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Comment by Locke1689 | Hacker News Reader

The issue I have with this is that technology disruptions came in the form of moving manual labor from farms to factories.

The service wave of disruptions moved manual labor to communications labor.

This wave of disruption is moving both of these to intellectual labor. Do I think that we have vast resources of unexploited intellectual labor? Yes. The issue is that the more people I meet the more I begin to believe the key to intellectual success is intellectual culture. Unfortunately, I don't think we have a very intellectual culture and culture changes slowly -- far slower than technology.

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Not only is the culture of anti-intellectualism to blame, but so is the prevailing culture of intellectualism. It is hardly feasible for the majority of the workforce to get a PhD or even a Masters, which is still the cultural baseline for work in many intellectual fields. With the rising costs of education, even a BS is out of the question for many people, and it is not even an appropriate choice for many who would otherwise be inclined to intellectual work. Until we have widespread acceptance and a proven track record for more non-traditional forms of education, the rest of the cultural change you describe will be stagnant at best.

Lots of programming jobs hire based on experience and knowledge, not formal education. It is possible to gain experience without having a "job", but at an opportunity cost of time and lost wages from a low income job. Most knowledge is available for free on the internet and libraries, with additional in-person resources available in urban areas via informal networks and meetups.

This route still works out to considerably cheaper than a traditional college education, takes less time than college, and has the potential for immediate employment once qualifications and prerequisites have been met. Last time I checked, every company wants to hire a "rock star" if they could only find one...

> Lots of programming jobs hire based on experience and knowledge, not formal education.

I hear a lot of people say this here, but that's not true for most jobs in the industry. For big companies good luck even getting past the HR without a degree.

> I hear a lot of people say this here, but that's not true for most jobs in the industry. For big companies good luck even getting past the HR without a degree.

Most of the people I know who do hiring, including some in Fortune 100 companies, very frequently identify through networking, not HR. Yeah, if the company hasn't heard of you until you hit the HR front door filtering process, your going to have trouble without a degree, but if you are coming in that way, you are already behind the curve.

Not everyone has connections!

> Not everyone has connections!

Not everyone has the specific skills needed to do the job, either: to be maximally employable, those are both things that you would do well to develop (I'm much better at the skill side than the connections side myself, but that doesn't stop me from recognizing the fact that connections matter a lot.)

Make connections through open source contributions, web discussions, etc.

Is Google big enough for you?

Yes, there was pressure to have a degree. But I knew several when I was there whose highest degree was high school.

I've worked programming jobs at big companies without a degree, and gotten offers from others that I didn't take.

I think you misunderstood. What you're describing is a culture of education. What I'm describing is a culture of intellectualism. Knowing things for the sheer joy of knowing things. To quote from HN, gratifying one's intellectual curiosity.

The people who know the most and, moreover, learn the best, tend to be those who love to know and learn. It is that which is so rare in our society. The Tweet, the press release, the short pithy blog post; these are consumption disguised as learning. I come to HN to learn -- unfortunately even here I suspect that maybe a tenth of the articles teach me something.

Or if the costs of education in the US were brought down and/or subsidies by the government as they are in other countries (or even paid outright like some European countries)

The cost of getting an education in the US is minimal or nothing. The cost of getting a degree from many schools is very high. However, there are still small universities where you can graduate debt free even with a minimum wage job.

And not everyone is able to or desires to provide intellectual labor even if given the opportunity.

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