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Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | Hacker News Reader

Reminiscent of this thread talking about undergraduate-level students mailing it in: https://bsky.app/profile/jesbattis.bsky.social/post/3m6pvvko...

Is this not rational behavior? If, through grade inflation, the only thing that matters to an employer is what school you went to and that you completed it (the sheepskin effect), then isn't the correct optimization to reduce wasting time on levers that won't make any practical difference in the end?

Sure sure, there's the love of learning and the formation of the well-rounded modern individual, but most people are much more pragmatic than that.

They need to get in, get the piece of paper for the least effort, get a job. Everything they need can be taught on the job or asked to ChatGPT most likely anyway.

A Case Against Education https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th... was prophetic of this phenomenon years ago.

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>Is this not rational behavior?

If you think the purpose of an education is literally nothing more than the diploma, then yeah sure.

If you think that I'm interviewing you for an entry SWE job (yes, we do this still) and you think I'm going to hire you because you hyperoptimized a compsci degree to minimize the work and learning you had to do and maximized your GPA, then you're going to blow the interview and wind up another person on reddit scratching your head wondering why these mean companies just don't want to give you your $125k software dev job.

Obviously, you don't need a degree to learn enough to convince me that you'll be a productive member of our team (or at least good enough in the short term and productive after a few months). But in my experience, the ones who half ass and ChatGPT their way through college are almost never brilliant polymaths. In my experience as a student years back and my experience interviewing graduates now, those students breezed through their courses and sought out more challenging learning opportunities such as accelerated graduate courses, impressive work within student organizations (for example, winning CTFs competitions with their school's computer security group), etc. And that all shows up on resumes and in interviews in a way that's night and day vs the ones who got tricked into thinking that the only purpose of an education is to get a paper.

I'm with you. In their position I did the most of the educational opportunity I had, but then I didn't live in a world where people told me my job would soon cease to exist thanks to Claude and I spent every waking out flipping through short form videos. I can't relate to what that does to you.

This is part of the reason I make this point online. People need to understand that there are jobs available if you do the work to make yourself valuable, especially if you aren't demanding high compensated FAANG roles right out the gate. It's just that if you learn absolutely nothing and will be hired to do shit work for a year or two until you become baseline competent and will just leave as soon as you can pass FAANG interviews, companies would rather just pay people in developing countries like India or Colombia. They'll do bad work and, in the case that they do turn out to be great, leave to make more money. But at least they cost 5x less (the US system of employer covered healthcase isn't helping our workers' competitiveness in this either!)

> If, through grade inflation, the only thing that matters to an employer is what school you went to and that you completed it (the sheepskin effect), then isn't the correct optimization to reduce wasting time on levers that won't make any practical difference in the end?

The reason I don't think this is rational at all is the amount of work needed to "look good for employers" isn't really that far off from the amount of work needed to understand and learn the info well in the first place.

I used to do a lot of college hiring for software devs. We did on-campus recruiting at a bunch of top universities, so sure, the school you went to is inherently one factor in our hiring process. But we also definitely cared about the grades you got, especially in core CS courses. Most importantly, my on-campus interviews were focused on things that someone should have learned in their data structures and/or algorithms course (but used examples that were as "real world" as possible). If you didn't actually understand the material, we weren't going to hire you.

> Is this not rational behavior?

Yes, and it is also demonstrated by the Flynn Effect. [1]

About "A Case Against Education": Caplan draws on the latest social science to show how the labor market values grades over knowledge, and why the more education your rivals have, the more you need to impress employers. He explains why graduation is our society’s top conformity signal, and why even the most useless degrees can certify employability.

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Completely unironically your best bet is to get into a good college, then do the minimum work needed to graduate and spend al the rest of the time networking (read: partying).

Yep, meet as many people as you can who might later give you a job or ask you to join their startup. Meet a potential spouse, you're in the same social class, about the same age, probably similar interests. You are alumni of the same institution. Do sports, drink beers, learn social skills.

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