Fun fact: I had a career in which I was in charge of hiring other people to fill the expanding roles in my department, and was tasked with hiring ‘more of myself’, but I was not allowed to even consider people with my own qualifications.
I was mostly self-taught, and was only allowed to consider people with at least a bachelor’s degree in a field that didn’t even really exist yet.
e: You can probably guess how that went.
So, how long ago did you leave?
15 years ago. Unfortunately not of my own volition (I became unable to work due to disability).
e: I can’t write right
Writing left is better anyway
You can probably guess how that went.
So how did it turn out? You ended up hiring nobody?
No, I ended up hiring under qualified people who had skills on paper but had no talent for the job, because I had to look at candidates who had ‘book’ qualifications in adjacent fields but not passion or any qualifications that actually meant anything to the specialty itself.
This was a design and engineering job.e: and to be clear, our company president was famous for saying ‘specialisation is for insects’. Like that was his catchphrase.
I’d rather teach someone with passion and interest on the job vs someone who has neither of those but with a certificate any day, and I’ve done both.
College degrees demonstrate you can complete a long-term project with disparate, often competing priorities handed down from separate departments while meeting deadlines and milestones.
10 years ago I had a senior director at a large fortune 50 corporation tell me that because of the dire state of US education, the only way to ensure a candidate could read, write, and do basic math was if they went to college. As someone who now does lots of corporate hiring, it’s only gotten worse. It’s especially bad in technical fields where about half the CS grads I interview can’t even answer basic questions like “What’s an IDE?”
Oh my God, I’m a CS Dropout who now works as a janitor yet I’m more qualified than half the people applying for your job.
These days, being a janitor might be the safer bet. But yeah, we’re finally at the point where a CS grad could have done their entire degree with ChatGPT.
I quit college to start my own successful outsourced IT business but HR doesn’t give a shit.
Controversial opinion: The point of college is NOT to prepare students to be “work ready” if that makes sense. The point of college is to give you the critical thinking skills necessary to be able to learn, grow, and make decisions on your own as an adult professional. Whatever technical knowledge carries over to your job is just a bonus.
Gradeschool is supposed to do that. That’s 12-14 years of a person’s life. If you’re not ready to be an adult by highschool graduation, then the system failed you.
(oh look at the system failing over and over and over again)
I think the Amish finish school at 13 or so.
I don’t see how that’s representative of society in general.
I’m giving an example of a group of people that have determined people are responsible for themselves for the most part at age 13. Its meant to show what’s possible on what many would consider the more extreme end of things.
Also having attended college and actually successfully passed its knowledge tests and graduated proves that you have both the discipline and mental capability for certain jobs.
I’m in software development and have been part of the process of hiring people and from the point of view of an employer, for a candidate to an entry level position that college diploma is an indicator that the person in question has the knowledge and capabilities to do that kind of job.
Mind you, in my area fortunatelly there are other ways to indicate that - for example, having participated in Open Source projects or, even better, having your own Open Source project with actual users that you’ve had to support (which in my view can put somebody above somebody else who merelly has a college diploma) - though that’s generally only for smaller companies since large ones will have HR filter candidates before the ever reach the actual domain experts and HR can’t judge skill like that and instead will go for “formal stamp of approval” shit such as college diplomas.
That said, the college diploma stops being important after junior level, unless it’s one from a handful of very prestigious institutions and even then it won’t work on domain experts, only non-expert manager types - if a company is hiring people for mid and above expertise levels based on which college they’ve attended, that place is going to be a political shithole of incompetence better avoided by those who aren’t skilled at or interested in progressing their career through social games.
Laudable goal, but whatever they’re doing isn’t working based on some of the graduates I’ve known.
They don’t seem to teach much critical thinking these days beyond a few elite institutions. The focus at the state schools I went to was churning out as many engineering grads as efficiently as possible.
The “Qualification” is to be shackled to college debt so that you’re a more compliant worker, unwilling to risk your income by asserting your rights and seeking a livable wage.
If you’re debt free, you’re liable to grovel a whole lot less just for the honour of being able to work there and might instead just quit.
Access to entry level positions is pretty fucked up in this because whilst experts will recognized expertise, for anything but smaller companies candidates get filtered out by HR and those people have no fucking clue what expertise outside their domain looks like, so they use proxies for it such as “stamp of approval from higher education institution” so in big companies the candidates without such stamps of approval (or a pre-existing insider contact) never actually get to be evaluated by the domain experts who can recognize that expertise.
That said, if a candidate doesn’t have at least some domain expertise (so, neither formal study nor having done anything in that area in their free time), sorry but somebody who has actually had the discipline to attend a learning institution and enough capability and domain knowledge to actually pass their exams and graduate, is way more likely to be at least decent at it (no guarantee, but the odds are much better) than a random person who never did either. It’s only fair that if you haven’t invested in learning it in some way or other (not necessarily college) you’re not going be seen at the same level as somebody who has actually invested in learning that domain.
It’s only naturally that some kind of expertise validation system for candidates emerges for any kind of domain were some level of expertise is required and as things stand now in most such domains at the entry level that’s colleges (which, IMHO, are better than cronyism-heavy “know somebody who knows somebody” systems), though in many domains something lighter and cheaper (some kind of cheaper test-only option) would probably be better (or, alternativelly, do as it’s done in civilized countries and have higher education be Public, thus cheaper or even free).
It’s funny, but a good college isn’t as much about teaching knowledge but about teaching how to think, so ironically this might still make some sense.
Though if employer is saying “forgot what you learned in college” probably will follow with something illegal.
The fact that college degrees are required for jobs that hey we’re all completely distorts hiring and the entire education system. College can’t possibly be anything other than a means to an end as long as that’s the case. No one’s going to go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt they can’t discharge and bankruptcy to learn how to think
Agreed. I think a lot of the people talking about how they are self taught are working in tech and software and they were hire twenty years ago or more. (Can’t wait till someone sounds off about how they got hired nine years ago).
Most other technical jobs are in far more mature fields. College may expose you to ideal situations that overconstrain your ability to get the job done in a corporate setting, but it still exposed you to a set of problems you don’t have access to otherwise. Mainly because these industries are in communication with the deans of these colleges and giving them feedback on what they need to see more of.
(Can’t wait till someone sounds off about how they got hired nine years ago).
I mean I did become a ATE tech at a solar ESU startup 4 years ago.
(That is after 9 years as an mfg eng tech at a server CM and just living in the SF Bay area with countless tech jobs of all levels)
The whole system’s bullshit
You need the basic technical knowledge, but most of it won’t apply in the working world. People cut corners just enough that they won’t get into trouble. Although, depending where you are, open and flagrant corruption is normal.
