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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

> The purpose of higher education is not to get you a job.

This is the line universities give, knowing full well that the only reason students pay exorbitant tuitions is because bachelor’s degrees are necessary for most salaried jobs in the US. Schools want to have their cake and eat it too. If education isn’t about the money they should have no problem charging lower tuition rather than paying their presidents million dollar salaries.

The reason lecture halls are packed at 7:50am on a Monday is not because students are thrilled to learn how to take the derivative of a polynomial function, but because Calc 1 is a prerequisite to their engineering degree, which is a prerequisite to their job.

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If one thinks doing simple derivatives is a chore, I'd suggest a career other than engineering.

I've known many engineers who practiced math avoidance. None of them were worth much as engineers.

I know a recruiter who would ask engineering candidates what is 20% of 20,000, without using a calculator or phoning a friend. He was surprised at how many could not, and it was an easy way to filter out the no hires.

It's a trivial task and certainly does not require attending an early morning class. In fact, most engineering does not require the degree. Almost everything in the field is self-learnable in a short period. The reason the students are in the class at 0750 is not to learn how to do this, since it is trivial and almost everyone I know could do it by the 10th standard two years prior to college. It's because no matter what you know, the credential is bestowed by 4 year attendance of 0750 classes, and the credential is what the university provides.

An engineer who does not understand the math is not an engineer, but a technician. Technicians can do very good work as the result of experience. But knowing the math behind it is what makes an engineer.

Credentialism is why the recruiter asked the simple math question.

I remember an engineer who was trying to solve a noise problem in an analog circuit. He spent days trying various combinations of resistors and capacitors. Finally, a real engineer stepped in, did a quick calculation, and picked the correct resistor and capacitor and solved the problem in a few minutes.

> I've known many engineers who practiced math avoidance. None of them were worth much as engineers.

I have an engineering degree and did "real" engineering (electronics/semiconductors) before switching to SW.

Almost all my engineering courses required calculus knowledge. None of my real engineering jobs benefited from it.

And I say that as someone who tried to find any and every excuse to use calculus at work. I love calculus.

My role is not an outlier. Every grad who came back to talk to students said the same.

> None of my real engineering jobs benefited from it.

At Boeing, there were two parallel engineering groups. The design group, and the stress group. The design group did things by eye, the stress group did the math.

I was in the design group. I did the math for my work (and so did a couple others), and we got the good assignments as a result. the stress group normally required a master's degree, but they invited me to join their group. (I declined, because I wanted to do design work, not check other peoples' work.) But it was a very nice compliment from the stress guys.

I've also seen the EEs at work who avoided the math. They'd just try random things until the circuit worked.

When my house was built, an architect designed it. But a structural engineer did the math on it - and I have copy of his work. It involved the usual beam formulae. But sometimes a beam is not in the book of formulae, and you gotta use calculus to do the stress calculations.

I've also watched engineers use book formulae with zero understanding of the basis of them. I was not impressed.

Sure, and 99% of engineering jobs aren't like Boeing's.

Engineering is math. If your job doesn't need math, it's more of a technician job.

Math is also needed to engineer a building that won't fall down in an earthquake, or is susceptible to dynamic instability in a wind storm. Same for a bridge. And a submarine. And so on.

P.S. Have fun guessing if your hydraulic feedback flight control system can go unstable and tear itself apart. Or if the spinning differential gearbox will disintegrate if it hits the stops. Or if the gear profile is minimum weight for the loads.

This is the kind of attitude exposes the hubris that leaves schools exposed. The idea that students should pretend this isn’t largely irrelevant work, ignore the opportunity costs of this subject, pay enormous amounts of money, and be happy for the privilege.

> I know a recruiter who would ask engineering candidates what is 20% of 20,000

This point would have been stronger if the recruiter asked some calculus trivia like the derivative of sin(2x). Perhaps this means the recruiter agrees with me that it is not nearly as useful as schools think it is.

The problem is administrators and professors who want to be paid well, since they are performing essential white collar job training, but do not want to be accountable for actually prioritizing the knowledge students will actually need. Having their cake and eating it too.

Those students should be separated from the students that want to learn, I know who I want to hire, or be sitting next to on the line and so does everyone else with a pulse: it's the person that is thrilled to learn how to take the derivative of a polynomial.

Not the loser sitting in a class they hate, living out their big plan to set their life on fire doing a job that makes them sad because they love money.

I enjoyed most of my math classes like multivariate calculus and differential equations, though I pursued my BS and MS degrees in CS later in life, and was already independently wealthy so didn't need to take out student loans. I also took many of the core STEM courses first at a California community college, which were honestly quite rigorous, and not obviously lower quality education than what I got at UCSD. The idea that students must go into vast debt attending an expensive 4 year university is dubious.

It's also easy to condescend and indict the students who may not necessarily love every single class they're forced to take. They're also not going to be using most of the concepts they're required to learn. In my personal career I've worked in software engineering, computational biology, machine learning, and quantitative finance, yet I don't think I've ever had to explicitly use Stokes' theorem or Cauchy-Euler equations. There are various tools I've used which I'm sure relied on these mathematics, yet it's really only at the frontier of advanced research that people will be using anything more complex than algebra.

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