While I have been self-employed for a few decades, I do see and hear about what's happening out there. I have many friends who have had challenges and others who are afraid to leave their jobs, even when paid well under what they are worth. One of them finally gave up and took a job in the oil fields in New Mexico. This, after sending hundreds of applications and enduring a few 5 to 7 stage interviews, only to be told they chose someone else.
Age discrimination has been a real problem in tech for a very long time, this isn't new at all. Yet, somehow, it feels like it has gotten progressively worse over time. There are companies where you have the young (25-ish, just out of school) comprise the majority and the managers are just a few years older than that. They simply do not want to see "Mom" or "Dad" join the team.
You are going to find very few 40, 50 or 60+ year old engineer in those environments. Their experience and capabilities do not matter at all except for a few domains where they almost have no options (RF electronics, signal/power integrity, embedded systems, gov/mil, etc.).
I am not saying that age discrimination is the only filter being applied, of course not. That is, however, likely one of the main filters for a large group in the application pool.
The other problem seems to be that a massive portion of the job posting on sites like LinkedIn seem to be fake. I have seen reports claiming that the number might be as high as 80%. These postings are fake for a lot of reasons. One of them, at least in the US, are rules/laws that require posting a job opening even when you have already identified someone you will hire (or retain) for that role. Companies have to be able to show they evaluated N applications before declaring they will hire someone from the inside or retain/bring-in an H1B.
This is terrible and --while there is no indication that this will be an objective-- I hope the new administration gives this issue some thought and modifies the rules of the game to create a real market for jobs, one where opportunities are fair for everyone (whatever that metric might be).
For example, people have been told to go study coding all the way back to the Obama administration (maybe earlier, I don't remember). So, lots of people did. And then they were dropped on their collective heads. No offense to anyone, but, if the US is telling its young to study CS, H1B visas should have become rare and exceptional. Nothing else is fair.
There are other problems, of course, many problems. One of the is that university CS programs in the US and elsewhere, well, suck. People come out of programs with their degrees and are incapable of writing code. In the US, they can argue with you about Socialism and Karl Marx, and they can't code shit. They are taught what I call "coding by library". I am going to stretch and suggest that the vast majority of them would drown if you gave them C and a raw embedded system and asked them to implement a neural network or a genetic algorithm (and many other things). Give them Python and Pybullet and they are all geniuses. Brilliant.
So, yeah, education has to change. A CS/Engineering degree should consist of three years of core, from the ground-up, subjects and one more year specializing at a higher level. Yes, that means that the $50K students are forced to pay for bullshit non-degree topics must go. They are a waste of time. General education should happen in high school, not university at $30K to $50K per year.
You should be able to graduate with a solid CS foundation in three years, a generalist, if you will. Anyone wishing to specialize should be able to add one year to their BS degree for this purpose and a Masters after that.
About two years ago I helped a recent CS graduate prepare for an interview. What I learned from this single data point was astounding. It is embarrassing that our universities are doing such a horrible job in preparing people for their future. The issues had to do both with breath and depth of knowledge. To be sure, encyclopedic knowledge isn't necessary, but you have to be able to code using something other than JS, P5.js or Python and a pile of fat libraries you do not understand.
Questions like "What's a pointer?" and "Can the data in a non-mutable Python object ever change?" should have intelligent answers that reveal understanding. BTW, the answer to the second question is: Yes, absolutely.
Getting back to the issue of finding employment, frankly, I am not sure what people can do about it. If I were looking for a job I would likely take one of two approaches. The first would be to join everyone else carpet-bombing job postings with applications. Well, that does not work. The other might be to be extremely selective and, perhaps, look for niche positions with few applicants and attempt to tailor the application to make a case for hiring you.
One thing is sure: Trying to second-guess a software-based application filter (AI or otherwise) is a waste of time. You are throwing your application into a black box and have not idea what happens inside it. Whatever guess you might make is far more likely to be random, rather than stochastic. In other words, in the first case your guesses will have almost completely unpredictable results while, in the second case, with some knowledge, the guesses are made in the context of something that resembles a probability distribution.
And yet, in the end, either case might be equally pointless. This is particularly true when the posting's intent was to support internal hire or H1B.
The other angle on this is entrepreneurship. This isn't for everyone. Most will fail and do so multiple times, dozens of times in some cases. I nearly lost everything I owned before I experienced success. Like I said, not for most.
In the end, I don't really know how this can be fixed. I don't believe in big government, so I am not comfortable with the suggestion that legislation is a solution. Then again, I also have to admit that there might be a need for this on a temporary basis to bring balance into the relevant markets.
I somewhat disagree with you about CS degrees. Though my data points are a bit dated. (And a couple academic CS acquaintances feel that there's are department level declines.)
But the standard curriculum I'm familiar with always includes courses where you need to use C, or similar low level languages, to write an OS, compilers, networking stack, etc. And at least one course focused on a system language as a pre-req for those. The push for more practical coursework I think is perceived to have come from industry, which generally would rather have someone who can string some python packages together to do something quickly than someone who's never touched python but can write a compiler or OS from scratch.
That said, I do think it seems like ML topics should fit into standard coursework (wasn't really a thing when I was in school - AI was maybe an occasional elective or grad topic). It seems pretty adjacent to parallel and distributed computing (don't remember if that was optional or required) and statistics, which was not precisely part of CS curriculum, but occasionally discrete math/algo/grammar track adjacent in practice.
But I have trouble seeing how that could fit into 3 years. It's hard to parallelize the intro series of courses that build up to the "fan out" to he higher level courses/reqs, (though maybe stats/ML intro could fit early) and once you hit the fan out, 3 courses take about 80/hrs a week for most of a semester. IMO if you're wanting foundational knowledge and not the "patch Python packages together" it's hard to compress.
One thing that is happening is non-CS degrees with weaker requirements to get to people skills, like BAs in technology and computing, that focus much more lightly on CS and just have a solid amount of "practical" coursework, e.g. "here's how to use the most common Python ML libraries and Django, BTW this would be a great thing to double major in with Bio."
While you are right, I think the evidence points to deficiencies in depth and breath.
There are plenty or published articles discussing why the mega-interviews became a thing when employers started to realize CS graduates could not develop software.
And then there's the H1B argument. If our educational pipeline is delivering people with solid skill sets, hiring H1B's should be rare because you could not justify it.
Better yet, given the cost of higher education in the US: Why are universities not graduating the absolute best professionals in the world? Every single H1B hire is one more data point in support of the idea that our universities are not doing a good job.
Before someone mentions pay, I looked around and there seem to be multiple studies indicating that H1B's are getting paid on-par with US workers.
Once again, if an H1B hire is justified, it means our universities did not produce candidates with competitive skill sets. Then, why are we paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for these degrees and financially enslaving people for decades?
While I can vouch for there being CS graduates who seem mysteriously poor at SW dev/engineering/programming, I also know a chunk of my graduating class never made it into a SW eng career despite having solid CS foundations.
IMO many of them suffered not from being poor at stuff like writing a compiler or foundational CS (because I think some of them were better than me), but not really having a way to translate those core skills to jobs that wanted specific skills that differed. I've had fine luck getting jobs in languages I've never used, but so far as I can tell (a) most people don't even try because they believe requirements are requirements, and (b) it's less and less common consider deviation from "requirements" okay, particularly without connections of some sort.
For non SW engineer engineers it seems worse - I know a good number who've ended up starting unrelated businesses (e.g. making furniture) because they couldn't find a job within a year or so of getting a degree. Or who got masters degrees just to work for $40-$60k a year for 5+ years before finding a way to get paid better.
I do not buy the H1B argument. While I think hiring remote foreigners is now widespread and often an even more economic alternative, I have, for my whole life, seen positions written to be excessively niche, posted in places where actual job seekers will ignore or not see, and applications rejected to hire H1B hires, whether for traditional engineers (chemical, mechanical, etc.) or SW developers. My dad used to enjoy pointing out job ads that weren't supposed to get applicants in papers and magazines.
That said, there's a large mix of H1B hiring types. But most of what I've personally seen and witnessed has not struck me as savory. Every shenanigan in the books gets used - label a SW eng role as "programmer" or "IT system tech" role, muddle whether the comparative pay does or doesn't include benefits valued correctly, reject applicants for inane reasons to get the more "perfect fit" non-American.
I am okay with universities have two years of unrelated classes because that's part of what higher education has traditionally been about - exposure to a lot of concepts, and I agree many have very little impact on your career as a software developer, but a degree was historically about more than just getting a job. It's slowly morphed that way over time, but if your main goal is getting a programming job, there are much faster and cheaper (free) ways to do that in 2024. There are 100 lifetimes on quality online content around software development and learning those skills, building a portfolio, and being able to demonstrate them well in an interview will definitely land you a job (at least prior to 2024 it would)
> higher education has traditionally been about - exposure to a lot of concepts
I completely agree. However, we have not had that (lots of concepts) for decades. Universities are largely ideologically monocultural now. This isn't education, it's indoctrination.
And, when you include the fact that students are paying tens of thousands of dollars for all of their non-major courses, this quickly turns into a tragedy. Most people take decades to pay off their student loans.
General education needs to happen in K-12. There are plenty of cultures around the world where high school students graduate with impressive (compared to average US) cultural background and exposure.
Sometimes flipping things around can be useful. Nobody in their right mind would suggest an English or History major should be forced to take a solid year worth of CS coursework as a condition for obtaining the degree. Why is the reverse OK? It is not. We've just come to accept it.
Here's another thought experiment: Imagine I was allowed by the Department of Education to grant Bachelor degrees in CS while focusing 100% on CS coursework. My four-year graduates would absolutely destroy anyone from a university who wasted their time with non-STEM courses. They would be brutally better candidates for every job. It would be a truly unfair advantage. That's how our current system is damaging our young professionals. They are forcing them to waste a year of their lives on stuff nobody cares about when hiring.
> Universities are largely ideologically monocultural now. This isn't education, it's indoctrination.
I would speculate that what you’re seeing is society in general being much more of a monoculture than it used to be. Extremes still exist, but they are far fewer than they were 100 years ago, when people couldn’t even use certain water fountains because of the color of their skin.
Maybe the point you’re getting at is that universities used to be edgier—it was more of an environment for challenging the status quo and not being afraid of controversy. I agree that it’s extremely not like that anymore, to the point that even guest speakers on campus are frequently boycotted or threatened.
I think it may be indoctrination in a systemic way, but not as a conscious, active effort. I don’t think there’s a secret group of people deliberately making universities more monocultural with that as the intended outcome. But I recognize that a process may have naturally led to this regardless.
> General education needs to happen in K-12
I think there’s value in extending general education beyond what public schooling offers, which isn’t much. Public school really fails to engage students in meaningful and interesting ways. People graduate hating math and thinking it’s stupid and pointless because they’re never given context as to why it’s interesting, or shown all the cool things math allows us to do. Universities can engage people in topics they wouldn’t normally consider, and that’s where the value of general education comes in. My partner is a great example of this—she got to attend a series of university lectures when she was in high school, covering a broad range of topics designed for her age group to help them figure out what interested them. She attended a physics lecture on dark matter, and it genuinely sparked an interest in a topic she had previously found hideously boring. She now has a PhD and a prestigious career in that field, and it never would have happened without that generalized exposure that universities provide.
> Nobody in their right mind would suggest an English or History major should be forced to take a solid year worth of CS coursework as a condition for obtaining the degree. Why is the reverse OK? It is not.
I would say English is definitely a worthwhile course for CS majors, due to my previous point.
> Here's another thought experiment
Yes, I agree. A university is not optimal for maximum efficiency in job performance, but that’s not really its primary goal. And I think universities are fine the way they are (minus the monoculture, the expense, and the problematic treatment of grad students, along with the publish-or-perish mentality). That said, there should also be better, more accessible mainstream options for the kind of training you’re describing.
In some ways I think the solution to quite a few of these problems is to make education a true free market experiment. What do I mean by this?
Well, first, the government should not be in the business of student loan guarantees. This inflates costs and provides incentives for padding education with expensive coursework that nobody values.
Degrees should not force non-degree coursework on students. While I tend to discuss STEM, I am sure this could be applied to other degrees. For example, my sister got a degree in Social Work at a major US university. She had to endure courses such as Statistics. Why? Even people in STEM fields hate statistics.
Yes, of course, I agree with you regarding courses such as English being important for STEM graduates. However, it would be my requirement and expectation that high school should graduate people who are able to communicate and express themselves without having to pay thousands of dollars in university for the same learning.
> an environment for challenging the status quo and not being afraid of controversy
Sure. And yet, when you have classes like "Young Karl Marx" forced upon students in direct opposition with reality, well, what the hell is that?
If we are to speak about delivering culture, we have to talk about the Greeks, the great philosophers, the law and other matters. Art, music, history and religion with as little bias as possible. Yes, of course, teach about Karl Marx. However, any reasonable treatment of the subject would clearly have to also deliver the conclusion that these are ideas the world has tried and determined to be disastrous at many levels. To be clear, the world has still to discover perfection --which likely does not exist-- however, teaching failed ideologies at a mass scale as if it were utopia only serves to destroy society.
> I don’t think there’s a secret group of people deliberately making universities more monocultural
Correct. Of course. No, this is like a control system with no feedback that, once it started to go off the rails had no feedback loop to correct it. It just happened.
I think Niall Ferguson provides good insight as to how this happened. Here's one of his interviews:
> she got to attend a series of university lectures when she was in high school, covering a broad range of topics designed for her age group to help them figure out what interested them. She attended a physics lecture on dark matter, and it genuinely sparked an interest in a topic she had previously found hideously boring. She now has a PhD and a prestigious career in that field, and it never would have happened without that generalized exposure that universities provide.
That's beautiful and that is precisely what school should be about, K-12 and university. However, at a mass scale, it has been broken for a long time. Sure, there are corner cases, but I think I can say this is the exception rather than the rule.
My own kids have always told me they learn more from me than what their public school education has exposed them to. Having been educated both in and outside the US, I understood precisely what they were telling me. I exposed them to all of the great philosophers, discussions about all religions and open discussions about political thought and history. And I always encouraged them to not take my words (or anyone else's) as ground truth, to think critically, learn and arrive at their own conclusions. And, yes, of course, I also exposed them to STEM subjects not covered in school or before they came up in school. Business and economics were subjects of frequent discussion, because you need this as an 18 year old entering the world. Etc.
In the end, what we choose to teach our children will determine our future. If we put them on the wrong path and don't give them the skills necessary to thrive and be competitive with others, our future will take a turn for the worse. It really is that simple; has been for all of humanity's history. These are important opportunities that should not be wasted.
This is what is sad about what has happened. The people focusing on ideological extremes do damage to society at a large scale, in terms of both time and lives.
People go to a technical college for this. The college you describe should introduce the student to a wide variety ideas and thoughts and history. When that is done going to a technical college to actual learn the craft is the better choice for those not programming in their spare time at a high level. Expecting hands on skills from a degree isn't fair because it is not what a degree means.
> Expecting hands on skills from a degree isn't fair because it is not what a degree means.
I have heard this argument many times and happen to think it is a false argument.
Universities (in the US) are not what they used to be. They are not culturally open. They have become dangerous monoculture indoctrination centers. STEM degrees, due to their nature, are not impacted as hard as are others. People in other non-STEM paths are in full-on monoculture indoctrination programs, even if not explicitly stated.
What isn't fair is for people to attend university in the US, graduate with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and not end-up with at least two things: Marketable skills that are competitive with anyone from other countries and, well, culture.
It just so happens that I attended both high school and university abroad and in the US. My family moved about due to business when I was in school. I have perspective to offer from the UK, US and Argentina.
I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that US education has been an unmitigated disaster for DECADES. The problem with this is that, even if changes were to be made today, it will also take decades for the results to surface.
I am an immigrant in the US. I graduated from high school with a far deeper and broader cultural foundation than I would say most college graduates in the US. This is no joke. And this is why, if I were to use a nasty generalization, Americans are regarded as dumb and ignorant outside of the US. Of course, this isn't absolutely fair, it's a stereotype, and stereotypes do not apply to the entire population. However, there are measurable elements of this. Our schools are broken, from the bottom up.
We have a country where people graduate from university actually believing that communism and socialism are good things. This sounds so fucking stupid to immigrants who have actually lived in these regimes that I cannot even begin to describe it. It is surreal to see how the US has allowed this to happen.
To go back to what you said: "Expecting hands on skills from a degree isn't fair"
No my friend, what isn't fair is to graduate with $100K to $300K in debt and have that degree be so dubious that you have to endure five technical interviews before someone considers hiring you. And, in addition to that, the jobs you could have had go to H1B's because companies can make a case that you are not adequate for the job.
We should not make our children pay for substandard education. That is not fair.
My solution is simple: Stop pretending that we are teaching real culture and fire all the ideological assholes from these universities. Nobody should be forced to pay one single cent for this crap.
Teaching should be a meritocracy. Our schools are filled with "teachers" and "professors" that are worse than YouTube tutorial authors. Why are we making our children pay for mediocrity and incompetence.
I remember one of my kids having a science teacher in middle school who actually taught his classes that the moon does not rotate about its axis. And that was not the only incredibly ignorant thing he taught. I went to war and tried to get him fired. He had no business teaching science at all. He was a Chiropractor who got his teaching credentials and they gave him the science spot because he had "Dr." in his name. Well, I could not get him hired. The union protected him. Jokes on me, he retired after 30 years on the job with full pension and healthcare benefits for life. Who knows how many kids he ruined through his "teachings".
Teachers should be paid very well and held to a very high standard.
In university STEM fields, teach STEM and only STEM. Graduate people with world class skills. Reduce the cost by eliminating that 25% of coursework that no employer cares about. If a student chooses to study non STEM subjects, sure, be my guest, they can pay for them and there are no loan guarantees for the universities (which will lower their cost). Critically, they should not be conditions for graduation.
We can pretend US colleges are about culture all we want. However, the evidence in the real world is that they do a shit job across the board and change is badly needed.
you got this from one episode on foxnews or you had to watch many to get all this together? :)
where do you think bezos, zuck, gates, jobs… went to school - fucking Argentina?!
what a nonsense drivel you wrote - quite insane!
us educational system has a lot of issues. tough to expect otherwise given the size as well as the fact that one of the two major political parties in the US likes their voters dumb - the dumber the better. but it is still the best educational system on the planet, otherwise the kids of US elite would be flocking schools in fucking Argentina (they are not and never will)
This is such a common and tired meme. It aims to stomp on something that someone said with a nonsensical argument. A bit of shooting the messenger and an appeal to authority (the veil attack being that everything that isn't Fox News is true and pure).
Fox News has its problem, every media outlet has. And yet, 95% of so-called reliable "news" outlets lied to the entire nation for over three years about such things as Biden's cognitive problems (and much more). Be careful who you choose as your source for truth. You should not trust anyone in the media. Yes, that means FNN included.
To address your personal attack: I had better math, history, science and, yes, English scores in public high school in Massachusetts as a foreign student educated in Argentina. I could read and write better than most in my class. I knew more about history, geography, philosophy and was better at math, physics, chemistry, etc. So, say what you want, at least this one data point, as flawed as it might be, actually lived through many experiences that showed me the real differences. Later on I made sure my own children did not fall victims to these inadequacies by supplementing the substandard education (at a world level) with learning at home.
And this isn't about just one country outside the US. For example, I have friends in Singapore, Italy, Spain, Germany and other places whos kids can run circles around your average US-educated high-school graduate.
> where do you think bezos, zuck, gates, jobs… went to school - fucking Argentina?!
One would think that before someone decides to make a comment like that they would take a few minutes to actually educate themselves and understand what they are about to say. Go learn about the people you listed there and understand.
Your insulting comments about Argentina (or nations other than the US by extension) is precisely why people around the world have formed certain opinions about Americans. You lack perspective, culture and knowledge about what you owe the rest of the world. Be humble, learn a little history and understand the shoulders you are standing on. If the history of the modern world is a meter long, the US is responsible for approximately 1 millimeter of it, if that.
Here, I'll give you a push-start: Go read about the history of the artificial heart, heart bypass surgery and blood transfusions. And, while you are at it, make a list of science, engineering and cultural contributions from around the world for some perspective.
You can believe anything you wish. Or you can make an attempt to understand reality and be a part of the solution. I want things to change for the better. It appears that you actually believe we have the best system of education. Well, I am not sure what to say other than: You are wrong. We might actually have one of the worst.
* Well, I am not sure what to say other than: You are wrong. We might actually have one of the worst.*
if you believe this and your children are here in the US that would be borderline child abuse to subject your own flesh and blood to the worst educational system…
I said FoxNews mostly because you are tauting word-for-word party-line garbage without any thought of your own on the matter.
people from all over the world come to the United States (including yourself and myself) to get educated. Absolute best higher education schools are here. If polled random 100 people from developer nations to name 10 non-US universities roughly 99 of them would stop at like 6.
shitting on US education is ring-wing garbage you are trying to sell and you should not be selling it cause no sane person will be buying it.
> shitting on US education is ring-wing garbage you are trying to sell and you should not be selling it cause no sane person will be buying it.
First of all, your right-wing characterization is wrong, insulting and distasteful. You have revealed much about yourself when choosing to take this approach instead of having a conversation, so I do not expect you to apologize. So be it.
It is really interesting to me to see just how common it is for some to attempt to attack ideas or discourse by making such accusations. The parallels to the story from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperors New Clothes" and even Plato's Allegory of the Cave are impossible to ignore.
Once again, the most recent examples of the delusion being the massive lies and deception around Biden's mental health, the southern border and the crime it brought into our nation, to name just a few. These are truths that stand on their won, regardless of where they might be printed, heard or viewed.
> I said FoxNews mostly because you are tauting word-for-word party-line garbage without any thought of your own on the matter.
Again, you make assumptions and deliver insults. It appears one cannot possibly be critical of the Emperor, who actually is naked, without being accused of all sorts of things. He is naked my friend. Can't you see?
> if you believe this and your children are here in the US that would be borderline child abuse to subject your own flesh and blood to the worst educational system…
No, you are wrong, and what you are saying is a ridiculous stretch. You are not thinking.
I want education in the US to improve for all children, because a better-educated people will improve things for everyone. The only way this happens is if we are honest and critical. Thinking that education in the West is, as you put it, the absolute best, is like being chained in Plato's cave confusing shadows for reality.
> If polled random 100 people from developer nations to name 10 non-US universities roughly 99 of them would stop at like 6.
I would suggest you stop here. What is being revealed about you isn't good at all. Either you are young and not ready to understand or confused, and maybe both. There are amazing universities all over the world, in both developed and developing nations. Yes, the US might have some of the most recognizable names in the world. And, in most cases, with good reason. Yet, that does not mean the world is a barren wasteland. In fact, some of the most prominent companies in the US are loaded with people who graduated from schools outside of the US, people who have driven innovation and wonderful things for decades. Don't take that approach. It is wrong and misinformed.
US education has problems that can be fixed with the right approach and incentives. This is not insurmountable, it simply requires recognizing the issues and acting in the best interest of future generations and the nation.
US education has problems that can be fixed with the right approach and incentives. This is not insurmountable, it simply requires recognizing the issues and acting in the best interest of future generations and the nation.
If you came here to discuss and said this to begin with - the conversation would have been a lot different. This is what I mentioned couple of times, there are problems. however, you said that US is one of the worst which is why you had to read a bunch of stuff ... not sure I have to tell you this but there is a very slight difference between US education has problems that can be fixed with the right approach and incentives vs. "US education system is one of the worst" :)
No, I absolutely hold to my assertion. It is one of the worst. Or, it was allowed to devolve into one of the worst.
The results we obtain do not align well with the money we spent per student. Not to mention the ideological crap we shove into their minds, particularly at the university level.
And the problem is that it isn't getting better.
Things need to change, and do so quickly. Like I said in one of my prior comments, these are issues that take a generation or more to yield results. If we don't fix this quickly, we are going to have very serious problems in the coming decades. And, the only way to solve these problems will be through the promotion of immigration of university graduates from other countries. There's nothing wrong with that other than the huge disservice we will do to our students.
The world is a competitive place. Nothing should stand in the way of our system of education reaching for and demanding excellence.
EDIT:
I have to add this.
One of my son's friends decided to go for a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. Since I was a mentor at our local high school robotics team, she asked me what I thought about one of the schools she was kind of set on attending. I took one look and begged her to not do this. Her Masters was going to cost her THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS.
How? Why? This is insane!
Mechanical engineers graduate every day from excellent universities around the world at a cost between zero and, maybe, one tenth of what she was facing. And they are just as capable as anyone else.
Well, the sales people did a good job on her and she took that path. Years later she told me just how sorry she was not to take my advise.
How does an ME degree cost $300K? How is it possibly worth it? How did we allow the system to degenerate to such a level that it is legal to do this to our young?
No my friend. This is a disaster. This is really bad on many fronts. It needs to be fixed or we will pay the consequences in the long run.
I went to a low-ranked university in the midwest for CS (class of 2011) after going through an intense honors/AP circuit in high school. After experiencing difficult courses in English/History in high school, I was flabbergasted at the low quality of some of the courses at this university.
I had two courses that, as part of their curriculum, had a couple lectures to teach me how to write a resume. One of them was a 200-level English Technical Writing course; the other was a 300-level CS course. I had never had an actual job, yet somehow I wrote a better resume than my peers; many of them completely half-assed theirs. In the speech/comms 101 course, apparently I was the only one who had ever synthesized an argument or done any sort of critical thinking prior to that class.
I frequently got told that it was unusual for me, the CS student, to be doing well in various courses. My physics E&M prof asked me how I was able to do so well, better than the engineers and physics students. My math profs asked me why I was taking math courses for fun.
CS courses generally were a joke; a prof told me he had been trying to figure out how/where he was failing in his teaching content, until I showed up and it was clear that the problem was not with the content, but with the quality of students. I am pretty certain the majority of folks who took the C programming course still don't know how to work with pointers.
In-state tuition was still ~$15-20k/yr.
I got quite frustrated by my peers. They just didn't seem to care about the content or technology. I'd internally think "why are you even here then in this degree program"? It was clearly frustrating to the profs, it was frustrating to me, etc. At the time, my peers would especially be loud/demanding that the profs put in more work in education, and to some degree struck me as rather entitled. I would tinker a bit beyond what was required in the curriculum / syllabus, primarily because it was fun and interesting, not motivated by any sort of desire to get ahead, etc.
The state of education is not great I agree, but imo somehow we have created generations of students who don't care or are less able to do critical thinking, and certainly that impedes and/or unravels the progress any educator could hope to do.
> The state of education is not great I agree, but imo somehow we have created generations of students who don't care or are less able to do critical thinking, and certainly that impedes and/or unravels the progress any educator could hope to do.
Thanks for posting this. I agree with everything you said.
Real problems are never about a single magical variable that fixes everything. They always consist of sometimes complex graphs of parameters (issues, control points, rules, laws, politics) that need to be address to a sufficient breath and depth to make things change.
I am intrigued about ideas such as eliminating the Department of Education. I haven't really given it any thought, so I can't speak about this to any depth, for or against it. I do, however, reject big government (that does not mean "no government") and tend to believe that the more you rip out of government claws the better off you might be.
When I get vocal about the state of US education it is easy for many to only think about my criticism only applying to top tier schools. That's not the case at all. The problem is systemic, and it starts with the sad state of the K-12 education.
Age discrimination has been a real problem in tech for a very long time, this isn't new at all. Yet, somehow, it feels like it has gotten progressively worse over time. There are companies where you have the young (25-ish, just out of school) comprise the majority and the managers are just a few years older than that. They simply do not want to see "Mom" or "Dad" join the team.
You are going to find very few 40, 50 or 60+ year old engineer in those environments. Their experience and capabilities do not matter at all except for a few domains where they almost have no options (RF electronics, signal/power integrity, embedded systems, gov/mil, etc.).
I am not saying that age discrimination is the only filter being applied, of course not. That is, however, likely one of the main filters for a large group in the application pool.
The other problem seems to be that a massive portion of the job posting on sites like LinkedIn seem to be fake. I have seen reports claiming that the number might be as high as 80%. These postings are fake for a lot of reasons. One of them, at least in the US, are rules/laws that require posting a job opening even when you have already identified someone you will hire (or retain) for that role. Companies have to be able to show they evaluated N applications before declaring they will hire someone from the inside or retain/bring-in an H1B.
This is terrible and --while there is no indication that this will be an objective-- I hope the new administration gives this issue some thought and modifies the rules of the game to create a real market for jobs, one where opportunities are fair for everyone (whatever that metric might be).
For example, people have been told to go study coding all the way back to the Obama administration (maybe earlier, I don't remember). So, lots of people did. And then they were dropped on their collective heads. No offense to anyone, but, if the US is telling its young to study CS, H1B visas should have become rare and exceptional. Nothing else is fair.
There are other problems, of course, many problems. One of the is that university CS programs in the US and elsewhere, well, suck. People come out of programs with their degrees and are incapable of writing code. In the US, they can argue with you about Socialism and Karl Marx, and they can't code shit. They are taught what I call "coding by library". I am going to stretch and suggest that the vast majority of them would drown if you gave them C and a raw embedded system and asked them to implement a neural network or a genetic algorithm (and many other things). Give them Python and Pybullet and they are all geniuses. Brilliant.
So, yeah, education has to change. A CS/Engineering degree should consist of three years of core, from the ground-up, subjects and one more year specializing at a higher level. Yes, that means that the $50K students are forced to pay for bullshit non-degree topics must go. They are a waste of time. General education should happen in high school, not university at $30K to $50K per year.
You should be able to graduate with a solid CS foundation in three years, a generalist, if you will. Anyone wishing to specialize should be able to add one year to their BS degree for this purpose and a Masters after that.
About two years ago I helped a recent CS graduate prepare for an interview. What I learned from this single data point was astounding. It is embarrassing that our universities are doing such a horrible job in preparing people for their future. The issues had to do both with breath and depth of knowledge. To be sure, encyclopedic knowledge isn't necessary, but you have to be able to code using something other than JS, P5.js or Python and a pile of fat libraries you do not understand.
Questions like "What's a pointer?" and "Can the data in a non-mutable Python object ever change?" should have intelligent answers that reveal understanding. BTW, the answer to the second question is: Yes, absolutely.
Getting back to the issue of finding employment, frankly, I am not sure what people can do about it. If I were looking for a job I would likely take one of two approaches. The first would be to join everyone else carpet-bombing job postings with applications. Well, that does not work. The other might be to be extremely selective and, perhaps, look for niche positions with few applicants and attempt to tailor the application to make a case for hiring you.
One thing is sure: Trying to second-guess a software-based application filter (AI or otherwise) is a waste of time. You are throwing your application into a black box and have not idea what happens inside it. Whatever guess you might make is far more likely to be random, rather than stochastic. In other words, in the first case your guesses will have almost completely unpredictable results while, in the second case, with some knowledge, the guesses are made in the context of something that resembles a probability distribution.
And yet, in the end, either case might be equally pointless. This is particularly true when the posting's intent was to support internal hire or H1B.
The other angle on this is entrepreneurship. This isn't for everyone. Most will fail and do so multiple times, dozens of times in some cases. I nearly lost everything I owned before I experienced success. Like I said, not for most.
In the end, I don't really know how this can be fixed. I don't believe in big government, so I am not comfortable with the suggestion that legislation is a solution. Then again, I also have to admit that there might be a need for this on a temporary basis to bring balance into the relevant markets.