Ditch college, learn a skill

When I interview entry level software developers I can place each candidate into one of two general "buckets." The majority of them come from the same handful of schools.

The buckets are:

1. Here's my portfolio. It's mostly simplistic "Hello World!" style programs that I had to do as assignments in college. Python (or any language)? Yeah I know about it and I look forward to coming here so you can teach me how to use it.

2. Here's my portfolio. It's a bunch of stuff I made because ideas kept coming into my head and I just can't sleep until I make those ideas into something. Python (or any language)? Heck yeah I can program in that. I went to a boot camp over the summer and made these programs as part of a challenge. Oh, and here's the code I wrote that won me $500 in <insert competition here>.

Is it the school's fault that candidate 1 looks less competitive than candidate 2? I don't believe it is. Nor do I think the answer is, necessarily, that the school should be forcing people to earn relevant certs along the way. Though that would be one way to weed out the people who just aren't that into the field they are studying for. If you had to earn an MCSE before graduating from a program where that certification was relevant I think that school would either need to accept that they'd have a very high drop out rate or they'd need to be incredibly selective in who they admitted to the program.

That's fine for Stanford. But the little known state university or the community college doesn't really have the resources for that.

But a lot of it is also a changing set of expectations that have no historical basis. Earning a degree in engineering has always, out of the gate, led to an entry level engineering position. The same is true of accounting, law, medicine etc.

You don't graduate from Harvard Medical and immediately launch right into a job as Chief of Thoracic Surgery.

I've had plenty of students, often with undergrad degrees in things like "IT Management," applying for jobs as IT Managers. They don't have the necessary skills to work as Network Administrators but they want to be able to supervise the NAs and cannot understand why I won't give them the job title that appears to correspond to their degree.

The truth, sad as it might be, is that there are programmers out there who need to program. You can't stop them. It runs through their veins. But some of them don't go to college. They are still amazing programmers. There are also people who do just enough to pass their exams. Am I really supposed to higher the latter rather than the former when my job is to put a butt in a seat with the expectation of cranking out code like a fiend?

 

My friend the Therapist went to grad school in the Worcester area. She was in this Masters program that did not qualify her for licensure but she didn't figure that out until the end of year one. In the end she also did a CAGS that gave her the qualifications for licensure and at this point it's "alls well that ends well." She was pretty pissed for a while though, thinking that the school deceived her. In the end she had to admit that the school never indicated in any way that the program qualified her for licensure. She had just made that assumption. It was a mistake that cost her another year of coursework. Live and learn. (Don't tell her I said that though):censored:

 

This person is contrasting what he learner working versus in college.

https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/how-i-learned-more-working-in-a-restaurant-than-i-did-in-college

 

again

Why millennials are forgoing college for blue-collar jobs | New York Post

 

The English major has number of choices.
Become a teacher, get teaching credential. I know some good screenwriters with English major from UCLA.

In an interesting interview an owner and president of major company revealed that they groom people with social sciences degrees in to upper management positions.
I quote.
We have time and can train the person but we have no time to educate the person.
This was his reply on hiring people with MBA etc.

A coworkers daughter had a degree is Spanish langue etc, after a while she ended up going to a business school earning MBA and today a very successful business Analyst in a well known bank.

 

I didn't say anything about "choices" or "options." An English major can also go on to law school or earn an MBA or learn how to weld.

I asked what skill someone with a BA in English leaves university with by virtue of their university training. The answer is none. Even if they wish to go into teaching they are likely going to have to go back to school to develop the skills (and license qualifying education) to teach.

That "grooming" is the building of skills. Some companies are willing to take people with promise and train them to be something. It isn't common but it does happen. Our Business Intelligence unit hired a person a few years ago with a degree in Biology who seemed clever enough to pick up the skills they needed to teach him. So they did and he did.

That doesn't mean that going to school for a BS in Biology gives you the skills necessary to be a Business Intelligence Analyst. He developed those skills over a full year of OJT with the BIU.

I think you've misunderstood my point about skills to be a statement about career pathways. That was not my intention. And I believe I was actually very clear about what my intention was.

Graduating with a degree in spanish does not qualify you to be a business analyst. Her MBA did. Her degree in Spanish served as a prerequisite to her MBA program. It may even help her resume in our increasingly globalized economy. But it did not impart skills to her in any area the way that a welding or carpentry trade school sends a graduate out into the world with a set of tools and the ability to actually do something immediately with no further formalized training.

 

I'm pretty sure that 100% of the people I know who majored in things like English Lit, History, Sociology, etc. did so knowing that they'd probably wind up teaching high school somewhere. They took the required Education courses and did their student teaching gig during their undergrad years and so never had to "go back" and do it later. I'm sure there are people who missed the boat and had to go back and take a few courses, etc. but now there are also all these alternative routes to teaching and so that traditional route might not even be necessary. Other than that your point is well made. I think the basic skill these people have is the ability to read and analyze text. I've known a few to go the FBI (intelligence analyst) route based on that skill.

 

Trades can be tricky too, I started as a computer technician back in the days when a computer used to cost $3000 and used to charge $60 an hour to fix them. Now, you can get a computer for $60 so this skill is not longer necessary. I used to fix VCRs too, who fixes them now? It took me long hours to learn how to fix them by reading manuals and long hours of VHS video watching for a short career of few years.

As for the hair stylist career, how long before walmart comes with a hair cut machine for $99.99 with 1000+ hair styles pre programmed? When you are in a trade, it just takes one technology breakout to put you out of business.

Degrees suffer from the same decease but trades are not the answer to a long term career either. The answer is to adapt and be able to learn fast a new skill, in a way a degree teaches you this so it is not so bad to earn one even if you work as a trade person.

 

To Kizmet's article:

$110/hr steamfitters are not new. What is new is people starting to look at skilled trades as not just something people do when they "can't get into college." There is a lot of snobbiness that built up over decades. A lot of parents acted like anything shy of the Ivy League was unacceptable and a lot of guidance counselors made it sound like a degree in underwater basket weaving was more valuable than becoming a union electrician. The pendulum is swinging the other way and I suspect we will eventually find a happy medium where a person with a degree it art history happily becomes a plumber without thinking the work is beneath them.

A year or two ago I bought a custom desk for my wife from a very skilled young woodworker (his full-time job). He has a BA from Dartmouth. Not only is there nothing wrong with that but I, personally, think there is something very "right" about it.

To RFValve:

1. I'm not putting my head in a helmet full of blades especially if it is manufactured at the behest of Wal-Mart.

2. Computer technicians didn't go away. My company employs them. A lot of companies employ them. You can have that $60 box for playing around on Facebook. But the systems for software developers tend to be more expensive. And upgrading is still much more common than replacing in business environments. My tower sports a (defunct) floppy drive, for example, despite the innards being more-or-less up to date.

For years I didn't pay a stylist or barber a cent. The barbers on base in Mississippi were terrible and the lines were always the worst (especially the day before Thursdays which were inspection days). I bought a pair of clippers for $40 and I buzzed my hair off every week. My roommate and I had an arrangement to trim each other's neck line. The clippers paid for themselves in a month. In the Navy the closely buzzed hair worked for me. Out of the Navy it didn't. So I go to a barber. The point is that there will always be people who opt out of that service and do it themselves even with present technology. But at my current barbershop half the patrons are nearly bald. They could cut their own hair with nail clippers. They are going for the experience. And at $15 per cut, who is really going to throw millions of dollars into R&D to try to "fix" the problem? Will it happen eventually? Probably. Will hair stylists and barbers disappear in our lifetimes? Probably not.

A computer being $3,000 was a problem for an industry that wanted to get into every home. They fixed that problem. A haircut costing $15 is not a problem. And if you are thinking of very expensive hair stylings just remember that would require even more programming and even more development.

And the people would would trust a Wal-Mart blade helmet are probably not all that concerned with their appearance anyway.

 

Where I live they are known as Wal-Martians.

 

And not a moment too soon. Years ago I hired a "handyman" to do some work around the house. Whenever I was in his sight he constantly told me how "educated" he was by having a bachelors in sociology and he could not find a job that required his degree. Nothing against degree holders in sociology, but all I really cared about was whether he could fix what I had asked him to repair. :wow:

 

Meanwhile, had he just shut up about his degree and done a fantastic job you might have recommended him highly and he could have made a very good living (if he wasn't already) as a handyman.

There is nothing that says that my plumber, handyman, roofer etc. cannot go home every night where his degrees hang proudly on his wall while he reads Chaucer and raises his children to appreciate the benefits of a liberal arts education. Nor is there anything about a liberal arts education and being a "well rounded" individual that precludes one from manual labor, skilled or otherwise.

There are two extremes; "I can't believe I'm doing this when I'm a college graduate" and "I'm so skilled I don't need college."

Just the other day a friend sported his new T-Shirt on Facebook. It reads "I may not have a PhD but I have a DD214." That's great. Gen. Petraeus, to name one, has both (so does our very own Rich Douglas).

I think when we reduce it to a binary proposition (i.e. higher education or skills) then we lose out. That's when we eliminate Classics departments because they don't prepare you for the real world.

But I'm OK with my plumber having a degree in Classics or my handyman having a degree in sociology. Maybe we need to find a way so that a person can reasonably pursue that broad education while they build skills and make earning a bachelor's in the liberal arts so affordable that it doesn't bury you in debt.

Of course, one also doesn't need a degree to be well-read.

 

There is a big difference between a computer technician and tech support specialist. Your company probably hires tech support people. Computer technicians used to troubleshoot motherboards, change microprocessors, fix monitors, etc. It is just economics, as computer hardware became cheaper, there is no point of hiring them.
I started my teaching career as a computer technician instructor, our program died due to the lack of jobs. The program was replaced with a technical support program with a new set of skills that included soft skills such as customer support, etc.

Yes, barbers and hair stylist might not go away in our life time but a haircut helmet might cut their jobs by 50% or more. One thing I learned is that no job last forever.

 

Not a haircut helmet but a shaving helmet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bgRszdUdhQ

 

Flowbee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEfA6hhhK90

 

There isn't a "big difference." The position evolved from one thing into another thing. All of the $60/hr computer technicians didn't find themselves replaced by tech support specialists. Those who cared to evolve found work elsewhere as tech support.

Incidentally, we don't hire "tech support." We hire PC Technicians. You need to be able to do a complete PC rebuild to get hired. And the pay isn't that bad between $42k and $50k.

Oh, so you've run the numbers of this? Making up statistics doesn't make your opinion more valid. Would a haircut helmet eliminate stylist jobs? Probably some. All of them? Probably not. We can't know. But you're talking about an insane amount of engineering that would need to take place to make a haircut helmet safe. And an astonishing amount of engineering that would be needed to install your 1000+ hair styles.

Considering you're talking about a helmet full of automated blades I'm thinking it would need a few years on the marketplace before consumers even started to feel OK with doing that.

But will your helmet also dye hair safely? Will it do perms? Will it shave the back of your neck? There are a lot of things that it would be much cheaper to just pay a human to do than to try an design a machine to do the same thing. That might not always be the case. But I cannot see a company spending tens of millions of dollars to "fix" a problem that most people don't regard as a problem.

No individual job lasts forever. Every job ends with a person either quitting or being fired. But there are professions that seem to have been able to withstand the test of time.

Mass production of modular homes could have replaced carpentry as a profession. Why hire people to build your house on-site when you can just pay some line workers half the price to build it in a production environment and truck it in? And yet that didn't happen. No job lasts forever without changes (except, possibly, prostitution). But there are some professions which seem to have endured the test of time fairly well.

 

I forgot that you have a PhD in Engineering, business, accounting, etc. There are already several patents for this helmet, all you need to do is to get a company in china to produce it and pay copyrights for patents. I forgot that you have again a PhD in everythingology, a patent below for your reference:
Patent US20140200734 - Positioning device for automated hair cutting system - Google Patents

Again, you win, I must get back to work and do something productive with my day. Getting the title of the person with the highest amount of postings here is not going to do much for me.

 

I wasn't aware that I needed a PhD in anything to realize that it would take a lot of engineering to make quickly moving blades operate safely near someone's scalp and even more to make sure that they cut various hair types into the appropriate style. That seems like some base knowledge you should have well before the completion of your undergraduate studies.

Copyrights and patents are separate things. One does not need to pay "copyrights for patents" to get something on the market. But you seem to also not understand what a patent is. Just because someone has a patent doesn't mean the technology actually works.

Mark Sullivan, a crackpot who appeared on Shark Tank with plans for an ocean generator that only produces gold as waste, has over 30 patents. But his generator, at least in part, was debunked using some hilariously derogatory language.

I'm not sure what you think a person learns during doctoral studies. But I work for a company that makes stuff. It's kind of our specialty. And while I would never claim to be a patent expert I've sat at the table with our legal department enough times to know that just because something is patented doesn't mean it is safe, efficient or actually works as described.

Right, I forgot that you are a super sought after consultant with an amazing hourly rate who always finds better things to do around the time you get called out for spouting BS. With such a high hourly rate and the neverending esteem of all of your colleagues (coupled with your expertise in engineering and IT) I'm amazed you are able to break away as often as you do. I guess you don't want to make too much money as that can create tax problems, right?

 

Hey, get a set of the Great Books of the Western World for about $300.00.

 

I thought about it. Then it was pointed out to me that:

1. I spend too much money on stuff that clutters up the house and
2. There is a government funded building filled with these books that will allow me to read and enjoy them without paying for them directly

Seriously, I was never a library goer. But recently I've been addicted to the place. A new audio book every two weeks for my commute and I don't have to pay for a subscription to Audible.