Yeah. The only, and I mean only non-social/networking advantages to universities stem from forced learning/reasoning about complex theoretical concepts that form the requisite base knowledge to learn the practical requirements of your field while on the job.
Trade schools and certificate programs are designed to churn out people with journeyman-level skills in some field. They repeatedly drill you on the practical day-in-day-out requirements, tasks, troubleshooting tools and techniques, etc. that you need to walk up to a job site and be useful. The fields generally have a predictable enough set of technical problems to deal with that a deep theoretical exploration is unnecessary. This is just as true for electricians and auto mechanics as it is for people doing limited but logistically complex technical work, like orchestrating a big fleet of windows workstations with all the Microsoft enterprise tools.
In software development and lots of other fields that require grappling with complex theoretical stuff, you really need both the practical and the theoretical background to be productive. That would be a ridiculous undertaking for a school, and it’s why we have internships/externships/jr positions.
The combination of these tools letting the seniors in a department do all of the work so companies don’t have to invest in interns/juniors so there’s no reliable entry point into the field, and there being an even bigger disconnect between what schools offer and the skills they need to compete, the industry has some rough days ahead and a whole lot of people trying to get a foothold in the industry right now are screwed. I’m kind of surprised how little so many people in tech seem to care about the impending rough road for entry-level folks in the industry. I guess it’s a combination of how little most higher level developers have to interact with them, and the fact that everybody was tripping over themselves to hire developers when a lot of seniors joined the industry.
It's not a particularly moral way to think, but if you're currently mid level or senior, the junior dev pipeline being cut off will be beneficial to you personally in a few years' time.
Potentially very beneficial, if it turns out software engineers are still needed but nobody has been training them for half a decade
It’s clear that it harms those that get to keep their jobs less to some extent (though when you’ve got a glut of talent and few jobs, the only winners are employers because salaries tank eventually.) But frankly, the pervasiveness of that intense greed and self-absorption used to be anathema to the American software industry. Now it looks a lot more like a bunch of private equity bros than a bunch of people who stood to make good money selling creative solutions to the world’s problems. Even worse, the developers that built this business still think they’re part of the in-club, and too special and talented to get tossed out like a bag of moldy peaches. They’re wrong, and it’s sad to watch.
Trade schools and certificate programs are designed to churn out people with journeyman-level skills in some field. They repeatedly drill you on the practical day-in-day-out requirements, tasks, troubleshooting tools and techniques, etc. that you need to walk up to a job site and be useful. The fields generally have a predictable enough set of technical problems to deal with that a deep theoretical exploration is unnecessary. This is just as true for electricians and auto mechanics as it is for people doing limited but logistically complex technical work, like orchestrating a big fleet of windows workstations with all the Microsoft enterprise tools.
In software development and lots of other fields that require grappling with complex theoretical stuff, you really need both the practical and the theoretical background to be productive. That would be a ridiculous undertaking for a school, and it’s why we have internships/externships/jr positions.
The combination of these tools letting the seniors in a department do all of the work so companies don’t have to invest in interns/juniors so there’s no reliable entry point into the field, and there being an even bigger disconnect between what schools offer and the skills they need to compete, the industry has some rough days ahead and a whole lot of people trying to get a foothold in the industry right now are screwed. I’m kind of surprised how little so many people in tech seem to care about the impending rough road for entry-level folks in the industry. I guess it’s a combination of how little most higher level developers have to interact with them, and the fact that everybody was tripping over themselves to hire developers when a lot of seniors joined the industry.