Yeah, the world is a social place. There's a reason European royalty sent their kids to etiquette classes, and even these days fraternities and sororities have formals. That's how the world works. Someone that's surprised by this in their 20s or 30s was failed by their parents or immediate community and this has nothing to do with college.
You need to be nice to people, you need to be friendly, you need to know people, attend events, be fun and jovial, etc. Politeness and relationships are the underpinning of our entire society.
But if you're introverted (like me), this takes very deliberate practice. Over the past few years, I've posted in every monthly "who's hiring" thread here on HN as just an exercise and to meet people (mostly local to LA). I've met dozens of really cool entrepreneurs, fellow engineers, VPs, C-levels, and other smart folks. Most of these connections will go nowhere, but I wanted to practice being more outgoing by grabbing a beer or coffee and talking about life/technology/anything with strangers. I was able to put together an investor I met with a friend of mine that's trying to raise money; was able to pitch some startup ideas to folks that worked in that domain; but more importantly grow my rolodex and become more comfortable with the art of networking.
I have no advice on how to overcome the wisdom/experience gap and unrepaired damage accumulated over time.
You end up with people like me who are told by a friend that they will open up a senior dev position just for you. That means the other people who post to that role are putting effort into the interview process but all for nothing since I'm pre-selected. So I don't ask them to open posting so I don't take the position. So I think these backroom deals are wrong, have been taught that by society, and so I get screwed like every other unconnected person.
There is no world where social skills somehow are ‘bias’. They are core.
But I agree totally. Most of my family worked in the public sector, I had no idea about any of this stuff until I started trying to get a job. And some of the people who I grew up with who were totally incompetent but were sociable/well-connected ended up doing very well (I went to a private school, so my sample is quite interesting: I know a guy who was very smart, went to college, trained in law at the top law school in my country, worked hard, but couldn't get it together ended up becoming a chef...meanwhile a guy who got straight Ds, scraped into uni, did no work whilst there is working as a PM at a top fund manager...they don't teach you this part of life in school).
On the OP: college isn't real life, it isn't anything like real life at all because you don't need to be an expert or have knowledge to extract economic value (and that isn't a bad thing at all). As someone who went to private school and saw a decent amount of privilege, it didn't helped kids who came from poorer backgrounds. These kids went to college (which probably would have happened anyway, they are smart) but most (not all tbf) struggled in the real world because they had poor social skills. I have a long list of utterly mediocre human beings who are punching well above their weight in life (and tbf, this is a bad thing...the guy I mention above shouldn't be managing anyone else's money...not to be harsh, he just shouldn't), and a list of one or two people who came from a poorer background and got out. I think that is down to a combination of socialization, understanding business, and nepotism (I wouldn't overestimate the latter, all of the people who punch above their weight had the ability to walk into a room and make another person feel like they had known them forever).
If you are in the bottom, say, 10% in these factors, employers will pick other candidates. And obviously, they won't tell you why.
While I have not (thankfully) been in a hiring role for some time now, I can confirm that these three factors dq’d a ton of candidates when I was. Here is the reality…there are not a lot of roles in medium-corporate companies where a single interview with a single person gets you hired. So if you don’t tick that presentable box, even if you are technically skilled, I have to have a conversation with the next interviewer that goes like this: “I know this candidate comes off as a pompous ass with rumpled cloths and smells like feet, but…”
You better be beyond brilliant for me to sell you despite shortcomings that I have to caveat to the next interviewer.
After her PhD, she was writing cover letters that were screaming "I hate the recruitment process".
One day, something clicked. Her next cover letter read like the first chapter in her bibliography. And one month later, she had too much work. :)
Makes me think I should start a company focusing on recruiting in that community.
How do you know if you are in the bottom 10%?
If you can't look around the room and identify who the bottom 10% are, you're the bottom 10%.
Public school is at at least 2 levels if not more. Elite will remain in their own world. Rich will just pour money on their kids education, middle class and the poor are fucked.
In France, most 18 years old would fail the brevet (end of middle school degree) as it was given in 1950s/60s. All the exams are pure jokes, and we see it in international education survey (PISA or even better TIMMS, level are dropping beside for the top 5%)
Also, baccalaureat now includes has a “Grand oral”, an standup exam where women succeed much better, where presentation matters way more than depth, and where positive discrimination can take place without leaving a trail.
One fault is the drop in teaching hours : https://www.reseau-canope.fr/musee/collections/cache/a65f40c... this is a schedule from 1952.
We are lying to kids and parents : https://twitter.com/loysbonod/status/1356128734508679168
Or Pierre Colmez writting : https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~pierre.colmez/lettre.pdf and https://images.math.cnrs.fr/R-eduire-les-in-egalit-es.html?l...
[1] https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/PISA2018_CN_FRA.pdf [2] https://nces.ed.gov/timss/results19/index.asp#/math/trends
Even at the college level, education doesn’t seem to extend past “teaching to the test” horrifyingly often (horrifying, given the amount of time and money our society is spending on it).
I saw signs of that academic dysfunction from other departments too. This was at a very non-prestigious state school, but that's the type of school that most students attend. There must be millions of people in the US walking around with degrees in subjects they don't know much about.
My alma mater didn't really push internships, but in retrospect perhaps a strong internship program would help students self select against employers.
In my opinion, the problem is not with the testing regime, or even “teaching to the test”. It’s the tests themselves that suck. The top priorities for tests designed and used today are ease and efficiency at mass administration, ease of grading, and reduction of subjective in favor of objective measures. Is it any wonder that multiple choice questions are king?
When I went to university in Eastern Europe (majored in Mathematics), in many courses we had a final oral exam. The professor would drill into you, and would not get distracted by regurgitation of irrelevant memorized stanzas, he wanted a clear explanation of everything he asked about. This approach to testing is not perfect — for one, time limitations only allow to cover rather small part of the topic, and you might get lucky to get something you actually know. At the same time, there is really no way to teach and study to an oral exam other than actual understanding of the subject matter. However, this is insanely inefficient for the grader: this makes testing a full week’s worth of constant work, as opposed to few hours of just sitting on an exam, and then few more hours grading (even shorter if it’s mostly multiple choice problems). No wonder teachers prefer the latter.
Bad example. Lambda School had some pretty bad press on HN about having lower completion rates than advertised, etc.
I've tried to explain that for 99% of CS majors, your grades do not matter. If you're spending your time in college constantly studying and worrying about getting an A in your test because oh no your GPA will be a 3.8 otherwise, you haven't really assessed what's important. Go to college; do your best to learn because the material is useful and pretty neat; socialize, have fun; then find a job. That's it. A 4.0 isn't that important.
In my experience it’s the tools and tech around working as more than a singleton. That’s the job. To be blunt, most industry jobs do not require a deep computer science background, so the content of the degree is worth less than the experience it gets you access to.
I was a broke student so I couldn't exactly afford to relocate for a summer internship, lose my apartment, store all of my belongings and such.
I started my career with basically no experience, spent my last money on a deposit and first months rent to relocate to a new city for work after getting a job. Lost that job four months later as the company failed to meet the projections they had.
It's been a rough road. I'm doing pretty good now, but overall my bachelor of computer science definitely did not feel like an equalizer.
Luck plays into career success to an incredible degree. I was just in the right place, right time to build a long career. I’m certainly not very talented or hard-working.
The first assumption that needs to change in order to revert the status of the college degree is the well meaning but false idea that competence can be taught to anyone. It gives people a false sense of optimism which frequently results in angst, debt, and wasted years.
I was taught (for better or worse), by STEM grad parents no less, that the only college to strive for is an elite liberal arts education, and the purpose was to broaden my horizons and make connections. It explicitly wasn't to decide on a career and learn hard job skills.
My teachers at my liberal arts focused high school definitely were more of your opinion of "broadening your horizons" and "being an educated member of the community"
My argument is mainly that not enough people know what they're getting into they take 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars in loans to get a degree
This can be good advice, unless you ultimately think you will really want a STEM career. You will ultimately spend an extra couple of years playing class catch up.
I wanted to share these thoughts to discuss any cool ideas to bridge the gap between an education and effectively increasing opportunity for people as automation take away more and more low-skill jobs
Without additional context, my guess would be that the Uber driver maybe focused on applications of math and statistics to the insurance industry, but maybe focused more on passing actuarial exams and less on using programming in order to implement the models. Some of the actuarial exams cover finance, statistics, and math; it feels like the driver would be suited to do data science work. It would be interesting to hear more about where the driver is located and whether he/she was only targeting the insurance industry or if that person was looking at other jobs in analytics.
EDIT: I started my business on the premise that universities teach a lot of "fundamentals", but that I don't believe higher education does not do as much as they should to teach the practical "day to day" skills (like data visualization or software version control / git) that are needed to get development work done. My thought is that a couple of online courses can quickly help to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
I think the solution might lie in teaching people the process of learning what they don't know on their own. Some people are just naturally "scrappy" or want something so bad they'll go out of their way to figure it out without connections. Maybe if we can deconstruct that into a course it could help people chart their own path rather than rely on other people to tell them what to do.
Dont forget that when colleges didnt exist for everyone, say 200 years ago, most people were farmers.
People are selective when it comes to timeframe, but it's just a mean regression - some periods reach peak, some get back lower, but all in all, we're trending up.
I agree that we're trending up which should feel AMAZING, but we're human so people's individual stories are what make us feel the most ;)
Also at my high school the metric for our school's success was 99%+ of the graduating class going to college, and it felt like pure vanity because it meant more likely than not tons of people going into debt and getting nothing out of it for the sake of "education"
This sentence implies that he didn’t meet “one guy”
Mind if I ask what in particular you liked? I am interested about certain topics like education + improving access to opportunity + building cool stuff with tech + thinking about economic systems and incentives to drive success, but I also don't to come off as someone who just yells into the void about my opinions.
If education is just 2k euros rather than the 15k (public) or 60k (private) in the US, I agree it's much less of an issue for sure because much less is at stake.
With regard to the context of the article, the example that Uber driver gets a degree in acturial science does not tell much. Probably he is just doing worse than other graduates - even though he is qualified for an acturial job, the employer has tons of better candidates.
thanks for the valid feedback -- I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do with my blog and definitely got carried away with SEO/Growth Marketing tips I've incorporated towards the end of the article. I'm not sure whether to go down mtlynch.io 's path of being a solopreneur or Daniel Vasello's deconstructing his career in SWE or a more pure scott aaronson or star slate codex blog.
I'll change it to something less 'fishing' and rather more open if people want be notified of posts. In retrospect, I'd rather just share my stories, guiding principles, and tacit knowledge I've developed than try to sell a course or a guide at the moment
With regards to the title, I hope the story I shared about the uber driver and my experience with the mismatch between my degree and what I had to learn on my own to become employable speaks to why I believe the title is true. I'll consider changing my essay's point of view from 3rd person-ish -- but again I'm still trying to find my voice so it's a work in progress
thanks for reading! I thought the discussion here was pretty cool too
But society is not the same as it was then. I don't think you can argue that the median job today requires the same amount of knowledge or skill then it did 70 years ago. And that is what college is for currently.
Of course you can still argue we don't need that many college graduates but your argument by itself is not convincing.
The mobilization for the war does not require super educated population.
I don't think it's a serious flaw that you can graduate from a top university with a CS degree without ever having written SQL, react, or used revision control. To me, those are vocational topics and can be learned on the job or in [paid] internships.
No different from expecting to see workings for maths homework.
Some programs, at least, are conscious of this problem. MIT built and shared their "Missing Semester" [1] course to help with this. There are also some schools developing more practical software engineering/computer engineering degree programs.
You read a bunch of books. You go to lectures. You answer questions to see if you understood the material.
The content is entirely in the public domain. You can read the same content as I did and understand how to build a radio, a bridge, etc, just like me. There are literally no secrets below phd level, and nowadays you even have easy access to multiple explanations of the same ideas.
There isn't even that much teaching, and I say that having attended multiple 2-on-1 tutorials each week for close to 100 weeks. So about 3-400 hours total contact time. Add to that quite a few hours studying for those tutorials, maybe 4 hours for each hour of contact? Depends on how diligent you were.
Compare that to my work, where I've regularly worked 60-80 hour weeks for years and years, of which maybe 40 hours was sitting next to a professional superior. Basically in your first months you spend more time sitting next to an expert than your entire degree. My non-contact hours, where I'd read about finance, was similar: after not very long I'd done a similar amount of non-contact work such as reading a textbook.
My point is that there's no way that university can qualify you for work. Yes, there are jobs that you need specific degrees to get, but even in those jobs you are normally not considered anything but a junior, entry-level person when you finish the course. You're literally not a lawyer when you finish a law degree, and not an engineer when you get your Master of Engineering (like me).
So why do employers want to hire graduates, especially graduates of specific universities and courses?
The reason is they think there's a degree to which people who got into top universities in certain courses are capable of learning the necessary material for a new profession. The material may be completely different from what the person studied, in fact it most often is just so. As what I wrote above explains, it should not take long to cover an equivalent amount of material.
Computer Science may well be the only exception to this rule. On CS courses (I've looked over the shoulder of a couple of students, and I know a professor) people actually do things with a rather large overlap with professional coding. For instance, when I was in uni I built a toy radio and a toy bridge using toy tools. A CS student uses the same Git to version control his stuff, and the same compilers to build them. There's a number of CS labs that maintain actual production code that people use.
This probably means a CS student has a shorter spin-up period, but they still hit the professional time dynamics I mentioned: get a coding job and you'll learn a lot about coding that you didn't learn on the course, really fast.
There are also some economic issues about degrees.
There's a fairly strong adverse signalling effect: if you get a degree but you don't find a job reasonably fast, or you lost your job, why is that? Did other employers interview you and discover some sort of attitude problem? Perhaps I should just interview the regular new grads. You definitely don't know what a professional knows, and I can train up someone smart, and there's plenty of smart kids coming out of uni.
The same goes for your uber driver: if they gave up on getting an actuary job, which is one of the highest paying jobs in society and well worth trying to persevere at, why is that? If he's given up, why would I back him? It's an unfortunate dynamic, but it's definitely there.
Regarding "who you know, not what you know", there's a good explanation for that as well.
If you have a field of people who are "good enough", and you aren't short of them, and they're not easily differentiable, the employer might as well hire his nephew (this is where the term nepotism comes from). And because of the dynamic explained, there's an awfully large field of good enough people: they are mostly a blank slate anyway, having shown just a bit of promise. Of course you'll never know if your nephew was actually among the best, but it will certainly seem that way once he starts gaining experience.
This is why we get a lot of famous peoples' kids breaking into fields like acting, where there's a small number of jobs for a large field of people who could actually do the job. (Though I hesitate to use the same explanation in competitive sports like soccer, where there's a very strong differentiation. Eg Frank Lampard didn't need his uncle to put him on the team, he'd have gotten there anyway.)
