Slashdot Mirror
Key EDS Witness Bought Internet Degree
An anonymous reader writes "EDS's key witness during the firm's court case against BSkyB was shown to have bought his degree online – but still managed to get a worse mark than a dog. Joe Galloway said he had a degree from Concordia College in the US Virgin Islands and gave detailed evidence on how he took plane journeys between the islands and attended a college there. But while questioning Galloway in court, Mark Howard QC managed to obtain exactly the same degree as Galloway from Concordia College for his dog 'Lulu' with one key difference – the dog got a higher mark."
My dog is smarter than your dog.
Its stuff like this that makes people question even reliable and accurate information on Internet.
wtf man
Hmm; a joker that got a joke degree with real money. I'm just wondering if they've been smoking their cash & weed at the same time.
College degrees are way overrated. This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
College degrees have always been worthless the moment you joined the workforce and got your first day of actual working experience. It's always been worthless because the assclown with family connections will get the job over any random summa cum laude. The worthlessness is even worse since anything worth knowing is learned on the job and not in the classroom.
Consider this. Right now we are in a terrible recession. Many people are going back to school because they can't find a paying job. That means that in 3 year's time we will have a huge glut of people with advanced degrees fighting over the same pool of jobs. It's the same as always, only the requirements to play require a higher standard of education.
Or does it? Since experience and personal contacts mean much more than degrees, the earlier you can get a job, the better. Wasting your time in actual school taking actual classes is a net loser compared to getting a cheap diploma from a diploma mill and getting a paying job today.
I spent a lot of time to get my advanced degrees, but I have no illusions about their actual value. My real value comes from my work experience and successes in my field. Degrees aren't worth the paper they are printed on. If you want one, you should do it for yourself, not for a job.
The fake-degree guy got fired from his job not for performing badly but for having a fake degree. What does this say about people who have a real degree that they didn't notice a difference in performance or at the very least that it took so long to find out?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Someone should warn the copious number of other colleges with the same name to expect massive calls from nominally informed reporters and/or bloggers. I imagine there will be some college administrators getting some odd phone calls.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
On the internet, no one knows you're a dog.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2007/images/internet_dog.jpg
Who are you and what have you done to the real BadAnalogyGuy?!
The court case is appearing before the British high court.
BSkyB and EDS are British firms, the collage in question is in the US Virgin Islands. This was reported by itweek.co.uk, itnews.com.au just copied the article so that doesn't qualify as an excuse.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Well, a degree is ultimately a bit of paper.
As far as "useless" goes, okay, I probably use at most about 5% of what I learned at university. So it has actually been useful - just not as useful as one might expect. Of course, even most of that 5% I could have learned from textbooks, but the course structure gave me a little context. It told me what there was to know. I have no idea whether I'd have learned about functional programming languages or Hough transforms without university guidance. I wouldn't have known they exist even to look for them. Granted, neither of those two examples have actually come up in the working environment, but I imagine there are some that have
If you want one, you should do it for yourself, not for a job.
Having said what I said, I still 100% agree with this statement.
College degrees are way overrated.
Not really. It's Human Resource people who make the hiring decisions who are over-rated. They look for degrees, good references and personality to make their decisions, instead of looking at a person's ability. Like the article said;
He gave his evidence [on going to the college] in the same confident, secure manner as he gave his evidence about the EDS representations.
Smart people usually aren't confident because they know how ignorant they are. HR people look for confidence in a person when hiring. Confident people also get promoted. It's all about sales, not ability. I'd rather hire an insecure person who wasn't confident in his abilities to do differential equations than hire somebody who confidently lies about his ability because he thinks (and knows) people are stupid enough to judge him based on how he presents himself.
Presentation is everything, that's why PowerPoint is so popular with business and sales people. It's quite useless, but it's pretty and it looks smart.
I spent a lot of time to get my advanced degrees, but I have no illusions about their actual value. My real value comes from my work experience and successes in my field.
Just to take the devil's advocate position here: you essentially are implying that you learned nothing in school and could have had the same successes without taking the courses you took?
I (owner of a piece of paper that says I am a medical doctor) agree that at the end of the day a degree is just a piece of paper. The real value is what you yourself put into the course, it's not "granted" to you by some outside force. I know people with exactly the same degree I have who, frankly, I would never let near my children. I myself used my training as an excuse to spend as much time as possible with patients, including weekends and holidays when I really didn't have to be there. So in essence I agree with you, it's not "the degree" that has given me a far more profound understanding of medicine than most of my classmates (who did the bare minimum). Rather it's my attitude towards learning, problem solving, and work that let me get ahead in my field.
However there has to be some objective method of classifying a potential employee, and the degree (and where it came from) is a very simple test. Yes there are bound to be highly efficient individuals who lack university degrees (my grandfather made millions - far more than I could ever hope to earn - and never had more than 3rd grade). And there are bound to be slackers who despite having prestigious degrees are absolutely useless. That's why hiring isn't (or shouldn't be) done on solely a candidate's degree. It's just another tool when sifting through the work-force to help identify the individual you think will be of greatest use to you.
However, all else being equal, I would be more inclined to trust someone with a Harvard degree than a degree from "Concordia Online College"...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Any one who's worked with these guys will not be surprised.
Somehow I really, really doubt you went to MIT, Harvard and Oxford. If you went to any of those institutions, you'd know the connections you make during school at those types of institutes are invaluable for networking later in life.
You're making the standard mistake when assessing the value of education. Your criticisms would be valid if all education was supposed to do was provide utility to companies. However education can not only improves your quality of life it may also shows an 'ability' to learn and provide a practical gauge of general intelligence - both of which are useful things for future employers to know. I did Philosophy/Politics at university and have since graduation worked as a software engineer - and for the first seven years of my working life worked with another Philosophy graduate, an History of Science graduate and a high school drop out - all excellent programmers! One of the things my employers mentioned about my education on offering the job was that my education at the very least proved that I could 'think', which they believed a valuable attribute. Blanket statements about the utility of further education fail.
College degrees are way overrated. This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
Maybe you did something wrong. Personally, I learned a lot in school, and when studying. Including a ton of stuff I would not have learned if I had spent the same amount of time working, but which turned out to be a tremendous help when doing actual work (stuff that immediately comes to mind would be how to write an application in assembly and C, and how to write an operating system, which makes it easier to figure out what's going on when you're programming in a higher-level language; also, how to write a compiler, which includes useful things like writing parsers and state machines, which helps me write proper solutions to problems that I would otherwise have tried to implement using a bunch of regexes).
There's also the point that nothing stops you from working while you're studying, especially if you're studying something like comp sci. Lots of great companies came out of a student's side project.
Heh, I don't got much fancy book learnin, but I done started going to work early in life. I would agree that personal contacts are key, being good at your job counts for nothing, IMHExperience. If you are really good at your job you get to train some graduate to be your boss. Even while you are showing him how everything works, he will be getting more pay than you.
So.
1 Get a degree by any means.
2 Lie, lie and lie again to get a job
3 Lie and bluff through the job whilst shmoozing your way to the next job
4 Profit
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
...it really grokked Tail Recursion.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've only been to one university - though I have plenty of vocational qualifications. Although what I learned at Cambridge was rapidly obsoleted as knowledge - and I work in a field which did not even really exist when I was there - what I did there benefits me almost every single day of my life. I learned the things you mostly do not learn at work.
Specifically I learnt the critical attitude - to take nothing at face value. At a University famous for its experimentalism, I learnt how to design experiments and test the results. I learnt how to use statistical and probabilitistic analysis to eliminate false results. I learnt to distrust the wisdom of crowds. And I learnt how to learn.
Ever since then I have discovered that many people simply do not think but accept what is perceived as the norm in their industry or group. That is why you get everything from religious cults to stock market bubbles. Anyone who learnt experimental technique as I did could never be fooled by the early-80s boom. Anyone who learnt those techniques (as I did) would be able to go away, analyse the quality records of their company and suddenly realise that what "everybody believed" about a major industrial process of the company was quite wrong - and, after nearly getting fired for whistleblowing, convince the CEO (a Cambridge PhD) and end up as CTO.
When I had to learn some metallurgy and electrochemistry in a hurry - I knew where to go and how to do it. When I suddenly needed a working knowledge of technical German and French - I knew how to do it.
Vocational courses are great when you have a vocation. But a good University is not a vocational school. It expands your mental horizons and it shows you how to both access knowledge and bend it to your purpose.
It has been estimated roughly that an engineering, science or maths degree from Oxford or Cambridge has a net worth of over $300000 - that is the increase in annual income over life, minus the three years out of the workforce and the costs of doing the degree. This benefit is leveraged by vocational courses - I have obtained distinctions on every one of mine by applying proper habits of study.
Unless you sleepwalked through those universities and did not take full advantage of what they offered, I suspect that you've never really been there.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
He didn't say college was overrated; he said college degrees were overrated. Although you learned and studied a lot, there were probably others who graduated with the exact same degree from the same institution as you, who bludged their way through the course, and are useless at actually doing the thing their degree describes. That's why he was saying a degree is useless. It doesn't actually provide what it says it does - that is, a certification that the person who has it knows their stuff.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
ROFL multiple degrees from MIT Harvard and Oxford, really. Not one from each place but multiple.
I think you should reconsider the value of a good education. For example, if you had a good education, even at a half decent state school, you would know how to lie more convincingly.
The worthlessness is even worse since anything worth knowing is learned on the job and not in the classroom.
While I agree that work experience is very valuable, I find that particular line very hard to believe. In fact, it makes me wonder if the three colleges you mentioned are, in fact, grossly overrated.
You learn a lot of the important stuff at work (though at least here in Finland, 6 months of internship is requirement for getting a college degree of any kind anyways) but you also spend years in classroom in order to not waste your employer's time in having to learn that stuff at work too, in addition to the things you learn there after college. And you need to know a lot of stuff before you can begin working. At that point it is simply a matter of "Do I learn these things faster myself at home or by attending college.". If the answer is not the latter, your college sucks (as many do, I admit).
There is no British High Court: Scotland has a separate system of justice and it is the High Court of England and Wales. BSkyB is ultimately owned by News International, the multinational creation of Rupert Murdoch, born Australian but now a US citizen of convenience, and is British only in appearance. EDS is a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard, a US multinational. I will forgive you collage, because calling it a college would clearly be exaggeration.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Somehow I really, really doubt you went to MIT, Harvard and Oxford. If you went to any of those institutions, you'd know the connections you make during school at those types of institutes are invaluable for networking later in life.
Maybe he didn't go to school to socialize. Though we all know how much more important socializing and networking is than actual ability.
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College degrees are way overrated. This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
Are those colleges doing a bulk deal if you buy all of them at once?
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
He single handedly lost the case according to the article. He knowingly gave false estimates to BSkyB the only point on which the court upheld BSB's complaints and as a result EDS lost the case. It appears the court decided this largely on the basis of his dishonest account of obtaining a degree (given in court under oath). So to say he lost his job just because he had a fake degree is misleading. He lied to his employer in order to obtain his post. He was sacked, I have no doubt, for dishonesty.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Google brings up the High Court of England and Wales as first result of "British High Court" so it appears we are victims of bad reporting.
But that not withstanding, the jurisdiction is in England as that's where the contract took place.
BTW, we Australians maintain to this day that Rupert Murdoch was never really an Australian.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
So you are saying you went through roughly 10 years getting degrees from MIT, Harvard and Oxford and didn't learn a thing "worth learning"?
Either your story is fake or their admission-departments are absolutely terrible....
Come on now, you can make a point without coming up with fake credentials.
I'm not sure why the parent was marked "insightful".
The crux of the parent post is: "smart" people lack confidence, therefore confident people are not smart.
It's hardly stupid that HR people look for degrees (an indication that the applicant has completed a course of study), good references (an indication that the applicant has performed favourably at their previous job) and personality (because, believe it or not, personality counts and in itself is not a negative trait).
Here's the news: Most jobs require a combination of different abilities, especially interpersonal skills. In many cases it doesn't matter if you are a genius if you are unable to communicate with your colleagues and work well in a team.
You know, this could just work.
Nobody ever wanted to see my degree. They asked whether I have one and I told them, and that's it. I always wondered what if I didn't actually have one? And why the heck did I choose my university instead of claiming I have one from MIT instead?
Not that my university is any less reputable (actually one of the leading places to study CS in Europe), but MIT has such a nice ring to it. Maybe I should beef my resume up a bit...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
College degrees are way overrated.
You're talking about arts degrees right?
the moment you joined the workforce
wait... maybe not :)
Seriously though, if you learned nothing of value from your university degrees then you did it wrong and you did indeed waste your time. The fact that those universities gave you those degrees without having learning anything of value makes me think a lot less of them too.
It's not black and while of course, and each field is different, but would you rather have your appendix removed by a doctor who has completed (or maybe is completing) university based education, or one who's just learning it on the job?
College degrees are way overrated. This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
College mostly is what you make it. Yes, you can go through MIT, Harvard, and Oxford, learn little, and still get a degree. But if you do that, that's your own fault. Many people do get useful skills out of those institutions.
Or does it? Since experience and personal contacts mean much more than degrees, the earlier you can get a job, the better.
Except, of course, that college is an excellent place for getting to know people that you can later network with. You may have missed this opportunity when you were in college and grad school, but other people take advantage of it and it helps them a lot.
I spent a lot of time to get my advanced degrees, but I have no illusions about their actual value.
Value in what sense? If your goal is to maximize your wealth, then it's no secret that you shouldn't get advanced degrees; it's something many graduate schools tell you explicitly (college, however, does pay off).
But not everybody lives in this world to maximize their wealth anyway. People who get advanced degrees don't do it to do well in the workforce, they do it because they are interested in the subject.
"I blew a shitload of money, went into debt that I won't see a positive bank account 'til I'm around 50, to hell with what he can do or what he cannot, he does not deserve having it easier than me just 'cause he's good!"
(Not saying he is or he ain't good, just that this is the general sentiment I tend to feel when people wave their degrees around)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In my RSS feed for this Slashdot article there was an advert saying "Online Master Degrees, learn more now". Strangely relevant and yet embarrassing at the same time...
Fuching awesome! I wern't alredy got my degrae from that sam RSS fead - GO ME! I gotta help pay for /. ya know?
Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!
I did a Computer Science degree in the '80s and there was very little attempt to be vocational - quite rightly so in my opinion. Of course, we did a lot of programming, but that was rather incidental to the fact that we were being educated about a subject, not trained as programmers. There is actually very little correlation in my experience between "knowing your stuff" in an academic sense and being an effective developer in most organisations.
Make sure to check your references.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
"If you want one, you should do it for yourself, not for a job."
Same goes for the job, really. How you spend your time is your decision, and it's best that you make sure you enjoy it as much as possible. If you're going to college to get a diploma that will allow you to get a boring job that you'd spend a lifetime doing, then you're pretty screwed even if that job does pay well. If, on the other hand, you're going to study something that interests you and plan to work in that, then you can end up a better rounded worker for your preferred job. You may have lost some money going to college, but you had some interesting experiences and gained some different perspectives. If you hate institutional studying and have a job you like and you've taught yourself, well done and that's a good way to go, too.
College degrees are way overrated.
That's what you think. In the meantime I've got dibs on hiring that dog !
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I'm confused... Where's the analogy?
Bot Assisted Blogging
Or does it? Since experience and personal contacts mean much more than degrees, the earlier you can get a job, the better. Wasting your time in actual school taking actual classes is a net loser compared to getting a cheap diploma from a diploma mill and getting a paying job today.
Yeah, except for all those fields where you actually require certification that you have the knowledge you're supposed to have such as medicine, law, education, engineering, etc.
What, do you think that if you had connections they would let you be the lead architect on a building project? Do you think they'd just let you have a go at brain surgery or teaching a group of third graders for a week? "Hell, this guy knows the mayor, let's let him be a cop for a day!" A degree is more than a "piece of paper" that is superseded by connections. Connections aren't going to magically give you the knowledge it takes to do certain jobs you daft waste of oxygen.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Let's suppose you're not full of shit. Still, the very fact that you believe mentioning your degrees increases the credibility of your post points towards degrees in general having value, and refutes the rest of your post.
Posts here regularly run counter to ivory-tower elite liberal lies like history, thermodynamics, and economics. But it's still relatively rare to find a single post that disagrees with itself.
One, the people going back to college, would probably have their time best spent at vocational and technical colleges, where they can learn skills.
Two, about those slackers, I don't know what to say. Did they cheat to get their degrees? Or did they forget a lot of what they learned due to not applying it?
The key to learning something isn't just learning it. It's also about applying it, and making sure you don't forget it.
It's hardly stupid that HR people look for degrees (an indication that the applicant has completed a course of study)
Which is quite meaningless. In this case it's not even true. I remember hearing about a study that found half of the civil service managers hired in the US lied about having a degree... OK it's been a few years and I can't remember the details, but I thought it was worth mentioning 'cuz it's something that I'd never forget). And, just because you go to driving school don't necessarily mean you should be driving. Personally, most people that I've met who have gotten middle-class or managerial jobs have admitted to me that they lied. And guess what, most people who go to school cheat on tests and homework etc (to at least some degree). So nope, going through the motions of making yourself look good on paper doesn't count towards competence.
, good references (an indication that the applicant has performed favorably at their previous job)
Not at all. Most people will lie about references, and the smart people will get their friends to vouche for them. Most employers will either be vindictive (like they were with Richard Barlow) or just give the standard BS to avoid possible libel.
and personality (because, believe it or not, personality counts and in itself is not a negative trait).
Unfortunately you can't judge a person's personality in an interview, even if it lasts a full half hour, that's why even trying to attempt such a feat is bogus. And as I've stated, references are just as bogus.
Most jobs require a combination of different abilities, especially interpersonal skills. In many cases it doesn't matter if you are a genius if you are unable to communicate with your colleagues and work well in a team.
I agree with you here. That's why I'd be more likely to hire insecure people (there is a LOT of research that shows that people who lack confidence are much, much more competent at there jobs than confident people, and yet they don't tend to get hired or promoted. You shouldn't even need to Google information on this; it should be common sense).
I'll give a quick (and far from complete) reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism
So it seems that I should withdraw my application from MIT. I've worked every two bit job in most towns in America, and had planned on using my stories for some sort of entrance exam to MIT. Now I'm rethinking that entirely... Perhaps I can just make more contacts and be more social. That always worked for me before. At 25, I was already thinking college had passed me by any way. Besides, who needs college when you have libraries, the internet, and a keen desire to learn more than anyone else. I should probably pay my overdue book fees.
Even if you never had to program in a functional language later, the very fact that you have learned one has affected your thinking (in ways not necessarily obvious), and very likely has made you a better programmer even in traditional imperative and object oriented languages.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I don't know what country you come from, but in the US it's been illegal for companies to give IQ tests since the 1970's. So employers are forced to find another proxy to measure aptitude. Of course, IQ tests were deemed "discriminatory" because the subject matter was not deemed directly related to job qualifications. Of course, frequently enough, neither are college degrees. The value of the college degree isn't so much the subject matter mastered, but as a signal that the holder has the aptitude and perseverance necessary to succeed in the job.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Why embarrassing? Was it you alma matter?
rewriting history since 2109
MIT was instrumental for me leaving the BuyMore and becoming a part of Roark Instruments.
Your problem is that you're an eternal student. A stack of advanced degrees philosophising about the sex life of the inside of a ping-pong ball are indeed worthless. But what makes you unemployable is your lack of experience and that you have never learned to work. It's that lack rather than the fact you have those degrees that's the problem. Employers are going to suspect that all you'll be an architecture astronaut and never actually deliver. On time. and to budget. Because that's not what students do and that's all the experience you have. Perhaps your expectations have been too high? Did you expect to walk in to a senior position just because you'd been a student for most of your life? That's as ludicrous as if I expected to walk into a Professorship at Oxford without a stack of academic qualifications. Does that mean my industry experience is worthless? Of course not. What makes me valuable is that I have both academic and industry experience. Just because you chose to follow and unbalanced career as a permanent student doesn't mean all academic qualifications are worthless. You were just unwise. So either stick with academia where your experience has some value or suck it up and start from the bottom.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
College degrees have always been worthless the moment you joined the workforce
Says someone who has obviously never tried to get a work visa overseas.
College degrees are way overrated. This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
In the world where I live, one usually gets a bachelor degree, then a master degree, then - maybe - an advanced degree like a PhD. So I cannot help to wonder how you managed to get multiple degrees from three universities.
And yes you do not use all of the things you learned at the university but I like to think that you develop some special analytical, learning and problem solving skills that you do not develop while being on the job. And I'd like you to tell me in which working environment I could have learned at the same time programming, calculus, statistics and surgery which I still use everyday.
ROFL multiple degrees from MIT Harvard and Oxford, really. Not one from each place but multiple.
I think you should reconsider the value of a good education. For example, if you had a good education, even at a half decent state school, you would know how to lie more convincingly.
Everyone knows the only Bachelor of Bullshit worth it's salt comes from Cal Tech. He picked the wrong Uni.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Did you consider that maybe his dog did one or two of them?
You're making the standard mistake when assessing the value of education. Your criticisms would be valid if all education was supposed to do was provide utility to companies.
Regardless of what education is "supposed to do", the fact is that the incentive for most people to pursue one is very much to demonstrate their utility to employers. Again, as you point out yourself, your employer didn't hire you for what you learned in school, he hired you because it "proved you could think".
The point here is that your employer used your education as a proxy for an aptitude test, he didn't hire you because you actually knew anything useful to him. The employer could just as easily have given aptitude or IQ tests himself, but unfortunately those leave them open to charges of "discrimination" if the subject matter isn't directly related to the job qualifications. Bryan Caplan and Charles Murray have both written some very good articles on the relationship between education and job qualification.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
At the end of the day, the value of having a degree depends very much on which area of employment you are in.
I have a degree in Electronics Engineering and yet I work as a Software Engineer. In practical terms my degree only really helps me in two ways:
- The one major thing I learned from University was how to learn things fast. This can be used with anything - just recently I managed to learn ski from total newbie to intermediate/advanced level in 1 week - since the observational and analytical skills to do this are generic.
- It gives me a large pool of background knowledge which can help me deduce things faster in other areas: many patterns of "the way people make things" are applicable to all areas of human engineering.
However, 95% of the information I learned for my degree is worthless for what I do now (with the notable exception of CPU design, things like Queue theory and some areas of Mathematics like statistics and numerical analysis).
The diploma itself was only usefull in getting me my first job: from then onwards my CV and the knowledge I display in interviews have been the things that matter.
The reason for this is that I work in IT. This area is still very much an Artisanship - it's practice is missing the predictability and repeatability which are the essential fundations for robust Engineering practices - and as such (outside Academia) proven hands-on experience is vastly more important than scholastic knowledge.
That said for many areas a degree is very important: how many of us would knowingly put the health of their children or the safety of their bridges to people that do not have a degree in the appropriate area?
Pfft. I have a degree from Oxford (albeit only one). Still in touch with friends from that time, but in the 20 years since I've never used any "connections" for any "networking".
Thank you, will be here all evening. Try the beef bone.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
ROFL multiple degrees from MIT Harvard and Oxford, really. Not one from each place but multiple.
ROFL? I think you could use multiple degrees in remedial reading comprehension. He didn't say multiple from each place; he said that he had multiple degrees and that they came from those three schools. Most likely one from each.
And if you find it implausible that one person could go to three different colleges, please consider: undergraduate (bachelor's), graduate (master's), postgraduate (doctorate). And it's typical for one person to do that at two or three different schools; it's enriching.
Idiot.
Here you go: http://thunderwoodcollege.com/
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I would argue it depends on what degree you get, and from where. This coming from someone who's about to get his first degree. ^_^
You say connections trump little sheets of paper - surely MIT, Harvard, and Oxford were good places for networking at least?
My compsci classes also taught me some very handy stuff - Big-O notation, database normalization, data structures, Berkeley sockets, threads, and other OS concepts. Granted, some of it I might have learned on the job, but having those extra tools completely changed the way I approach problems.
It's like saying you don't care what box a pizza is delivered in, but pizzas graduating from Domino's have extra cheese, better crust, and a completely new sauce. Knowing that, maybe you'd hire something in a Domino's box first.
DATABASE WOW WOW
And guess what, most people who go to school cheat on tests and homework etc (to at least some degree).
It is not possible to cheat on homework. You can find the solutions from the internet? That is problem solving and ability to find information: it will probably benefit you at work too. If it is too easy that way, the homework was designed poorly. You copy those from a friend? I doubt your friends will be friends for a long time if they have to provide you with all the answers so most likely you are taking some turns. IE: Teamwork in order to help your whole group have nice grades while still having free time. I think that this kind of activity is not cheating: It is essential part of being a student.
Now, if you do those things in order to avoid learning anything, that should be reflected on exams. If you can cheat on them, the teacher is just being very lazy and/or the test has been designed poorly. (Or you truly have superior social and/or problem solving skills.)
Embarrassing because I suspect the University in question would rather its advert not appear alongside such a story, as the viewer is likely to view the ad negatively. The advert was not for my alma matters but should that matter?
This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
Oxfords a complete dump!
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
For doctors, plummers, lawyers etc, yes, for IT&C no.
Not everyone networks.
You're talking about arts degrees right?
I had a pretty decent career in IT. My degree was in Latin.
When my son wanted to drop out in his senior year in college, my wife told him he was going to finish his degree. She said it wasn't the subject that counted so much as that the degree showed you had enough discipline to complete the work required to get it.
I'm not convinced. I think there is value in a degree. I would tend to agree that their value isn't as much as they're bigged up to be though - there's a lot of careers that 3 years on the job holds more value than 3 years of formal education, but ... at the same time, I think I've come out ahead with mine, working in IT. But I know a lot of my contemporaries at Uni who _didn't_ end up working in their chosen field, and for them, the degree has had less value than 3 years more work experience would have.
there's no concordance in this college name
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Agreed. Most of my degree was _directly_ not a lot of use - I've moved into systems admin type stuff, and Computer Systems Engineering only had a few modules over the 3 years that were directly applicable. (E.g. perl programming I use daily, formal methods, database design, not so much).
But there's a lot of stuff that's been indirectly relevant - communication theory kicks in when you start talking about protocols. Database design lets you slap people upside the head for using a spreadsheet for server configurations. Assembly and embedded processor programming gives you a handle on performance analysis for 'black box' devices.
I daily see the difference in perspective my degree has given me - I'm thinking a different way to most of my colleagues who just 'sort of ended up' in IT.
Just to take the devil's advocate position here: you essentially are implying that you learned nothing in school and could have had the same successes without taking the courses you took?
I picked up an MBA in my spare time so I'd have it for people that want to see it. I learned more in my first 6 months in the workforce than I did in the classroom getting undergrad and master's degrees. It's not that you learn nothing, but that if you keep your eyes open you can get paid to learn more in 6 months than paying for years of college.
However, all else being equal, I would be more inclined to trust someone with a Harvard degree than a degree from "Concordia Online College"...
But the real question is, would you trust the Harvard Man, or your grandfather?
Learn to love Alaska
Education doesn't show an ability to learn. how do i know this? because I know people with degrees who won't learn a damn thing that college didn't teach them. I also know people without degrees that not only learn something new every day, but try to build on that.
All a degree shows is that you sat through boring lectures and accepted the knowledge passed in them. All it shows is that you can sit in a 9am management meeting without falling asleep.
A degree does give you specialized knowledge that on the job training can't give you. and there are many jobs that require such knowledge but it doesn't show anything other than you have that knowledge.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Load of crap ?!?! There is no way you have a load of degrees. The people the excel at highly technical fields without having gotten degrees are extreme exceptions.
This is a logical as saying, why should I study, Einstein couldn't even speak until he was 12. Buddy you're no Einstein. if you can't score a job after getting a bunch of degrees you occupy the other end of the spectrum. One with all that paper work and you are still a dunce.
You really need to get out more.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
This happened at three or four companies when I went to a careers fair that wasn't organised by my university:
[Bored IT company rep]: "Yeah, we use Java and you get free coffee, etc, blah, bored blah. Do you study IT or computer science?"
[Me]: "Computer science, at Imperial College [London]"
[IT rep]: "Ooh, OK, here, take my card. Email me your CV, you don't need to do the online application thing"
Another example: when Google came to the CS department to do a presentation they said noone needed to do a phone interview, as they were sure we'd all pass. (Other companies did this too, but they were either small or I don't remember the names).
Look carefully and you'll see the guy was using a badanalogy to explain the recent trend in automobile recalls. He posted in the wrong topic.
Education doesn't show an ability to learn
When will people stop asserting blanket statements as though they were fact - and then backing up their 'facts' with anecdotal evidence??
Simply because you know some people with a degree and no aptitude to learn this does not imply that having a degree is not in some way a useful gauge to someone's aptitude to learn. If I stated that I knew some graduates who were good at learning new things and some non-graduates who were bad learners would you take this as evidence enough to change your view? No, I didn't think so . . .
That's interesting. My take on that is Google does not look for any inter-personal skills when hiring. Looking at the GOOG employees walking to and from work every day near where I work it certainly would seem that way too... (let's just say I am sure in a pure dev environment they are brilliant at what they do, however if they worked with me I wouldn't dream of putting them within a mile of a customer even as a technical contact).
Alma Mater
Alma matter would be the name of some exotic particle, or part of the brain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_mater
I share your evaluation of the worth of your degrees.
You better obey him, or else
He said he had degrees from there, he didn't say he attended. Shoot, I have a laser printer too.
In my current job:
A) I wouldn't have been considered for hiring at all without my degrees, and
B) much of what I learned in university is directly applicable to my job.
Granted, I now work at a university in a scientific field, but even after I had finished my degrees and worked elsewhere the knowledge and skills I learned were genuinely applicable. Could I have gained the experience I needed for those jobs without a degree? Maybe. But my degree was worth it precisely because there was more to it than the piece of paper. I learned. I also gained work experience through part-time/summer work during my degree, something I consider at least as valuable.
You are quite right that possession of a university degree is no guarantee of competence and it is sometimes overrated.. Likewise possession of a diploma mill degree is no guarantee of incompetence. However, if someone offers a diploma mill degree as a demonstration of their competence, while not telling anyone how little effort was actually involved in obtaining it, then it's a different issue. I have no illusions about the actual value of my degrees either, but I do know that anyone who represents their diploma mill degree as if it were a real degree is a lying charlatan. I wouldn't hire them for any job because they aren't to be trusted. If it's their skill and experience that qualify them and they don't have a real degree then they should demonstrate that skill and experience in their application some other way, not try to fool someone into thinking they also have a degree. And to testify in court with a diploma mill degree offered as expert qualification? Wow, that takes guts. Or they are profoundly stupid.
So, I agree with your point, but not with the use of diploma mills. Well, except as a joke.
Dr. Dre can suck my dick,
that bitch got no PhD,
I lost count of mine,
I got stupid whack degrees.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
And who would that be?
College degrees are way overrated. This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
More specifically, they're supposed to mean something but they don't, not always. Same goes for technical certification. An employer wants to look at these things and know someone with them meets certain standards. Can you be taught? Do you have drive? Are you unlikely to flake out? And it's really tough to measure any of that. And as others have pointed out, it's possible to go through the process, get the degree, and know less than before you came in. But it's the hoops you jump through.
I'm doing some certs now and there's a freshly-minted computer engineering BA in there. He got good marks in uni but came out and can't get a job. Now he's doing certs to make sure he can get into the game. He'll be one of the good ones. But there's other people going through it that just don't have the right mindset for computer work. They might be able to pass the cert if they drill the testkings but they're not really going to be able to apply it in the real world, hence the paper MCSE.
I think what's really telling, though, is how important bullshit is. If you can put on the right attitude, you can bluff your way through a job without having the technical skills. I'm amazed when I read about doctor imposters managing to work for months in the field. I'm not talking someone who made it most of the way through med school and dropped out, I don't mean a guy who graduated but didn't manage to get board certification, I mean someone with very little exposure to medicine who can still bluff and bullshit and get away with it. This guy with the internet degree, shouldn't his lack of qualifications been apparent by how he did his job?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
just take the extra t and change it to an r and put it at the end of the word "you" in my post while you're at it.
rewriting history since 2109
I spent a lot of time to get my advanced degrees, but I have no illusions about their actual value. My real value comes from my work experience and successes in my field.
Just to take the devil's advocate position here: you essentially are implying that you learned nothing in school and could have had the same successes without taking the courses you took?
He said the piece of paper was worthless, not that the schooling was worthless. Of course, a lot of schooling IS worthless... but that's a separate conversation.
They didn't have very high English requirements at your school, I take it?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Everyone knows the only Bachelor of Bullshit worth it's salt comes from Cal Tech. He picked the wrong Uni.
I couldn't agree more, but even the math majors know to spell it Caltech.
Yes and no.
If the CEO or HR director thinks that everyone at the place MUST have a BS degree then you cant get past that gatekeeper even if you have 30 years of experience in the field and may even designed most of the tools used in that field.
A degree is great for personal growth and enlightenment. Getting a PHD in History does not make you employable (actually most of the time it makes you LESS employable. Overqualified) But it did give you access to the subject you loved and several years of studying that subject.
On a side note: we do have a huge number of people going back to college, problem is we also have a huge number of dropouts right now as well. Most people cant cut it, My wife has noticed that a large number of these people really cant handle even the basic classes and end up dropping. A class of 35 will drop to 15 within 10 days.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
He said the piece of paper was worthless, not that the schooling was worthless.
Er, the piece of paper represents the schooling. That's implicit. Which is why he followed up with "My real value comes from my work experience".
They didn't have very high English requirements at your school, I take it?
This made me laugh considering the above is a case of logic, not language. I hope you feel better after venting your anger in a passive aggressive manner with your personal attack. I don't care either way, you can say whatever you want about me: you don't know me, or my school. But passive aggressive behavior is usually a sign of some other underlying issues - depression, personality disorders, etc. Just a heads-up, from a concerned physician.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I used to know a guy with four: one first degree, a masters and two PhDs. Certainly having three degree from three different places is fairly common - even here in the UK where people don't move around quite as much as they do in the US. Come to think of it, my wife is finishing her fourth academic qualification (a BA, LLB, PgDip and currently on a LLM) - and that is in additional to professional qualifications.
I actually use 80% of my EE degree. It puts me way above the other programmers because I actually understand how the computer works and the other hardware works.
It's all how relative your career path and degree part are, Programming and electronics are hand in hand. Now my Chemistry degree, that's not so useful... Unless I become a programmer at a chemical plant.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
But the real question is, would you trust the Harvard Man, or your grandfather?
True. My grandfather of course. But only because of his track record. If you offer me a Harvard man or some random guy off the street, I'd have to opt for the Harvard guy. I'm willing to bet that the proportion of absolute ineptitude is lower (although not exactly zero) among the better educated than the general population, especially for a specific task. Although I am open to the idea that there are some fields that could have a tendency to attract more idiots than others.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"Are those colleges doing a bulk deal if you buy all of them at once?"
I must have missed out on the "park hopper" season pass deal. Kinda like they do at Disney, pay one price, you can visit Epcot (MIT), the Magic Kingdom (Harvard), the Animal Kingdom (Oxford)!
I daily see the difference in perspective my degree has given me - I'm thinking a different way to most of my colleagues who just 'sort of ended up' in IT.
OK so your testimony below is that something broadens your horizons, and your statement above is that its degrees that do it. My experience on the job is the primary way to broaden my horizons has been certifications over time, not a one time degree.
For example, I was doing a lot of BGP and OSPF work. When I went for my CCNP in the early 00s, I didn't really even study for the routing/BGP tests because I didn't have to (other than studying ISIS and CLNP, does anyone actually use that in production?), but I learned a heck of a lot from studying for the switching test because I'd never professionally done much layer 2 stuff.
Another example, I had a coworker going for one of cisco's VOIP certs that required a MCSE. He was a pretty much linux/unix dude, and the workplace was strictly linux/solaris. He certainly broadened his horizons by doing the MCSE thing.
Reread your story below and ask yourself if there's anything in there that isn't better covered by certs and continuing education, rather than a degree.
But there's a lot of stuff that's been indirectly relevant - communication theory kicks in when you start talking about protocols. Database design lets you slap people upside the head for using a spreadsheet for server configurations. Assembly and embedded processor programming gives you a handle on performance analysis for 'black box' devices.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Most dont. They want degree first and you almost never get to where you can show references if you dont get past the gatekeeper. SO my recommendation to many is to obfuscate. Have an ASS degree but 20 years experience? Put down BS degree if it's required, you can explain in the interview if asked that you put down what you have plus experience to get past the HR filters. Any competent interviewer will fully understand that. you need to get your references in their hands and they dont even want them until interviewing. I have a set of references that pretty much guarantees a hire, It's because I carefully cultivated those relationships and keep in contact regularly. I'll be going to 4 superbowl parties this weekend, spending half an hour at each to make an appearance and refresh that relationship. I know a lot of executives at different places because of my work and working with them... you HAVE to cultivate that kind of relationship because when you deliver a page of professional references full of president, vice president, and other executive names you get more attention.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
A recent exchange I had:
Me: "I wonder whether $PROMINENT_INTERNET_SITE would be interested in working with us. This $THING we're creating is something they'd be interested in."
Partner: "Let me see whether I know anyone who works at $PROMINENT_INTERNET_SITE."
Me: "What about the front fucking door? We can just go through normal channels."
A business degree is like a lobotomy.
This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
I think you could use multiple degrees in remedial reading comprehension. He didn't say multiple from each place; he said that he had multiple degrees and that they came from those three schools. Most likely one from each.
No, "multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford" implies that the poster has at least 4 total degrees from those 3 schools.
Someone with a single degree from each school should have written "with degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford". Although this phrasing doesn't exclude the possibility that more than 3 total degrees from those 3 schools were granted to the person, it's more likely that someone with 4 or more would make specific mention of that in some way.
"When will people stop asserting blanket statements as though they were fact - and then backing up their 'facts' with anecdotal evidence??"
When I can legally perform experiments with a collection of hapless strangers in my test and control groups without silly requirements like an "ethics review board". ;)
-os
I have a degree in Electronics Engineering ... just recently I managed to learn ski from total newbie to intermediate/advanced level in 1 week
You are confusing #2 as being the result of #1, when in reality both are the result of already being intelligent.
The diploma itself was only usefull in getting me my first job: from then onwards my CV and the knowledge I display in interviews have been the things that matter.
Blatantly false. Trust me, when you have a stack of resumes, the first thing you do is toss out the simple demographic ones like no degree. Because of HR, there is literally no way Linus could possible be hired as a Linux sysadmin or Linux developer at 99% of companies in the US, unless he has a degree (which luckily for him, he does). Doesn't matter what you write in the experience section, if they toss the resume out because of the education section first. I know I went from unemployable to easy street when I finally got my degree...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Nobody suggested everyone does. But this is Harvard we're talking about. The commonly held view (stereotype) is that Harvard is more about who you know than what you know.
To HR it is all about Risk Management. They do no not really know you or your skills. Given the choice between someone who claims to know their stuff and someone who claims to know their stuff and has a degree the choice is clear.
Sometimes the guy with no degree is smarter, more driven, and has tons of passion for what they do. Some people with degrees just took the class and passed with no real usable knowledge in the end - I have see two short lived co-works fall into this category.
But for HR department the individual education and limited experiences trumped some extremely energetic candidates. It was clear in one case where the one so called ‘expert’ in computers did not know how to turn a computer on – honesty his response was in the lab the computers where always on so they never need to turn it on themselves. But it went down hill from there. The second case was another expert with a great reference but after taking one week to write a simple query they came back with: “SELECT 'this is it' FROM DUAL; ”. Really that is it they had hard coded every column and every result and selected only from DUAL.
HR has no really clue to what the jobs really need or how really qualified the individual will be at the actual job. All HR can do is reduce the risk of picking the wrong candidate. A piece of paper will help impress the HR folks but after that it is up to your real skills.
When will people stop asserting blanket statements as though they were fact - and then backing up their 'facts' with anecdotal evidence??
People will never stop asserting blanket statements. That's a fact. I know several people who do this frequently and no matter how much I tell them the plural of anecdote is not "facts" they persist.
I'm in the same boat, but, I tend to disagree: What you learn in academia, @ least in Computer Science, actually does help prepare you for the "real working world". What you learn there, in the basics/fundamentals, do come into play in the workforce (because without the basics, you can't really do the "advanced stuff" well, & fast(er) too for deadlines).
Now, take an MBA: What they tend to learn, for MIDDLE MGT. ROLES? Nearly useless... or, does calculating the par value of a stock qualify as something somebody would use @ middle mgt. levels (foreman type positions, where most DO end up after schooling usually, because almost nobody ends up "straight @ the top" out of academia (unless they are "connected")).
I feel differently about degrees than you do though. I know there is a LARGE DIFFERENCE between say, an MCSE & a full-blown CSC or even CIS degree. There is a reason the latter 2 take longer to earn than certs do - you learn far MORE in them, overall, than you do earning say an A+ or MCSE is why.
E.G.-> My first degree prepped me for the "business end of things" (via a B.S. in Business Administration + CIS concentration/minor) & to a decent extent, the computing end of things as well. Later on, even moreso, via an A.A.S. in Comp. Sci., which then further took care of the computing end of things later on, & mainly to be more current as well as understand the "theory" behind things as well. Between the 2 of them, I was immediately able to function in a Fortune 100-500 company called GOULDS PUMPS for 1 yr. as a contract programmer (3 time contract renewal too, & as a "rookie" right out of academia) - ending up with a great reference from them too.
However, in my major then (CSC)? We had 120 of us @ the start, & only 10 or so @ the end... it's a hard major is why, many people drop it. Only myself & a Russian fellow (worth 24 million now no less this gent) obtained work, @ the recommendation of our dept. chair @ said college for CSC.
HOWEVER: I do have to admit though - you do have a point on "the connected people": I have found that because it's their belief that "I don't have to know how to do that, I will just use my allotted budget in payroll to hire somebody that does" is horrific: First of all, it's spending monies that really should NOT have to be spent in payroll outlays because of their blantant incompetence (nobody should be leading ANYBODY if they have not done the job themselves, hands-on, in the trenches OR have been educated in said area @ least).
(They believe this, & rather erroneoudly imo, because the "somebody they hire" could mislead them or make a mistake & they'd be none the more wary for it, because they have NOT done the job @ hand themselves, making them bad project time estimators, and being unable to spot possible flaws in said designs also).
That's when actually KNOWING what's going on, especially on the part of mgt. DOES MATTER... in that they are yet another "competent set of eyes" examining the work done & if it actually meets the requirements of the task @ hand.
In my time in Computer Sciences related work? I have had only 2-3 bosses that truly understood "What is what here", & the other 6 or so? Man... bad estimates, bad planning, no understanding of Comp. Sci. whatsoever almost... was sad, because it cost monies... & who "gets the axe"? Not said mgt. figure... actual production workers do, nearly every time.
APK
P.S.=> However, nice part here (if there is such a thing) is that those incompetent MBA fakes don't tend to last long afterwards either... when their next projects fail or turn into "money pits"? They get the axe too, finally being revealed as what they are: "Fake it till you make it" types.
(Still & unfortuntely, they still end up "getting theirs" (money in salaried pay), & others take the fall for them, while they walk out w/ severances galore etc. et al)
I know that a big part of what's going wrong in this nation (USA) is the result of incomp
Technically if he got his undergrad at MIT, masters at Harvard, and pulled a minor in English at Oxford he would have multiple degrees from all three of those.
Degrees in medicine or civil engineering are a little more delicate than degrees in CS, mathematics or theoretical physics. I don't want to be operated on by someone who received a mail-order degree. However, if he can fix my server's BIOS POST error and get it running again, I probably wont care. I believe the theory thought in university is very important and provides an employers a level of confidence but not a guarantee of on-the-job performance.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
I don't have a degree, but I have observed something throughout interviews in my time. Interviewers with degrees look for a degree. They prefer that you have a degree from the same place they do. Many interviewers that don't have degrees prefer that you have a good job history and/or disregard the fact that you have a degree.
You are right, the value of the degree is just an illusion. 4 years of experience in a field seriously outweighs 4 years of job experience.
Most people that I've known with degrees were unable to find employment in the career field that the degree applied to. For example, an English major has a job in accounting. A psych major was a customer service manager. I've found that the subject of the degree doesn't mean that the person knows anything about it. I asked someone for some detailed help in what should have been covered. I was told "Oh, my professor was getting ready to retire, so we didn't learn anything and passed anyways."
When I am hiring someone (which I've done quite a bit over the years), I've noticed that the degree usually means very little until they have the job experience. In my field (systems administration), the degree is worthless until you have the equivalent number of years actually working the field. For example, I hired a few folks who had just received their degrees in computer science, but didn't have any real world application beyond what they learned in school. They didn't last very long, because they simply didn't retain the subject matter. They're being taught enough to pass the tests and/or certifications, but can't make their way through in the real world. It's a shame they wasted all that money just to get a piece of paper to decorate their cube with.
I wouldn't discount anyone with a degree, but if I'm presented with someone who has 4 years of job experience, versus someone with a 4 year degree AND 4 years of job experience, they'd be equal until we carefully reviewed their practical experience. I haven't had a candidate for a position with me that has been able to show any sort of better ability with their degree.
It seems that advanced education is a babysitter for 19 to 22 year old kids. Their parents are more than happy to let them go off to school, because they'll be out of the house. Even at that, it isn't terribly successful, unless your goal was to teach them how to drink, and do other things that the parents would not approve of.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I always said my dog could run a better network than EDS. Talk about prophetic.
One of the cardinal rules in IT is you never give EDS a working application.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
And it was at Oxford that he met his wife, Morgan Fairchild. (Just kidding, B.A.G. I can tell you're an educated egg.)
Either they're not in the US or they're taking huge loans, which, on top of not having a "paying" job is a very bad idea.
Or, you can get an advanced degree in English like me and guarantee that you won't get a job.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I won't agree with lying in your resume or job application. If you lied about that, what else are you going to lie about? Since I've interviewed quite a bit, I'll ask real world questions that the candidate should know if they have experience in that area. A candidate may say "Oh, I know Unix inside and out", so I'll ask something like, "How do you configure an interface from the command line" or "How do you get onto a machine where the root password has been lost". The questions will be more specific to the variant and version, but you get the idea.
As an interviewee, I've had it go both ways. An interviewer who isn't familiar with the field I'm applying for will ask some general questions and I'll throw the answers right to them. If the interviewer is familiar with the field, I'll answer a few field specific questions and then we'll end up in a good conversation where they'll see that I know my field. A few times, they've had a prepared list of questions, we've blown through a half dozen, and then they'll say "I really don't even need to bother ask you any more of these, it's already clear you know the subject material." It's been more annoying when the interviewer has the list, but doesn't know the topic, and they can't accept my answer because it isn't what they have listed. Sometimes I'll have to give 2 or 3 different ways to solve the problem, to end up with their precise answer.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I learned more in my first 6 months in the workforce than I did in the classroom getting undergrad and master's degrees. It's not that you learn nothing, but that if you keep your eyes open you can get paid to learn more in 6 months than paying for years of college.
This depends on the assumption that you can freely choose between college and a paying job in your field of interest, and I think that is a false assumption. There's no question that college and career teach very different skills. Depending on your field you may never "use" any of the factual information you learn in college, or you may use the fundamental principles and skills every day. Whichever, the degree is a way to distinguish yourself from the other 100 applicants to an entry level position. It doesn't say you're qualified to dive right in an design the combustion chamber for a scramjet. It doesn't say you're qualified to manage a team of phone drones. It says you're able to stick with a project for 4 years with enough focus to show up most days and turn in assignments that someone can make sense of. It's less a testament to ability than a denial of incompetence. It gets you into the interview chair.
Everyone goes to MIT to socialize. It's nothing but a party school!
I find it amusing that I got served up an ad for Phoenix University on this page.
Internet college FTL.
And that is what leads to some of the Diploma mills is HR putting down needs it even some times way out side of the field the job is it in. Come on a BA basket weaving with maybe 1 year IT work over ranks some with 2-3 years of real IT work for a IT job?
also other stuff like 5 years working with windows 7 for a job today?
5 years with vista back when vista was a big flop?
3 years with 2008?
You have BS just to get past HR some times.
and staffing firms BS all the time.
That all depends on who's hiring.
At one place I was at, I was very upset that the first round of pruning was to take all the women out. Their belief was that a woman could never be a sysadmin. I've known many women who could do my job very well, so that was a completely unfair (and illegal) thing to do.
The resumes were then given to me. I pruned out all the candidates who didn't have any skills that we required. Why would you apply for a Linux sysadmin job, if you've only ever worked as helpdesk support for a Windows environment? We required some sort of scripting ability, where many candidates didn't even known what a shell script was.
From there, it was thinning out the crowd to the specifically higher candidates with experience in the field.
Even if you considered a degree as an added bonus, by the time they made it to an interview, it was usually clear that the degree wasn't a bonus. Not that I haven't had degree holders working for me, but that isn't what got them the job. It was the fact that they had tinkered with computers since before they went to school, and continued learning on their own AND had real world experience. I've even accepted candidates with no real world corporate experience, because they had worked with various OS's at home. That's not "I set up a Linux machine once", but "I've used all these OS's and here's how I found they compare", and they were able to answer real world questions that you wouldn't just absorb the material from reading a trade magazine once in a while.
My favorite method of interviewing, when I've been able to, was to give a candidate a machine and say "fix this", with only some basic instruction. I won't ask them to do all the work, but I can frequently see in 5 minutes that they have a clue of what they're doing. That is only if time allows, and I happen to have something handy for them to work on. If not, the further testing comes in their probation period (the first 90 days). Usually by the end of the first few days, I'll already know if they have the ability to do what they say, without hosing any of my servers.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
So, you're trying to do that whole "electroshock stimulus as encouragement to work" test, aren't you? No, a cattle prod doesn't make for happy employees, but at least they will learn to stop complaining so much. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
"Teaching a group of third graders" ... yeah pretty much from what I've seen.
Agree with you on the other ones though
english parsing fail. english does not have a (mandatory,
anyway) distributive law of noun phrases over prepositional phrases.
Yes, a degree is ultimately a bit of paper.
But, a human is ultimately a bit of meat that hasn't spoiled yet. So, that little bit of paper is what tells me that the bit of meat sitting in front of me will do some good work before it spoils.
Or, something like that.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Now stop eating the cat's poop and show me how to lick myself.
Sometimes HR people can try to overstep the bounds of reason.
For example, a friend of mine interviewed at a place where HR and the technical team must evaluate how good a fit a candidate is for a job.
In his meeting with the team he would actually work with, things went well, they were impressed by his knowledge, and they felt as he smoothly fit in.
Meanwhile, the HR person blocked hiring him because his degree was from a less prestigious college (his GPA was high though) and that he would be a poor fit for the team because he was too cynical.
Fortunately, the technical team escalated the 'don't hire' decision and got him through, but I find it amazing that an HR person would demand escalation presuming to know more about a person's relative personal fit for a team and technical capability than the technical team he would work with.
And I have to say, references are a total waste of time short of being able to genuinely put down names like Linus Torvalds, Bill Gates, etc. Anyone can dig up pals to be good references. Unless those references are already known to be incredible first-hand, verifying a reference's usefulness is no easier than evaluating the candidate's usefulness directly.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I know people with exactly the same degree I have who, frankly, I would never let near my children.
Yep, I know those kind, too; they work in state university health centres...
I can't tell you how they are controlling, and I have described the estimate as "rough", but my own experience of my own extended family, which has a number of Oxbridge and Russell group graduates as well as US, German and Italian universities, suggests that getting into Oxbridge is partly accidental and, other things being equal, depends on your school and your social circle. My brother is far more intelligent than I am, but associating with a group of kids who clowned about at school caused the school not to put him forward for Cambridge, whereas I was more conformist and was being guided in that direction from the age of 13. I think I am unprejudiced in saying that Oxbridge does not in fact take the top tier of UK students because, in fact, it is too small and the selection process can never be sufficiently accurate. I believe that in practice their recruitment system gets them students reliably from the top 5% of the IQ range, i.e. +2sd, and some obvious standouts, but that overall the majority of students from that group go to the Russell group.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
If he had multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford, that doesn't mean multiple degrees from each institution. You don't think all three institutions would grant him a single MIT-Harvard-Oxford diploma, do you? He never claimed to have multiple degrees from each institution, you're twisting his words to fit your presumption he's a charlatan.
But to the point of his message: he's talking about the dichotomy of learning and certification. With learning, the setting, the means and effort are all that's required; but with certification, there's no guarantee that much effort was expended. Plenty of people play the University game and get out with the bare minimum amount of work a school requires. Schools don't demand enough work to even ensure competency within many of the fields who grant degrees. Employers and life don't want minimum competency, they want excellence.
Those that work hard and care about their education will come out with a lot of knowledge by the time they obtain their degree. Those that don't work hard, cram prior to an exam, party at every opportunity, join in homework circles where they can ride the coat tails of others, and participate in course shopping for the easiest routes to their degree will invariably come out with a four year semi-vacation and not too much knowledge by the time they get their degree. The degree doesn't say certify that someone has a lot of knowledge, it certifies that someone met the minimum attendance requirements. Only personal bias and desire to go to the better schools make us think it's somehow related to school prestige, in fact school prestige is more associated with the amount of money a school obtains to do research (and has nothing to do with the school's educational program).
Well, I know Murray's Institute of Tools don't do no package deal naw how!
I worked in state government. My office was the central data center for several state colleges. As part of the college system, our HR management was militant about checking the degree status of finalists. Anyone who made it to the final round of a search was asked to submit college transcripts, with the official seal of the college, mailed via hardcopy directly FROM the college to our HR department. About 5% of applicants were exposed as fakes.
The silly part was: The HR department had an exception process, whereby they could skip the degree requirement if the position could not be filled by an applicant with a degree. They frequently made use of the exception process because the salary structure was often not competitive with private industry. If you were hired at entry level and could bypass the degree requirement, you could move up the ladder without facing serious external competition. The IT department was well known for requiring specific skill sets, often tossing the degree requirement out the window to get qualified people on board.
Nearly all of the fake degree applicants were hired into similar jobs by OTHER employers whose verification of credentials was less vigorous. Look around you. In a room of 100 co-workers, 5 of them probably have fake degrees. Which 5? Probably not the people you would suspect. I can state with authority that the problem goes straight to the top. CEOs have been nabbed more than a few times with degree falsification. The higher the position, the easier it is to talk your way through an interview without hard-core knowledge of any particular subject. Get away with it once, and employers stop asking about degrees, since you obviously have experience that could never be achieved without one.
For purposes of the 5% statistics, the entire population consisted of finalists -- people who interviewed well enough to be offered the job. The actual percentage of fake degrees is probably much higher, but the people who fail to make the cut are really not an issue. We would not have hired them anyway.
If your HR department is not detecting at least 5% fake degrees, then these people are slipping through undetected. The problem has nothing to do with degree status. After all, there are plenty of CEOs non-grads: Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, and Steve Jobs for starters. The problem is lying.
There are honest, non-degree people in jobs that normally require a degree. These people don't say much about the subject; it's almost a secret society. Exceptions are made far more often than HR managers or recruiters want to admit.
Wait a second. A 3 Year program? CSE? That sounds alot like DeVry to me.
I agree somewhat. I think it depends largely on the College you attent. If its a big name place, then they are primarily concerned with keeping their big name and their big donations. Other schools are too stupid to know how the game is played. Those schools actually teach you useful information like the one I attended.
On another note, I am an EE but I write software. I studied software on my own because its my first love. I don't think an EE has any advantage over a software degree.
Software is not as simple as making the hardware go. To many EEs think this way and I spend lots of time fighting with them trying to make sure they understand what 'good' software is. Management too. If it goes to the lab and works, they want to ship it.
He said he had degrees from there, he didn't say he attended. Shoot, I have a laser printer too.
They might be real; did he say whose name was on those degrees?
An "engineer" in our QA group has a degree from Rochville University based on his "life experience". What a load.
I gotta wonder how many credential sets like his are floating around in the industry.
What is often written (and if not written, often iimplied) in job descriptions is that is says "Degree X or equivalent by experience". This certainly happens in IT. Not in places where a degree is a must, like a docter or a lawer.
That obviously does not make it OK to lie about it, but I can imagine that people might do so, because they are afraid not to get the job and as long as they have the experience, no one is the wiser.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
No such thing. As the phrase goes, Yale men, Princeton boys, and Harvard scholars.
There's a distinction between "useful" as in "I know the solution of this differential equation", and "useful" as in "this has shown me a different way of thinking about things". The second on is actually more likely to be of benefit over the long term.
In fact, this thought is hardly original to me: it was expressed to us many years ago by our crystallography lecturer.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
99% seems a bit high. I would be surprised if more than 20% of companies that are still in business today are stupid enough to put HR in charge of screening.
People should put their best foot forward on their resume. If education is all you have going for you, put it first. Once you have professional experience that matters, put that first. Most people don't read past the first page of a resume, so useful experience on the first page is more likely to get an interview than whatever education someone has listed at the end of their resume.
I've been responsible for hiring dozens of people over the years and education has never been all that useful as a metric. What school someone attended and whether or not they graduated doesn't seem to have any correlation with their ability to solve real world problems. Education only introduces people to subjects, it doesn't ensure comprehension. Which is more interesting - a programmer who has proven that he can complete assignments on time, or one who has demonstrated in the real world that he can take a vaguely defined problem and produce a working solution without 30 other people working on the exact same problem that he can go to for help?
Case in point: George W. Bush graduated from Yale. Doubt the BA in Arts helped more than the connections to become president.
Now my Chemistry degree, that's not so useful...
I use mine to understand ingredients on product labels on food and drug commercials, mostly. ;)
I have to be difficult here.
A degree from the Colorado School of Mines is not just a bit of paper. This is because they print the degrees on silver. No joke. So my degree is worth whatever a few grams of silver is, something like $40. I could easily trade it for a pizza, if the person that owns the shop is also a precious metal dealership.
UHm... well.. money is just worthless paper too. It has value because we say it does. The same is true with a degree. Contacts are important, experience is important, but intelligence is also important, and motivation is even more important. Graduating from a decent college takes stamina, discipline, and motivation. Usually it takes intelligence as well. You learn how to do a lot of things in a safe environment instead of getting fired for learning on the job. The academic learning is just icing on the cake.
Still, I work as a programmer alongside other programmers who haven't taken computer science, and the amount they don't know is staggering at times. Of course they could have learned it other ways, but most people simply won't learn something as abstract as "Big O Notation" if they don't have to.
Multiples from the same uni are actually not that hard to do, since there is a lot of overlap. Some degrees may differ from others by only a few real courses, so for an extra 9 credit hours, you could get another BS. Probably not worth the effort of going through the bookeeping just to have an extra sheepskin on the wall, though.
Still, by making all of those claims there's probably enough information there to actually figure out who that is, or who they're claiming to be, or even whether or not the claim is true. Just get the rolls for each of those institutions and filter out anyone not common to all three lists that is listed fewer than four times.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
OK. I have done certs and continuing education - I've been 'in the industry' for 10 years now. It's all been too narrow in scope - vendor certs in particular, are much more focussed on how their bit of kit works, and very few of them cover any broader than that. Even those that do widen the scope somewhat, still are quite narrow in scope - they might tell you about the general practises of SAN tech, but to date no one has covered communication theory, Nyquist theorum, hamming distance and channel bandwidth/entropy.
Similarly No employer has seen a need to educate me about databases, because I'm not a DBA - but knowing how they work, and the theory behind them is frequently very useful when I'm doing Unix sysadmin. And more, it means I understand what 'relational database' actually means (sound dumb, I know, but a lot of my colleagues don't really 'get' it). I understand/know how semiconductors are designed, and have done some PCB design myself.
There's a lot of stuff where that's the case - there's _some_ courses that are better than others, that I won't dispute. But still, all of them I've run into have been quite narrowly focussed, and don't confer many transferrable skills, for all they give me bits of paper to list on my CV.
Yes, but do you have 25 years experience programming in Java and a willingness to start in the mailroom?
I do not entirely agree.
1) I find that people who are self-taught, or who "learned on the job" usually have large holes in their knowledge and skill set that they are not aware off and thus often come up with suboptimal solutions.
2) I find that in the current job market, that employers will pick those with degrees over those without.
Not everything you have been taught needs to be useful in your current job, for it to still have an effect on how you approach new things you need to learn and problems you need to solve.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Blatantly false. Trust me, when you have a stack of resumes, the first thing you do is toss out the simple demographic ones like no degree.
Maybe you do (you do actually participate in hiring new coworkers, right?). I haven't noticed that having a degree has much (if any) predictive power (what seems more useful is looking if their experience is all copypasta of job descriptions or expands on every trivial detail) so I don't pay much attention to it, and since there are a few people with no degree HR is clearly not just dumping them all either.
Meanwhile, you're conflating being educated with having a degree. Some people are naturally self educating and will only be hindered by the college experience. Others have plenty of aptitude but find the structured learning of college to be very helpful or even essential. In the end, both end up well educated.
The other side of the coin is those who just blow the whole thing off or just go through the motions (memorize and forget) in college. Both of those end up without an education.
Bullshit. Anyone with a degree from any one of those institutions would smell you a mile away.
I don't have a degree.
I don't include the education section.
No one asks why I didn't.
I have no problem getting hired at large companies and government organizations in the US.
If you don't show them certain things they don't think about them, as we've established, HR isn't the brightest bunch. If you aren't smart enough to get by them, its probably in the companies best interests that you don't.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I agree with you, but you're not a typical PHB. Just as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, nobody ever got fired for hiring a college grad with a decent resume.
The goal of the hiring manager usually isn't to take the industry by storm with his new product - his goal is to not lose his job. If hiring that guy with a degree might mean getting a $10k bonus instead of a $15k bonus, but hiring the guy without a degree might result in his termination if the guy didn't work out, the choice will be easy.
The fact is that ANY new hire could turn out to be good or bad. If you were conservative and followed all the rules when you hired the guy, then your boss will say "well, they don't all turn out good." If you fought to hire some guy without a degree and he doesn't turn out, then your boss will say "see, you clearly don't have good managerial judgment."
And in a sufficiently-large organization, it is unlikely that a hiring manager would even be able to lobby for somebody without a degree. They could pitch it to their boss, and push hard, but when their boss pushes it to the next three up the chain of command they won't push nearly as hard, and it will get squashed.
For a minute there, I read that as "School of Mimes"...
College degrees are way overrated. I agree, but I'm also sure the contacts you made while attending MIT, Harvard, and Oxford have served you very well in advancing your career. I got my first job because two people that graduated before me had gone to work for a start up and recommended me; I followed one of them to my second job. I've also done consulting work with a couple other people I went to school with, and was given a job interview at HP based on one of my fraternity brother's recommendations. Yes, connections are more important than education (I really have not used anything I learned in college in the 28 years since graduation), but attending college is a great way to make those connections. On the down side, attending college does set you back hundreds of thousands of dollars in both in both college fees and lost wages, and it does take a very long time to make that up in increased wages.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I'll bet you use your Chemistry degree more than you think. A Physics degree taught me the valuable uses and differences between a theory and a hypothesis - which really helps reduce problem determination chaos. Knowing what's "known" and what remains "unknown" and how to fit several hypotheses through the known points so you can weed out the theories that don't work. The labs helped in risk assessment. (^_^)
The EE degree has been helpful to understand interfaces and systems debugging by successive bisection. The debugging one is easy: Cut your problem domain in half (or close) and see which end of the worm still wiggles. Then cut the part that doesn't work in half; rinse and repeat until you're done. Don't waste your time starting at the endpoint and guessing everything or worse, pointing fingers.
Interface politics/assessment is trickier: Don't always start with a hacked prototype and call that your interface; think ahead and hold to a good overall specification. Avoid temptation to bend the spec when half your project folks are short on analyst months and the other has some time to rework to fit the newest hack. It will complicate your support, increase spaghetti logic/workarounds, and hurt your next versions for years.
Given how many good folks I've worked with that have offbeat-for-IT degrees (and how many folks I know who did better after a career change), I think having a heterogeneous mix of degrees can help. That includes IT-degreed folks in the business workforce, where they can bring a better understanding of the benefits of technology deeper in the field.
As for Mathematics, I haven't done a Laplace transform in years, but I've had to code FFTs. Broader education usually helps - ka5vjl
Read the labels? Wait, you don't eat people do you?
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Blatantly false. Trust me, when you have a stack of resumes, the first thing you do is toss out the simple demographic ones like no degree. Because of HR, there is literally no way Linus could possible be hired as a Linux sysadmin or Linux developer at 99% of companies in the US, unless he has a degree (which luckily for him, he does). Doesn't matter what you write in the experience section, if they toss the resume out because of the education section first. I know I went from unemployable to easy street when I finally got my degree...
NOT blatantly false, at least not everywhere. I work in the IT field, specifically software development and engineering, and 16 years ago I landed my current job with a large corporation -- formerly Fortune 500 before being acquired as a private holding of a corporation with the initials B.H. (run by W.B.) -- with some college but no completed degree, based on a skill-set that I was able to demonstrate. Virtually all of my knowledge was self-taught, and I had already been published twice in programming journals before graduating high school (this 25+ years ago, before the personal computer boom). At the risk of sounding arrogant, when I was in college I knew more practical programming than most of my professors. Boredom with the curriculum, youthful restlessness, and finances drove me from university to the military (in a completely non-IT related field). I kept my skills up as a hobby though, and upon returning to the civilian world managed to land a job with someone whom I had interned with while at college, where he had designed mainframe emulator cards and I had written the firmware assembler code, and now he ran his own business. So the previous relationship did help me there. We contracted engineering work for much of the industry where I now work, and from there I was able to demonstrate my skills to our clients, one of which is my current employer. Today I manage a team of developers in a large corporation, make a very nice salary+bonus+benefits, and have interviewed, worked with, (and in one case, hired & fired) people with advanced degrees that I honestly wondered how they found their way home from work, let alone graduated college and survived up until then in a software development field.
So yes, a CS/MIS degree is one of those door-openers when you have no experience and no personal contacts. If nothing else it proves you can commit to, follow through, and complete a fairly rigid course of study which does demonstrate some degree of maturity and responsibility, I suppose. But to say someone of Linus Torvald's ability couldn't find work without a degree in "99%" of companies in the field is just hyperbolic and untrue. I work closely with our HR department in writing job requirements, and seldom is a degree a requirement -- we typically word our job descriptions as requiring "a BS degree or equivalent experience." This has also been the case with most IT job descriptions I've seen posted to the major job sites. So getting that first job might be a lot tougher sans degree, but once employed you have a much better chance moving forward from there if your experience and performance are up to par and verifiable (and it certainly helps to have personal contacts too).
One conditional point I'll concede in favor of a degree would be for economic conditions like we currently face, where jobs are more scarce and candidates are plenty. Considering the sheer volume and SNR of candidate applications, the degree may well give you a competitive advantage over non-degree holders and thus save your resume from being shuffled to the bottom of the pile (or the bin). But this isn't typically the case, when the job market returns to a quasi-normal state.
Untrue, EDS is a USA corporation. The founder, Ross Perot, ran for U.S. President in 1992.
The contract was written in the UK, and, I assume, is under British law.
The US Virgin Islands are a full territory, under USA federal laws. Only Puerto Rico has its own government, which can be exempt from some US federal laws.
Universities and Colleges are regulated and accredited at the US State level. Of course, the US Virgin Islands are not in any state.
I'm not sure why the parent was marked "insightful".
The crux of the parent post is: "smart" people lack confidence, therefore confident people are not smart.
Because that's insightful.
Most people don't realize that (to quote a bad cliché) the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. So a person who's confident that they know all there is to know on a subject is quite likely less knowledgeable than the person who doesn't make that overreaching claim.
Amanda Plummer?
It might be illegal to use generalized IQ tests that are not job specific, but it is entirely legal and in fact quite common to issue employment tests on specific job knowledge, particularly in technical fields. We do it all the time, as do several of the recruitment firms we've used. You do have to be meticulous in how you present the questions and score the answers, and our legal dept. makes sure we stay within the rules.
Of course our experience is that the results still have to be cautiously measured and taken in context with the interview and everything else, because some very capable people test very poorly, while some test well but fail miserably at applying that knowledge in a practical scenario. Which is why I always give more credibility to verifiable, real world experience than I do to academic performance.
Case in point: some time ago I was involved in evaluating and hiring candidates for Java development positions. One particular candidate impressed us solely based on the fact he was co-author of a very prominent Java book from a very prominent publisher (all names withheld to protect the guilty), that I happened to have on my bookshelf (and still do). We were pretty much blinded to anything else on his resume (which as I recall was pretty "impressive" as well), and basically hired him on the spot based on that qualification alone. Big mistake. While he could quote chapter and verse, and thus would likely ace any written test, when we put him on a rather large Java project that we hoped would benefit from his experience, he was totally lost. He was separated from the company within a year, but only after taking the project down a couple of dead-end roads and soliciting several of us to contribute to his next book.
The worthlessness is even worse since ![anything worth knowing is] skills needed for a particular job are learned on the job and not in the classroom.
FTFY
Strikeout tag, where art thou?
As far as "useless" goes, okay, I probably use at most about 5% of what I learned at university.
By 5% of course, you mean a very little amount, since this is hardly quantifiable. Of course, these small percentages in many cases are such that their lack can make it extremely difficult to get the remaining 95% of the knowledge. As you said yourself, a university education can give you a good foundation (the operative word being 'can'). I took just one sequence of programming courses (C++) in college and that was enough to be comfortable with any language I needed to know thereafter for working in physics.
Wasting your time in actual school taking actual classes is a net loser compared to getting a cheap diploma from a diploma mill and getting a paying job today.
That's like saying that the existence of counterfeit money proves the uselessness of money.
:P).
Now, there's an analogy for you (you decide if it's good or bad
I have 25 years of experience fapping... does that count?
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
You sound like an Eloi. I, as a Morlock will find you quite tasty.
I'll bet you don't ski as well as you think you do.
Cheap storage VM.
As someone with no degree, who makes a shitload of money as a software developer, I can safely state that your 99% figure is pulled straight from your degreed ass. I'm even an independent contractor and I don't seem to have a problem getting gigs. I don't work with many other non-degreed developers (which are pretty rare) but I do work with people with all sorts of degrees that have little or nothing to do with Comp. Sci. Most people I have worked with in this business don't even look at the degree information unless they are hiring someone straight out of school because they realize it's worthless to determine worthiness. Degrees are used as a barrier to entry and nothing more. If you can find a way around the barrier, you're golden.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
He said the piece of paper was worthless, not that the schooling was worthless.
Er, the piece of paper represents the schooling. That's implicit.
No, that's false. The piece of paper represents the testing.
I hope you feel better after venting your anger in a passive aggressive manner with your personal attack.
Yes, I do.
passive aggressive behavior is usually a sign of some other underlying issues
And here I thought it was active aggressive behavior. I'll try harder next time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually you need learn some reading comprehension. And you need to be careful about calling people much smarter than you "idiot", because that only makes you look like an idiot.
So here is a quick lesson in advanced reading comprehension. It will probably be way over your head, but hey lets give it a try.
Human language is usually structured as to convey information efficiently. Thus, proper use of language usually avoids providing redundant information. Thus, if a properly formed sentence has multiple meanings and one of them would result in it having redundant information, and one would result in it not having redundant information, then the meaning without redundant information is usually correct. If the OP meant that he had a single degree from MIT, Harvard and Oxford each, then the word "multiple" would be completely redundant. Therefore that interpretation is incorrect. The correct interpretation is that he had multiple degrees from each school.
Of course he could have worded the sentence incorrectly, but he would not have done that if he had any degree from Oxford. They are very pedantic about their English there.
By 5% I mean that's an estimate. I know there are entire courses that I don't use, and those that have components I do use, the actual used components are few and far between. For example, I have never needed to know anything abut networks, never needed to perform a fourier transform for image processing, never used anything except basic rendering from computer graphics. If I could have predicted exactly what would have been directly useful I believe I could have learned it all in 1/20 of the time.
Well, a job is ultimately just a lot of little papers good for furniture and hamburgers. If it's all a bit of paper, then what makes one better than the other?
Learning to think and to understand is what really matters in life, and university is the best place to do that.
The value of the college degree isn't so much the subject matter mastered, but as a signal that the holder has the aptitude and perseverance necessary to succeed in the job.
Exactly! Going to college or university isn't about the details you learn, but rather about learning how to learn so you can continually educate yourself (and hopefully others) while on your career path. The technical aspects of what I learned in university are now extremely dated and useless, but the theory and techniques I learned are still valuable.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
That really was a bad analogy *cough* lie.
Permitting diploma mills prove the worthlessness of degree.
TFTFY.
Some nations actually enforce standards on educational institutions to prevent these kind of scams from occurring. A diploma or degree shows that you had some level of competence in attaining it and went through the arduous motions of attaining it when those minimum standards are actually enforced. This is why an MCITP certification is not a nationally recognised competency.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
HR is a problem, I got my first IT job by applying via an ad (I.E. through HR). My next two jobs I got because of people I'd met in my first job, the conversation went something like "Our current IT person is an idiot, do you want a job".
(Un)fortunately, you'll get a better job with who you know as opposed to what you know.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Unfortunately that is true, connections do trump qualifications and ever experience. But this does not make those things worthless. A connection will get your foot in the door and a recommendation, your knowledge and experience will sell you. A degree will get you your first job if you sell yourself a little, a degree does not make getting a job automatic but it does help.
From your first job you can start making connections. My first IT job I managed to get by having a piece of paper that said I was qualified, I worked and proved I was qualified, now my subsequent two IT jobs have been through people I knew from my first job. The conversations went along the lines of "Our IT guy is an idiot, are you looking for a job". If you prove to people you are competent and make a good impression on your co-workers then you will find job offers come to you, most companies give a head-hunting bonus for new positions, it's cheaper then engaging a recruiter.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
It's always been worthless because the assclown with family connections will get the job over any random summa cum laude.
Ok, you've made your case, and I agree with the sentiment. Ass-clowns with family connections don't need degrees. What about the rest of us, ass-clowns with no family connections? Having a good transcript/degree can sometimes be a good differentiator.
Or does it? Since experience and personal contacts mean much more than degrees, the earlier you can get a job, the better.
Yes, the earlier you can get the right kind of job, the better it will be for you. That being said, this assumes that you will be able to get the right kind of job at the right place initially. Few people are that lucky, or have the social maturity and good sense, to make those kinds of good decisions right from the beginning (personally, I know I wasn't that smart to begin with, and I certainly didn't have the family connections. Knowing myself, I would have probably landed at a dead-end workplace/job. Today, I still do not have a College degree, I actually dropped out, but I still wouldn't trade that limited College experience for anything else in the World).
ROFL multiple degrees from MIT Harvard and Oxford, really. Not one from each place but multiple.
OK, so he forgot to say "multiple degrees [comma] from MIT Harvard and Oxford". One from each would satisfy that construction.
Back to the barn, Hee-haw.
(Good grief -- still using ROFL in 2010. Will he ever grow up?)
Being able to hold the attention spans of twenty 10-year-olds for longer than 10 minutes is a technique that takes weeks - if not months - of training. No joke here. You have to always be on the ball or they'll just get out of control.
Volunteer at a local Boys & Girls club, youth center, community center, etc. and see how well you fare with a group of 10 or more kids. It's not something you can just hop in and do.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
... or anything more distinguishing than the two brown blotches on his left ear.
Someone recommended for him a PhD in Humanistic Sciences from Preston University... apparently
a rare breed !
You think it's unfair to hire someone with a good personality? Only on slashdot...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You think it's unfair to hire someone with a good personality? Only on slashdot...
No, of course not. If you're not joking you're just stupid. It's certainly unfair of HR to hire people based on what THEY think a good personality is, based on THEIR judgments, and based on bogus assessments like half-hour interviews or (like I've mentioned before, and STILL I need to repeat myself, self-serving references or employers who are jealous or vindictive or, uhm, just OTHER HR people who get off on the power trips of ruining people's careers). Since people tend to hire (and work with) people like themselves it would mean that poor quality and dishonest people get hired and promoted. Granted I'm basing my assessment largely on the few dozen HR people I've had to deal with. A 100% correlation of incompetence and dishonesty does not necessarily mean that all HR people are dishonest and incompetent. I'm just stating my observations.