I went and failed school programs several times as an adult, in a country where those programs are free. The last 2 programs I went to were 1 year programs. I already have programming skills yet they did not give me the "degree" because they might have perceived a lack of motivation. Those programs were web oriented and I'm more focused on industrial programming.
I tend to dislike higher education as a general rule because it's more a process of fitting in and obeying a teacher, instead of focusing on the subject matter. I don't care that much actually because I know I'm already skilled at programming. I might not be an excellent programmer, but I can do a lot of what's required.
While education is important, I have put a lot of personal time to learn more and more programming skills after the year I failed one, 8 year ago. Yet the job market is constantly focused on "the degree", while everybody knows that self-teaching is more important in programming. I don't get hired and it's always a matter of trusting a new guy who doesn't have professional experience and can only talk about his skills.
Personally I don't have a lot of faith into the market and the market doesn't have faith in me. So yes, I have plenty of reasons to say that people going into higher education are lucky, privileged or just obedient people who are not yet capable of learning new things, or did not have to waste so much resources to learn things they could do at home.
In the end, you will either have large companies with normative, schooled people, or start ups, who will always struggle to start products because they have no resources.
I'd say that higher education can be bad because normalization slow downs innovation, so in the end, degrees become privileges. People who are taught skills but don't use them to improve society and constantly encourage obedience are a brake on society. In an age of inequality, degrees are seen as rent seeking. People get degrees for comfort. Other people won't seek degrees because they don't want to obey to a system they see as lame and evil.
I feel the same way. I went straight into the workforce with 17. Now 5 years later I feel like I absolutely need that degree to advance my career or to simply avoid my resume being thrown out. So I went back to school and I bet you can already guess what happens. Now that I have to spend at least 25 hours a week studying I barely have time to work on my software skills. I used to learn stuff like writing compilers, work with FPGAs, read up on machine learning, etc... You can argue that maybe I focused too much on individual topics and a CS degree covers many more but at the same time the lack of a degree isn't what's hindering me from working in these areas. I'll finally be done with school soon and then I can go to college next year and I definitively am going to specialize in topics that I am unfamiliar with such as robotics. However, I bet the end result will be that I will work on the same trivial web applications as I am doing right now but with a pay bump and more opportunities during the job hunt.
> I feel the same way. I went straight into the workforce with 17. Now 5 years later I feel like I absolutely need that degree to advance my career or to simply avoid my resume being thrown out.
> However, I bet the end result will be that I will work on the same trivial web applications as I am doing right now but with a pay bump and more opportunities during the job hunt.
I started working in the field professionally around 18 or 19, and I'm begging to fear this same thing. If I do decide to go back to school, it'd be in hopes that I can escape subfields that bore me to death, but I feel the reality is that there just really isn't any real job market for the things I'm interested in.
I tend to dislike higher education as a general rule because it's more a process of fitting in and obeying a teacher, instead of focusing on the subject matter. I don't care that much actually because I know I'm already skilled at programming. I might not be an excellent programmer, but I can do a lot of what's required.
While education is important, I have put a lot of personal time to learn more and more programming skills after the year I failed one, 8 year ago. Yet the job market is constantly focused on "the degree", while everybody knows that self-teaching is more important in programming. I don't get hired and it's always a matter of trusting a new guy who doesn't have professional experience and can only talk about his skills.
Personally I don't have a lot of faith into the market and the market doesn't have faith in me. So yes, I have plenty of reasons to say that people going into higher education are lucky, privileged or just obedient people who are not yet capable of learning new things, or did not have to waste so much resources to learn things they could do at home.
In the end, you will either have large companies with normative, schooled people, or start ups, who will always struggle to start products because they have no resources.
I'd say that higher education can be bad because normalization slow downs innovation, so in the end, degrees become privileges. People who are taught skills but don't use them to improve society and constantly encourage obedience are a brake on society. In an age of inequality, degrees are seen as rent seeking. People get degrees for comfort. Other people won't seek degrees because they don't want to obey to a system they see as lame and evil.