Co-worker of mine became a product guy at Google. His undergrad degree was from an no-name school, but his MBA was from... Harvard. I'm sure he fits in well.
My engineering interview at Google left me with a similar impression - very culturally monolithic, very sure the had all the right answers to "scale", no need for outside ideas. I don't think they realize they're not the big dog any more (especially not their cloud platform, which is a tiny also-ran).
Friend of mine finished his degree a year ago. Half his classes were online anyway. He said those were more useful to him, as he could watch each section of a lecture he struggled with over and over until he got it.
The distinction between "online classes" and "college" is becoming "college is where you buy your degree after doing the online classes". I expect it won't take too many years before the biggest dev employers find a way to recruit using "and you don't need to buy the degree" as a competitive tactic.
I can get a job as a stocker at Costco without a college degree?!
Costco has a rule, or used to, that everyone in their org, even senior management, starts as a stocker and works their way up. Very egalitarian that way - I hope they still have that rule.
What you say is true, once you get past the HR drone and their "checklist".
But until you get past that hurdle, you have nearly zero chance without a degree. Ask the one who knows.
So, thus policy hopefully gets past at least one of the barriers, by removing " degree" from the HR checklist.
Now if "age over 39" would be removed, too...
For your first job, absolutely.
Beyond that? Like I said, there's nothing about college anywhere on my resume or online profiles, and it's just never come up, except with Google (who uses education as input to their comp algorithms).
My resume is also carefully free of anything that shows just how old I am. Obviously, nothing about college is going to be there.
No, on the 50 or so recent college grads I've worked with and mentored over the past couple of decades. They generally had a good grasp of data structures and algorithms, but had no "best practices" worth speaking of, except where they might have picked up a little from an internship.
New college grads and people with a few years experience don't compete for the same positions at big companies. It's generally not even the same group of recruiters. There's not reason not to interview someone entry level if they've done a coding boot camp, and then demonstrated some real ability though some screening process.
Big companies would do well to broaden their entry-level hiring to include alternate paths, and I do think they're working on it. However, it's tough though to figure out a screening process that will give consistent results without re-using questions so often they end up on the internet.
Apple has never required a college degree. Neither Woz nor Jobs had a degree when they started Apple.
Microsoft was similar - friend of mine got hired there straight out of high school, back in the day.
But that was a different time. Before the mid 90s, CS degrees were rare (most degreed developers has some different degree), and anyone who could write real code in a real language was welcome.
With new programmers fresh out of college with their shiny BS in CS degrees, eager to impress with their knowledge, only to have them spend hours arguing over every decision I make as an architect, because that isn't what they taught them in school.
You know, I've never had that problem. I expect some discussion, of course: you should be able to explain your design convincingly to anyone technical. But I've never had a lengthy argument over choices of data structure or algorithms or the like from junior devs. They ask "why don't you do X instead, isn't X better?" and I reply with the ways X will fail in production and make life suck for everyone. It's pointless to have philosophical arguments, but practical explanations based on experience shuts them down, and is useful and educational to them. Maybe they can avoid some of the mistakes I made.
All of my painful arguments about architecture have been with semi-technical managers, who think the thing they once did 5 years ago must be the best possible way, but aren't technical enough to understand how it will fail.
It will still be harder to move between jobs without a degree;
Not once you have a few years of experience. Once you've proven you're really a developer, by delivering real commercial software, few people care. College only matters when it's still the majority of your experience. I don't have any information about a degree on my resume (or anything more than 10 years back, really), and only Google has ever asked me about it in over twenty years and quite a few job changes.
It's really tough to get that first software development job without a degree, though.
And most importantly, they learn best practices that help them avoid pitfalls down the road.
You definitely don't learn this in college. That's the main thing I've had to teach new grad hires for most of my career.
Although I have to ask... what do you mean by 'creatively solve problems'? I
I've seen many people with no flexibility in problem solving. Just too few tools in their mental toolbox. They think there's One True Way to solve problems, and that all problems are really the problems they know how to solve. I haven't seen any correlation with college degree on that one though - it's mostly people who have not worked for software companies who have that problem. Not enough exposure to multiple coding styles, tools, and methodologies, since everyone in their shop (e.g., bank) was forced to rigid compliance with one approach.
Fascists usually wear masks and their defining characteristic is destruction of property and public beatings?
Other than the masks, yes, that's exactly how the brownshirts operated. They engaged in political street fights for a decade, kept at arms length from the Nazi party, with no official connection. It was only in 1930 that Hitler officially took control of the brownshirts, having gained a lot of credibility in the meantime by being seen as keeping things strictly legal. Of course, 4 years later Hitler killed all their leadership to cement his control of the party.
The question is: how important is access to social media? Has it effectively become a utility? I'm not convinced yet, but the argument seems reasonable.
And every conservative I know would say that you've got a long way to go if you want to successfully assert that Facebook is a "utility".
Mmm hmm.
If an ISP is not a "utility" (which you have asserted in the past), then certainly Facebook cannot be one.
I have consistently asserted that the "last mile" should be a utility. That has always been my objection to net neutrality, which addresses the wrong problem.
Connecting "net neutrality" and "social media" is left as an exercise for the student.
So what's your position on the universe origin hypothesis that it all started as a sufficiently large random quantum fluctuation? Feynman didn't buy it, but he never argued it wasn't science.
Where did you get the "not true"? Faith for the most part is based on evidence about what sort of behaviors work well, and what don't. That part is as "true" as anything in the social sciences.
For example "act as if it were true that a moral judge who sees everything you do will reward or punish you" is damn good advice. It's also clearly true, assuming you have a conscience and a sense of morality, as your future self knows everything you did, and judges you, and suffers for your mistakes. You may have faith in some supernatural entity motivating you, but the advice remains good regardless of His existence. However, for those with poor impulse control, thinking of their father looking over their shoulder right motivates a lot better than concerns about the future. Call that "convenience" if it makes you happy.
Slide rules are awesome, once you get how they work. Thanks to a slide rule in high school, I can approximate stuff like the 8th root of a large number in my head (and usually get it right to two significant digits).
Property tax is somewhat proportional to income as most people spend as much as they can on their rent or mortgage. Who's hurt more by an X% tax increase, rich or poor? Who benefits more from an X% tax decrease?
They operate very much like the KKK did in their heydey, including compliant local government. If it weren't for the color-coded uniforms, it would be hard to tell them apart in the street.
BTW, brownshirts = antefascists.
It's also worth pointing out that the actual Nazis did not rise to power on a platform of racism and war. They were actual socialists, before the Night of the Long Knives, and required a lengthy propaganda campaign before they had any support for the racism and war part. Neo-Nazis are campaigning on racism and war, and so pose little threat - almost no one wants that shit, and they're to dumb to realize they're supposed to hide it.
The idea that Facebook has some special duty "to the public" flies in the face of every conservative principle about corporate existence and the law.
Are you confusing anarchists with conservatives again? Anarchists are the ones in the black hoods. They're color coded for your convenience.
Every conservative I know believes that utilities have a special duty to the public. Most believe that abuse of monopoly power is bad. The question is: how important is access to social media? Has it effectively become a utility? I'm not convinced yet, but the argument seems reasonable.
I do, however, believe that Facebook can either be exercising editorial discretion over what gets published on its platform and thus be liable for all of it, or it can be a neutral platform that just passes messages along, not responsible for their content. It can't have it both ways.
43% sucks. What percentage of people on the left support restrictions on "hate speech"?
It's good for the POTUS to call out lies as he sees them, but that's different from shutting down news outlets. The answer to bad speech is more speech.
Obviously, the market regulates the actions of large corporations, not the other way around.
And it does help, a lot, when not corrupted by bailouts. Corporations dominated by short-sighted greed and lack of concern for customers will fail in the market, making things better. Unless they're "too big to fail", of course.
Remember that "faith" is belief in something despite the preponderance of evidence to the contrary.
Bullshit. Faith is belief in something where there's a lack of evidence, usually because acting as if it were true has worked well for a long time. Faith is often based on evidence, but it's evidence about what beliefs make people happy or successful, not the scientific method.
The scientific method less than 500 years old, after all, but humans have been optimizing their behavior for far, far longer.
They both failed at their jobs resulting in loss of life, by the sound of it.
If by "failed" you mean "consistently warned about the impending disaster for the past 6 year, while politicians openly mocked the warnings", then sure.
And maybe both will see jail time
Probably so. It's not like the politicians who blocked funding of an alternate route are going to let any consequences affect themselves.
If the bridge was only over-engineered by 20%, then it would be a disaster to keep using it.
It seems like the engineers have been opposed to this bridge design from the beginning, pointing out the impending disaster since 2012, and advising limiting traffic and building an alternate route. But good luck getting politicians in a democracy to spend money on infrastructure (even when given money by the EU specifically for infrastructure).
Sure, and we've developed too much of a cultural aversion to those jobs. Given the stream of people replaced by robots we expect, I think it's time to fix that. It does seem to be where the new jobs are, as the "real work"-adverse middle class is willing to pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Co-worker of mine became a product guy at Google. His undergrad degree was from an no-name school, but his MBA was from ... Harvard. I'm sure he fits in well.
My engineering interview at Google left me with a similar impression - very culturally monolithic, very sure the had all the right answers to "scale", no need for outside ideas. I don't think they realize they're not the big dog any more (especially not their cloud platform, which is a tiny also-ran).
Friend of mine finished his degree a year ago. Half his classes were online anyway. He said those were more useful to him, as he could watch each section of a lecture he struggled with over and over until he got it.
The distinction between "online classes" and "college" is becoming "college is where you buy your degree after doing the online classes". I expect it won't take too many years before the biggest dev employers find a way to recruit using "and you don't need to buy the degree" as a competitive tactic.
I can get a job as a stocker at Costco without a college degree?!
Costco has a rule, or used to, that everyone in their org, even senior management, starts as a stocker and works their way up. Very egalitarian that way - I hope they still have that rule.
What you say is true, once you get past the HR drone and their "checklist".
But until you get past that hurdle, you have nearly zero chance without a degree. Ask the one who knows.
So, thus policy hopefully gets past at least one of the barriers, by removing " degree" from the HR checklist.
Now if "age over 39" would be removed, too...
For your first job, absolutely.
Beyond that? Like I said, there's nothing about college anywhere on my resume or online profiles, and it's just never come up, except with Google (who uses education as input to their comp algorithms).
My resume is also carefully free of anything that shows just how old I am. Obviously, nothing about college is going to be there.
No, on the 50 or so recent college grads I've worked with and mentored over the past couple of decades. They generally had a good grasp of data structures and algorithms, but had no "best practices" worth speaking of, except where they might have picked up a little from an internship.
New college grads and people with a few years experience don't compete for the same positions at big companies. It's generally not even the same group of recruiters. There's not reason not to interview someone entry level if they've done a coding boot camp, and then demonstrated some real ability though some screening process.
Big companies would do well to broaden their entry-level hiring to include alternate paths, and I do think they're working on it. However, it's tough though to figure out a screening process that will give consistent results without re-using questions so often they end up on the internet.
Apple has never required a college degree. Neither Woz nor Jobs had a degree when they started Apple.
Microsoft was similar - friend of mine got hired there straight out of high school, back in the day.
But that was a different time. Before the mid 90s, CS degrees were rare (most degreed developers has some different degree), and anyone who could write real code in a real language was welcome.
With new programmers fresh out of college with their shiny BS in CS degrees, eager to impress with their knowledge, only to have them spend hours arguing over every decision I make as an architect, because that isn't what they taught them in school.
You know, I've never had that problem. I expect some discussion, of course: you should be able to explain your design convincingly to anyone technical. But I've never had a lengthy argument over choices of data structure or algorithms or the like from junior devs. They ask "why don't you do X instead, isn't X better?" and I reply with the ways X will fail in production and make life suck for everyone. It's pointless to have philosophical arguments, but practical explanations based on experience shuts them down, and is useful and educational to them. Maybe they can avoid some of the mistakes I made.
All of my painful arguments about architecture have been with semi-technical managers, who think the thing they once did 5 years ago must be the best possible way, but aren't technical enough to understand how it will fail.
It will still be harder to move between jobs without a degree;
Not once you have a few years of experience. Once you've proven you're really a developer, by delivering real commercial software, few people care. College only matters when it's still the majority of your experience. I don't have any information about a degree on my resume (or anything more than 10 years back, really), and only Google has ever asked me about it in over twenty years and quite a few job changes.
It's really tough to get that first software development job without a degree, though.
And most importantly, they learn best practices that help them avoid pitfalls down the road.
You definitely don't learn this in college. That's the main thing I've had to teach new grad hires for most of my career.
Although I have to ask... what do you mean by 'creatively solve problems'? I
I've seen many people with no flexibility in problem solving. Just too few tools in their mental toolbox. They think there's One True Way to solve problems, and that all problems are really the problems they know how to solve. I haven't seen any correlation with college degree on that one though - it's mostly people who have not worked for software companies who have that problem. Not enough exposure to multiple coding styles, tools, and methodologies, since everyone in their shop (e.g., bank) was forced to rigid compliance with one approach.
Fascists usually wear masks and their defining characteristic is destruction of property and public beatings?
Other than the masks, yes, that's exactly how the brownshirts operated. They engaged in political street fights for a decade, kept at arms length from the Nazi party, with no official connection. It was only in 1930 that Hitler officially took control of the brownshirts, having gained a lot of credibility in the meantime by being seen as keeping things strictly legal. Of course, 4 years later Hitler killed all their leadership to cement his control of the party.
For a rabid liberal, you sure are a staunch defender of the rights of corporations all of the sudden!
The question is: how important is access to social media? Has it effectively become a utility? I'm not convinced yet, but the argument seems reasonable.
And every conservative I know would say that you've got a long way to go if you want to successfully assert that Facebook is a "utility".
Mmm hmm.
If an ISP is not a "utility" (which you have asserted in the past), then certainly Facebook cannot be one.
I have consistently asserted that the "last mile" should be a utility. That has always been my objection to net neutrality, which addresses the wrong problem.
Connecting "net neutrality" and "social media" is left as an exercise for the student.
So what's your position on the universe origin hypothesis that it all started as a sufficiently large random quantum fluctuation? Feynman didn't buy it, but he never argued it wasn't science.
Where did you get the "not true"? Faith for the most part is based on evidence about what sort of behaviors work well, and what don't. That part is as "true" as anything in the social sciences.
For example "act as if it were true that a moral judge who sees everything you do will reward or punish you" is damn good advice. It's also clearly true, assuming you have a conscience and a sense of morality, as your future self knows everything you did, and judges you, and suffers for your mistakes. You may have faith in some supernatural entity motivating you, but the advice remains good regardless of His existence. However, for those with poor impulse control, thinking of their father looking over their shoulder right motivates a lot better than concerns about the future. Call that "convenience" if it makes you happy.
Slide rules are awesome, once you get how they work. Thanks to a slide rule in high school, I can approximate stuff like the 8th root of a large number in my head (and usually get it right to two significant digits).
Property tax is somewhat proportional to income as most people spend as much as they can on their rent or mortgage. Who's hurt more by an X% tax increase, rich or poor? Who benefits more from an X% tax decrease?
They operate very much like the KKK did in their heydey, including compliant local government. If it weren't for the color-coded uniforms, it would be hard to tell them apart in the street.
BTW, brownshirts = antefascists.
It's also worth pointing out that the actual Nazis did not rise to power on a platform of racism and war. They were actual socialists, before the Night of the Long Knives, and required a lengthy propaganda campaign before they had any support for the racism and war part. Neo-Nazis are campaigning on racism and war, and so pose little threat - almost no one wants that shit, and they're to dumb to realize they're supposed to hide it.
The idea that Facebook has some special duty "to the public" flies in the face of every conservative principle about corporate existence and the law.
Are you confusing anarchists with conservatives again? Anarchists are the ones in the black hoods. They're color coded for your convenience.
Every conservative I know believes that utilities have a special duty to the public. Most believe that abuse of monopoly power is bad. The question is: how important is access to social media? Has it effectively become a utility? I'm not convinced yet, but the argument seems reasonable.
I do, however, believe that Facebook can either be exercising editorial discretion over what gets published on its platform and thus be liable for all of it, or it can be a neutral platform that just passes messages along, not responsible for their content. It can't have it both ways.
43% sucks. What percentage of people on the left support restrictions on "hate speech"?
It's good for the POTUS to call out lies as he sees them, but that's different from shutting down news outlets. The answer to bad speech is more speech.
Obviously, the market regulates the actions of large corporations, not the other way around.
And it does help, a lot, when not corrupted by bailouts. Corporations dominated by short-sighted greed and lack of concern for customers will fail in the market, making things better. Unless they're "too big to fail", of course.
Remember that "faith" is belief in something despite the preponderance of evidence to the contrary.
Bullshit. Faith is belief in something where there's a lack of evidence, usually because acting as if it were true has worked well for a long time. Faith is often based on evidence, but it's evidence about what beliefs make people happy or successful, not the scientific method.
The scientific method less than 500 years old, after all, but humans have been optimizing their behavior for far, far longer.
They both failed at their jobs resulting in loss of life, by the sound of it.
If by "failed" you mean "consistently warned about the impending disaster for the past 6 year, while politicians openly mocked the warnings", then sure.
And maybe both will see jail time
Probably so. It's not like the politicians who blocked funding of an alternate route are going to let any consequences affect themselves.
If the bridge was only over-engineered by 20%, then it would be a disaster to keep using it.
It seems like the engineers have been opposed to this bridge design from the beginning, pointing out the impending disaster since 2012, and advising limiting traffic and building an alternate route. But good luck getting politicians in a democracy to spend money on infrastructure (even when given money by the EU specifically for infrastructure).
Sure, and we've developed too much of a cultural aversion to those jobs. Given the stream of people replaced by robots we expect, I think it's time to fix that. It does seem to be where the new jobs are, as the "real work"-adverse middle class is willing to pay for it.