Technology

Colleges explicitly advertise themselves as means of getting training for specialized job markets. They directly partner with companies to provide internships. A college degree is required on the majority of job openings in STEM, regardless of the opening.

This was not a distortion of colleges - it was a full societal push to make colleges more useful to the general public in the 1940s, which directly lead to an explosion in the number of colleges, mostly in the form of community colleges. Since then, the major purpose of colleges has been vocational training first and foremost.

well explained, and I agree on it.

If that's the case, they need to stop with the deceptive marketing. Because they are absolutely outwardly promising career opportunities.

As a CS grad in the trade, I can confirm.

I make my living exclusively from web development.

I'm able to apply a lot of the fundamental stuff I learned from college (e.g. algorithms, code analysis, statistics, security, etc), but by the end of the day, it all goes to the web apps.

I'm only a hobbyist, but I do embedded programming, and knowing computer science concepts really helps when you're bare-metal programming a teeny-tiny computer in say, a smart toaster.

Pointers and dereferences and how memory works, buffers, interrupts, how registers work, and perhaps even a little bit of assembly are still very useful things to know about in today's world, just not on the web. But like damn near everything has little computers in it everywhere, even your TV remote. I bet the average home is filled with hundreds of these one-chip computers.

Universities aren't there to teach marketable skills, and they never have been.

In fact they get quite snotty about the distinction; they're not some trade school, ugh.

They go and market themselves as employment-enablers, because that drives enrolments which drives funding, but a large percentage of adademics see undergrads as a vexing and demeaning distraction from their real work of writing grant proposals. Which to be fair is what their whole career (and the existence of their employer) depends and is judged on, so...

The other thing is that there's two skillsets involved here: learning to use a specific set of tools and techniques to produce a desired outcome (the trade part), and learning to wrestle large, unwieldly and interconnected tasks in general, while picking up the required specific knowledge along the way (the adademic part).

Teaching just the trade part gets you people who are competent in narrowly-defined roles for now, but it doesn't necessarily get you adaptable, resilient, bigger-picture people with common sense and a strategic outlook. Teaching just the academic part gets you people who aren't necessarily productive right now, but have a lot of potential wherever you put them.

Employers would like to hire people who are both. They're also lazy and cheap, and will use anything they can get their hands on as a resume-filter because they aren't willing to put time and money into usefully evaluating someone's potential usefulness as an employee. If they can farm that off to the universities to do (and the students to pay for), they're happy to let a degree stand in as a not-chaff marker they can require of all their candidates. It's like bad video game designers using bullet sponges to 'increase the difficulty'.

Teaching CS is important and useful, but the benefits only really pay off longterm - apart from the bullet-sponge factor.

Teaching programming is important and useful, but the benefits can be short-term and dead-end.

If you only pick one... depends on whether you can afford to eat while those nebulous long-term benefits slowly kick in.

Universities should communicate these things better, and employers should be incentivised to stop using junk degree-requirements to offset their laziness and incompetence. Make it so for every position they require a degree for, they're taxed the tuition fees for that degree every year.

CS degrees haven't been relevant to programming for a long time, but they're still used as a troll toll in large parts of the industry. Most places actually looking to hire fresh graduates are expecting to have to train them in how they do things, but good luck actually finding an opening like that. Almost all of the open positions are looking for mid-level to senior experience.

Doesn't help that the job market is absolute ass right now, thanks to a bunch of big corporations laying off huge swathes of their workforces in order to pad their earnings reports.

I studied a lot of machine learning, going into the math and whatnot behind it.

In reality these days, you just start some model with a single line of code and you're set.

You have to know best practices and whatnot, sure, but I fully agree - science and engineering are two different disciplines and should be taught as such.

They’re about 20 years too late to be doing that. Current clever-person play is to learn a solid manual trade, build good relationships with people in your community, make sure you’re directly connected to where the food comes from, travel if you can and make sure you’re familiar and have connections in a few different places in the world.

People who are today getting into CS and going into debt to get a Bachelor’s in it are in for a rude rude awakening if they observed that that would be the ticket to a comfortable life.

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