this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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WYM I'M UNQUALIFIED?! (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

We need to figure out college in the US. There's way too much dead weight meant to justify tuition in most programs. I'm sorry but I don't need to know how to write research papers to do half the fields taught in college. Dropping that dead weight would make college far more attainable for so many people.

If we can't stop businesses from requiring degrees, and we can't, then we need a hard look at what's in a degree.

Also, the government needs to back off requiring degrees for so much stuff too. For example they want a degree to tell people nearing retirement age what their options are and to do the paperwork. I'm sorry but that's not what college is about. Unless there's a technical need that cannot be fulfilled with certifications or practical tests, (code a coffee machine for me, and build the stack), it should not require a degree.

Going by job listings you'd think literally everyone other than construction, military, retail, food, and security, has a degree.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Its not about learning, its about paying your dues to the church of capitalism

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (2 children)

For the US, id certainly agree with you. College is free here and some employers require it (less and less though). A coworker once told me a degree shows you can be serious for one thing and see it through. It shows you are capable of achieving a goal.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

I believe your coworker is right to some extent. Getting a degree is a lot of work. It demonstrates your ability to do work and get things done.... Among other things.

Having any degree/post secondary diploma, generally says you have the ability to work on something without being forced into it. IMO, HS is generally expected and more or less forced on everyone, so it doesn't really count.

While I believe that's the motivation behind needing a degree to get a job, I also, personally, don't agree with it. There's plenty of hardworking people who never even considered college/uni after HS. Some of them are much more motivated and hardworking than the people I knew from my time in college.

I work in IT, and see degree requirements on all sorts of job postings. It's bullshit, since there's haven't been IT centric degrees until very recently, outside of CS/development. Most of these jobs don't require any programming whatsoever. They'll be for helpdesk, system administration, networking, etc. Programming knowhow might help but it's definitely not required. I don't need Java, or C++, or Python, or any other language to know how to click buttons on dialogs in Windows.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

that's still such an ableist take. (as someone in the usa)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Employers are inherently ableist. They discriminate against people who are unable to do the job. They also discriminate for reasons unrelated to job performance, but then measuring job performance is very difficult even when someone has been working at a company for years.

Note that in professional sports and in Hollywood it’s quite easy to measure performance. Accordingly, you see athletes and actors compensated in a way that’s much more in line with their job performance than other industries.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Can you expand on this? I'm curious what you find ableist about it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

some people are just unable to go to college due to finances, physical/mental health, or other things like being a single parent. i was never able to go to college because i couldn't mentally handle the stress due to serious trauma of various kinds that i was just coming out of. i couldn't find a job to adequately support me and i had health issues and undiagnosed learning disabilities preventing me from having the energy or time to focus even on part time studies. i had no family, so no safety net. i tried taking college thru a work program but the college ended up being unaccredited.

and keep in mind some people have several/all of these things to deal with.

so to say that seeing someone went thru college shows they can stick to something, it's negating all the hidden struggles that the rest of us work every day to get thru. I'm on year 7 of my current job, so i can clearly commit. but saying that college is the measuring stick is kinda disrespectful for those who had a different path.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 months ago (4 children)

I had terrible imposter syndrome when I landed a sw dev job. I thought everyone could tell that I didn't belong. I was / am self-taught. Everyone had CS degrees. I thought I was a fraud. I later recalibrated to realize that I'd earned it even harder without a degree. But I had to get that spot to be able to leverage my knowledge. There are probably people who know a lot more than me getting rejected because they don't have the right credentials.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

I never managed to land a job in the field but of the 4 interviews I ever got actually related to IT every single one mentioned that I was technically overqualified for these entry-level jobs despite never officially going to school or working in IT, one of them called and had the lead back-ens guy come and sit in since I was a potential fit for an entirely different and much higher up role

Of course that's probably the reason I was never hired over other options (as well as why I didn't get many interviews, who wants the guy with 0 education if the other 20 applicants do?) and so now every time I do IT work for home I just get super sad. It's taking a lot of therapy to undo that and it's not reeeeally working lol

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

CS degrees, at least in my experience, prep you for a bunch of things that honestly don't matter too much. Like, I don't think knowing what P versus NP means really helps me at my job. I think learning to use build tools and frameworks rather than just the language itself would've been more useful.

The best professor I had in that regard at college was younger and also working at a "real" company while also teaching (I believe he was getting a master's degree). He taught us about Spring and Maven and had us make a REST API. The only downside is that this course was about making GUIs and the majority of it was about Swing which nobody really uses. I have a feeling he added the other assignment because it was.more relevant to things most folks do with Java.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

It's because computer science degrees aren't really programming degrees.

A computer science degree sets you up to be a scientist, most common dev jobs are just glorified Lego sets patching libraries together and constructing queries. There is skill, knowledge, and effort in those jobs, but they are fundamentally different.

Most common software dev jobs are closer to the end user than not.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

25 years after graduation in CS I’m still waiting for the Pumping Lemma to have any relevance to my work as a dev.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Get a job in scientific computing then

Even stuff like simulation engines can make a grown man cry

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I’m glad I don’t have to cry. I was just terrified initially that to do this kind of work you had to be really good at maths and stuff, but actually you’re just taking user input and putting it in a database, then getting it out later to show back to the user, fluffing stakeholders, and often rewriting the code you already did in a new framework or architecture that looks good on your resume.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Brother, recently i landed my first official job as system administrator (I'm still in university as EE), even though i know almost all things, i just don't know nuances of how they adapted these technologies we know of in their specific case, and i am too felt terrible imposter syndrome

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)
  1. college doesn't teach much.
  2. college is still useful tho. It does require some determination and persistence to get through, or at least tolerance for dealing with. "This is the way to learn" junk.
  3. most actually useful knowledge is gained on the job
  4. I think most people fresh out of high school aren't ready for a real job, but college grads are barely ready too to be honest. Hyper generalized and i bet most people reading this are actually very qualified, that said I've met many college grads interning with us who just don't have the fortitude to do it just yet, hopefully by their second job they've grown accustomed to the dumb way of life we all call work.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You sound like a hiring manager that puts x years of experience required on an entry level position.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Lols. Yea i actually hate that. No i gave been begging my org to just treat interns differently and actually help them rather than let them sink or swim. Most of the interns we get are expected to know all the ins and outs, but they are just kids yet basically. So i think hiring managers honestly should lower the bar and then the org needs to properly train and teach them to get em up to speed. Maybe it takes six months but it's about time we start investing in our people.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

That's what is supposed to happen. Entry jobs and internships are supposed to be for inexperienced employees to learn the job. You can have all the book experience in the world from college/uni, but if you've never worked in the industry on a team, you're going to need to learn a few things. Just giving them jobs and then letting them swim or not is not something that should be the norm.

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