, being overly defensive of a position rejecting academia. Don't get me wrong, it's got lots of issues (I'm quite vocal about this too, even with my name associated), but they also do a lot of good.

What's most baffling to me is the rejection of research and theory (depth in knowledge). Claiming that the work isn't impactful. But that's like saying the ground you stand on doesn't matter...

I'm absolutely astounded this is such a common opinion among programmers and CS people. We're literally building the largest companies in the world and bringing about the information revolution and AI revolution on technology that isn't even 100 years old. It's rapidly getting better because of research and we're not waiting for a hundred years of return on investment here.

It's anti-intellectualism. Often spewed by those trying to prove their own genius, demonstrating the opposite. CS of all people should be able to recognize how complex even the simplest things are. For fuck's sake, we can't even get timezones right lol. We need to balance depth, not ignore it or reject it (I don't think the author argued that btw)

It feels excessively myopic. And honestly, the major problem with academia is the same myopia!

  | How do you manage genius?
    You don't 
    - Mervin Kelly (Bell Labs) 
 
  | What I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.
    - Donald Knuth

I could quote a hundred more from a hundred fields.

I think we have this weird image in our heads that researchers do nothing and if left to their own devices will just waste time and money. I write with my pocket computer that sends signals across the world and into space, passing through machines moving so fast their clocks disagree. Our science isn't taking centuries to benefit from. It rarely ever took decades.

Yet historically most science was done by the rich who had free time. Sure, we're moving faster now but we also have several orders of magnitude more scientists. Our continued growth doesn't mean we've become more efficient.

We seem to be really bad at attributing the causes of success. We're fixate on those at the end of a long chain of work. I mean even NVIDIA depends on TSMC, as does Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others. And TSMC is far from the root. I'm not trying to say how the economics should all fall out but its at least a helpful illustrative target to look at the biases in how we think.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44110055

> What I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want.

I had a boss who let me do this for a while. He just told me to do whatever I wanted that would help the team. He didn’t talk to me for 2 years after that. For the first few weeks I was kind of stressing to find what to do and show some results, but after that the boredom set in, and that’s one things took off. It was the most productive I’ve ever been. I was regularly working 12+ hour days, because I was enjoying what I was working on. After 2 years I had so many projects and so much stuff that they built a whole team around what I was doing to spread the load out a little. That actually helped me get bored again, so the ideas started flowing again. Those were the good ole days.

A lot of what I did started as research, then I applied what I learned. It was a nice balance to keep things interesting, rather than being in research mode or build mode all the time.

I think the result is unsurprising when you think about it for a bit. Though non-obvious at first!

Most people want to work. They think "hey, I'm here, might as well do something." When we're talking about experts in a field (academic or work), usually what interests them the most is the things that matter the most. Giving free time to "play" allows for these larger challenges to be solved. Things that you could never pitch to a manager because it's highly technical, hard to measure, and difficult to prove. But expertise tends to fill in those gaps.

Obviously you can't and shouldn't do this with everyone. Juniors shouldn't have completely free range. They need some to be able to learn this process, but need much more hand holding. But a senior? That's a position with high levels of trust. They should know the core business and you're literally hiring them to be an expert, right? And of course there are people that just want a paycheck. I think a surprising amount of them will still work regardless, but maybe not as much and as effectively. Certainly, micromanaging people will not get these people to do more work, and you risk just becoming overburdened with people in administrative positions.

Usually, you can sniff out the people that should be given more free reign. You don't have to understand the technical, you only have to detect passion. Some people will fool you, but passion is a pretty good litmus test. There's no optimal global solution here, so we have to accept some losses. Doesn't prevent us from trying to minimize that loss, but I think we get overly concerned with the losses that are easy to detect. Removing those often just results in your losses being harder to detect, not becoming non-existent. It's like the survivorship bias problem. You can't measure the hits on the planes that don't make it back. In our case, losses through employees (including managers) metric hacking. Frankly, we want our losses to be visible, because that makes them treatable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com