College is not a trade school, it was never meant to train you for a job with rare exceptions like medical professionals and they have a lengthy apprentice program. I can get a CS/CE degree without ever stepping into an actual office, why would you expect me to know a job I've never done?
I may be showing my age but there was a time where companies had new hire programs and OJT where entry level workers could learn the job and learn the job the way the company wants you to learn it. Now there seems to be an expectation that every fresher should have a decade of experience under their belt and know the ins an outs of a job they've never done or at best did for a few week/months as an intern/college hire. This is just another example of companies living on the cheap and pushing the onus training new workers from the company on to the worker. In my opinion it's stupid and short sited.
All of this makes sense if you only pay attention to what universities say they are instead of how they function in society. Functionally, companies and students treat university as some combination of trade school and expensive credentialing system. A bachelor’s degree is both a signifier and predictor of class. They are expensive, and every office job requires one at a minimum.
The vast majority of CS students aren’t interested in the minutia of theory, they’re interested in reliably getting a job in a field that will let them have a family. And schools know it too, which is why a degree can command and justify a six figure cost. All of the saccharine scholarly platitudes aside, the cost of learning about Homer or first year calculus keeps going up every year.
Forcing students to pay for their own vocational training isn’t stupid and short sighted at all. It’s a form of industry-wide tacit collusion [1] and it’s working.
I think it's very short sighted: tech stacks come and go, you can't find people who know all the ones you picked. People who know their foundations and have applied them to practice (no matter the tech stack) will be better prepared.
That's why boot camps haven't really taken off: most students can reproduce what they learned but will struggle growing up. They learned the tech before the theory!
I've been thinking this for at least a decade and thought I was going crazy. Thx for verifying there are others thinking similar "crazy" thoughts.
I wasn't going insane, I was just going Marxist. (Which sounds like an insult, but isn't.)
More specifically, it seems that you can easily get a load of cash for your startup if you're a Stanford CS grad. Then you grow up, have a couple of liquidity events and put some of your cash in a VC fund managed by a college pal. Then you get asked to listen to a few pitches from young kids and you spend the hour talking about fun times on the quad and in Terman hall. And you vote to give them some cash 'cause they seem like nice kids.
Don't get me wrong. I'm as committed to perpetuating classiest stereotypes as the next guy. But it all seems a bit financially and socially incestuous.
>College is not a trade school, it was never meant to train you for a job with rare exceptions like medical professionals and they have a lengthy apprentice program. I can get a CS/CE degree without ever stepping into an actual office, why would you expect me to know a job I've never done?
I agree with your sentiment. This was true for a while, but it isn't anymore. Companies would hire you just because you had a college degree, because it showed you were capable of learning. Once they stopped that and required particular degrees, it became a trade school.
It's also the outcome of a system where, in many/most cases, the expectation is that a new hire will have moved on by 2-3 years. And, yes, that's driven to some degree by compensation but ICs historically also didn't expect anything like FAANG compensation and even most executives had very middling compensation by Big Tech standards. (My starting salary as a product manager at a major computer company in the mid-80s with two grad degrees was about $100K in today's dollars.)
If someone is probably going to head somewhere else in a couple years it might make sense to put them through a one week orientation but probably not a 6 month class.)
Isn't that more of a reflection of the company and not the worker? Why would a worker stay when they can make significantly more at another company? If companies wanted to retain their workers you'd think they'd do a better job but it's been shown over and over and over again that if you want to earn a market rate wage you need to find a different job -finding a new employee is expensive, much more expensive than retaining that same employee but being penny wise and pound foolish seems to be how compensation works.
The amount that a Big Tech company could afford to pay a new employee is often more than the cost for a regular company to hire a trained employee again.
And hiring a trained worker is overall less expensive than hiring an untrained worker who takes a year to get up to speed and then leaves for greener pa$ture$.
What's more, if you have a brain drain of experienced people leaving for Big Tech, hiring an untrained worker who is able to make messes that won't be cleaned up is sometimes even more expensive than the wages paid to the employee.
The result of this is that after a few rounds of people leaving management is faced with two options. Either contract projects out as the standard approach rather than having software developers on staff or move to "we're only hiring experienced people with all of these qualifications" so that on the job training isn't necessary.
While some will also say "raise your wages to be competitive with Big Tech" - that isn't always practical or able to be justified for budgeting based on the revenue of the company.
The overall industry appears to be bimodal with "Big Tech" and "everyone else". Any employee who can move from "everyone else" to "Big Tech" can out compete any wage offered by "everyone else" (and in boom times this was a much easier prospect).
With that consideration, it was often very poor ROI for any company in the "everyone else" portion of the industry to offer training.
I don't know if it's actually bimodal to the degree that, say, law is. But I have seen the dynamic where, if someone at a smaller company gets an offer from, say, Facebook, the response of the company is to basically shrug and move on.
Probably not to the degree that law is bimodal, but there's certainly a different distribution of salaries in the big tech and venture capital companies than there is in "everywhere else".
If someone got an offer from Facebook and puts it on the table, there is no way to compete with that as anything other than another big tech company. There's no way that say... Jack's Links ( https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/JackLinksProteinSnacks/7439... ) can compete with working at a big tech company.
This also goes for interviewing. I've seen new grads (back in the boomier times) say "I have an offer with {big tech co}" part way through the interview and say "ok" and stop the process since there's really no point in going on - the smaller shop better uses their time interviewing other candidates that may accept.
Like many systems, it's something of a self-perpetuating cycle--combined with an environment where many large tech companies can and will pay almost arbitrarily large amounts to hire people away from another company. I'm pretty sure that, if you're a mechanical engineer or a developer at General Motors, you aren't going to double your salary by going to Ford.
To be honest I'd say that it's driven much, much more by compensation rather than that being some additional element. Leaving aside FAANG levels of compensation, places pay staff the minimum they can get away with and don't raise existing staff's compensation unless absolutely forced to.
If you could somehow anonymously go through your company's hiring process you'd be offered more as a new joiner for your skills and experience than someone already there, which is bizarre set-up (even though any new joiner has to spend time ramping up & existing staff have a great level of instituional knowledge).
So companies have created a system where if you want to get a fair market rate, you _have to_ move every 2-3 years. I know a lot of people who stay put in spite of this, as they don't like the friction/effort of interviewing & are comfortable/like colleagues etc. If places paid market rate to existing staff, I'd imagine their churn would plummet.
> College is not a trade school, it was never meant to train you for a job with rare exceptions like medical professionals and they have a lengthy apprentice program.
The University of Bologna, the first university, had faculties of law, medicine and theology. That’s a trade school for lawyers, notaries, physicians and priests. While university has always been an alien place for anyone not of the bourgeoisie or higher it’s always been mostly about getting a good job afterwards. There were never enough people whose family had enough money to support them doing anything or nothing to support that many scholars. College is and always has been in large part about getting its graduates good jobs. Saying it’s not a trade school is primarily about snobbery. One of the ways it makes its graduates suitable for those jobs is by teaching them the habitus of university men (and nowadays women) so that they can’t be mistaken for the kind of people who do go to a trade school.
>> there was a time where companies had new hire programs and OJT where entry level workers could learn the job and learn the job the way the company wants you to learn it.
Wasn't this also a time when people could expect to stay at the same company for 10+ years? Things are different now as total compensation is linked to how your options package is doing. People don't stay at jobs where their options aren't likely to be worth much.
> I may be showing my age but there was a time where companies had new hire programs and OJT where entry level workers could learn the job and learn the job the way the company wants you to learn it.
Why as a hiring manager would I waste time with a junior dev that does “negative work” knowing that by the time they get productive they would leave instead of poaching a former junior dev from another company?
I may be showing my age but there was a time where companies had new hire programs and OJT where entry level workers could learn the job and learn the job the way the company wants you to learn it. Now there seems to be an expectation that every fresher should have a decade of experience under their belt and know the ins an outs of a job they've never done or at best did for a few week/months as an intern/college hire. This is just another example of companies living on the cheap and pushing the onus training new workers from the company on to the worker. In my opinion it's stupid and short sited.