People have an expectation problem.
University’s are about education not job training. If you need to understand the difference think sex education vs sex training.
Computer science, law school, and other degree fields aren’t (directly) about getting a job. It’s about giving you an education, context, and teaching you how to think and research.
It’s been distorted over the years, specifically by the last two generations whose parents basically said “you have to go to college to get a job”.
There is value to computer science education. That foundation is important to making better developers and better software.
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.
how to make computer people care about everything else as much as they care about computers
For me, you can’t. 😆
Programming is a trade now. It isn’t computer science any more. Make web things is the majority of it. Mostly using CMS.
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.
Agree agree
It used to be that working was working, and it prepared you for making a living, and education was education, and it prepared you for picking your head up above the melee and seeing what was coming and what needed to happen and adjusting (and adjusting your society) accordingly. That system worked well.
Then we entered into a little closed feedback loop of “degrees make money” -> “holy shit, I want a degree” -> “we need people to give all these thirsty people degrees” -> “well we gotta make it easier to get one then” -> “open more schools” -> “pump em in pump em out get those stacks, yay tuition” -> “more tuition” -> “student loans” -> “hey now we can REALLY charge tuition” -> “argh this degree doesn’t even help me with my job which was the purpose” -> “fuck these loans are six figures and I still don’t have a job” -> SYSTEM ERROR REDO FROM START
At this point, aside from some outliers which still attempt to provide a good education, the majority of undergrad programs are as far as I can tell just like a big young adult day-care program and a fairly ineffective job-training center. The educational purpose is still there depending on the professor but the wider system only cares about it every now and then, by accident.
System is fucked
It is bothersome, because actual education is actually really important. Especially in the US we really need it right now.
So well said, up vote wasn’t enough.
I attended three different institutions at various points of my life and still didn’t see some of the soft skills and basic business etiquette taught. I see young career people come into business with no idea how to attend meetings, answer phones, deal with expectations, etc. I’m not saying those can’t be learned on the job and added on top of an education that was meant to empower people to learn things on their own, but when they’re also tens of thousands in dept and can’t do basic professional tasks, makes me question what right looks like.
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.
Too many students take computer science instead of software or computer engineering. The ‘science’ part of the courses is almost never used by students as the vast, vast majority of employers do not need scientists, they need engineers. In my job searches, I rarely see a job for a scientist, and the few I do see are highly specialized roles that aren’t looking for green college grads.
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.
It seems everyone wants to be a computer tech millionaire or a coding money machine.
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.
I want solid data to back up your bull
Getting a college degree is one of the best investments you can make even if you pick the lowest on return on investment degrees. Go check the billion department of labor studies on this.
Manual trades mean back problems at 40. It’s strictly better than unskilled labor in terms of salary but it ain’t going to last.
I don’t need to hangout by fucking farms. I can got to the store thank you, like a normal person. Have fun cosplaying as a hippie on some hobby farm.
I want solid data to back up your bull
Anecdotal, but my brother does tree maintenance. His minimum callout fee for a day’s work is $2,000. And he often earns more than double that for one day’s work. He does have relatively high costs, but his income is way better than what I earn writing code.
We’re both at the stage in our career where it’s time to stop being an employee and start running our own company and believe me, his company is more successful than mine. Early days still but my money’s on him earning seven figures per year very soon.
He’s so much more successful than that if my business fails, there’s a good chance I will end up working for him. I’d be on minimum wage for several years while I learn the trade but I think it might be worth it long term and I can eventually pull my connections (the boss being my brother) and get promoted to being a manager with a cushy job driving a company car between job sites.
I want solid data to back up your bull
I am mostly talking about the future. My feeling is that climate change is going to fuck up the world in a big way, and AI is going to fuck up pure-mental-computational labor as a reliable meal ticket in a big way. Neither of those are coming in the next year or two, but they’re also not like 50 years from now either. You may feel differently but that is my prediction.
As of right now, the data is:
Computer programmer Austin TX, $69k - $123k I picked those more or less at random. I’m aware that senior software engineers may make more depending on area or depending on advancing into a lead role. On the other hand, many other college-dependent fields probably make less than software engineers. Tradies may make more by opening their own company. It’s hard to compare. But more my point was that going into someone’s house and fixing their wires is likely to remain a lot more viable than programming a web site or doing admin for a doctor’s office, in the long term, starting from today and planning for what you’ll be doing to have a good life in 2064.
I don’t need to hangout by fucking farms. I can got to the store thank you, like a normal person. Have fun cosplaying as a hippie on some hobby farm.
I hope you are right and stores are still operating and there is still food enough for everybody and finances are the main concern. I do not think that is going to be accurate 20-30 years from now though. Again that’s more where I’m coming from with this, as opposed to talking about what would have been a good plan 20 years ago and landing in late adulthood right now and thinking through your retirement going forward.
It still kind of is though? The market is ass right now but my TC last year as a new grad was $200k and I only started in April. If you grind interview prep you’re bound to get something eventually, and new grad software engineers currently pay near to low six figures.
It’s not easy but CS bachelor’s degree to software engineer is a solid career prospect long term even if the market sucks right now. Not to mention trades destroy your body in ways that cause long term issues, and pay way less over the course of a career unless you’re doing something exceedingly risky.
my TC last year as a new grad was $200k
UPS drivers make $170k. I’m not saying you’re unsafe in the short term, necessarily, or that driving for UPS is safe in the long run, either… but I think they are far less likely (or likely to be later on down the road) to get replaced by technological developments, as compared with pure software dev. And, they don’t have loan debt to pay down, and they have a union to protect them against the employer suddenly realizing in the medium-term a cheaper way to get it done and picking up the axe with no hesitation.
Long term, I’m assuming that there will be very major changes to the world. There are lots of memoirs you can read of people in a sudden upheaval situation realizing that all the money in the world couldn’t save them. That was part of the thinking behind my comment that I didn’t really spell out in detail.
CS bachelor’s degree to software engineer is a solid career prospect long term
Why long term? Short term yes, but you seem to be assuming that climate change and AI developments don’t produce any major changes to the landscape.
trades destroy your body in ways that cause long term issues
Depends on what. Construction, yes, absolutely. I was thinking in terms of more like electrical or plumbing, crane operation, things like that. But yeah I’ll agree with that for some things, definitely.
Current clever-person play is to learn a solid manual trade
Can confirm. Finding a solid tradesman is a bitch (high demand, low supply) and they get paid well.
