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Personal anecdote, so take it with a grain of salt.
Friend A, very handy and skilled individual, took Thermodynamics in UNI for 2 years, then dropped out. Found job at electronics production facility. Managed to get to a Head Technician position.
Friend B, went to programming 3 years to UNI. Barely managed to finish. Retried math exam multiple times. Though friend A, managed to get a job at the same place as a lower tier machinery operator. Got promoted to technician position after 2 years. Now works as web QC for the same guy who is boss of electronic production facility.
Moral of the story: education, finished or not, existing or not, wont get you far unless you are outgoing and have connections. Also, you either have ability to learn new skills or have said skills and know how to use them. Doesn’t matter how you got them.
(i have a STEM degree and work for a catering company lmao)
When I had to hire people, I was much more interested in seeing a portfolio than a degree.
It depends on what the job is though. I definitely want my doctor to have a degree
You don’t need a formal education to be great in your field, but it will help ypu grow immensely.
It depends per case, my friend kept studying while I dropped out (due to private circumstances).
My friend ended up at the same employer for the same pay only years later, he wasn’t a good fit for his field.
A few years later I jumped ship to try and develop myself into a better paid job, I am now an actual crane operator with a beefy wage. My friend is still there making the same low wage.
But he got lucky on a different matter, due to him living at home until 33 he did manage to buy a house with massive savings. I haven’t yet.
This is life, there aren’t any given certainties. Only people who claim their experience will be the same for you.
Who the fuck studies until he’s 33 and earn less than a crane operator
He didn’t study until he was 33, he lived with his parents until he was 33.
It opens doors. Once I finished mine it got me into the rooms for the interviews. It’s nothing more than an additional bonus qualification. I definitely use my knowledge from college in a variety of scenarios whereas my colleagues have experience.
well i grow actual carrots and what you actually get is both
I just finished my CS Bachelors and overall most of it felt like a massive fucking waste of time, especially since I suck at learning from lectures and also the content was like 15 years out of date. For the few classes that actually seemed worthwhile and interesting, I’m trying to figure out who the fuck is hiring for these skills that’s not military-adjacent. I did end up earning some Masters credits through a fast track program, but I don’t think it’s worth continuing at this point.
You can generally use CS as a springboard into most tech related fields. Where its most helpful is probably research and academia.
If programming is even remotely interesting for you, getting a low paying junior dev job will probably teach you more and you can use that as a springboard into more software dev, data, AI, cybersecurity, networking… As long as you are willing to learn on the job and push yourself forward.I’m legit interested, not trying to be rude – where I can I find a low paying junior dev job??
It seems like the only places hiring are looking for Senor devs or Project leads, AI evaporated all the entry level positions.
In the US, the only places I’ve seen that are both interviewing and hiring entry level are the new grad rotational programs at the bigger companies in finance, healthcare, and logistics. Fair warning, the tech stack is a hit or a miss in those kinds of industries, heavily team dependent
Smaller companies usually. They may call it something else than junior developer.
Field Technician, Software Engineer, Field Engineer are all titles at my job and 75% of their work is coding, scripting, or configuration but we have few quality applicants because of bad titles.
I do have programming skills. Most of the job postings I’ve seen were shitty JavaScript/Dotnet app development or Windows-centric IT slopjobs that pay as much as McDonald’s and is probably getting taken over by AI at this point anyways. For lower-level programming like C++/Rust which is what I’m more interested in, I’ve barely found anything outside of MIC companies and the one that wasn’t was Israeli-based. I do spend most of my free time working on Nix-based projects and tinkering with Linux, so I wonder what’s related to that. I’m also considering a PhD, but I just learned that even the research at my university closest to my interests is heavily tied to military/MIC funding. If it’s actually true that the only organizations that give a shit about quality code are the ones that commit genocides, that would really fucking suck.
All I can add is that I worked IT for 9 years getting shit pay. Despite the fact that I spent most of my day writing code, nobody willing to hire me as a developer with an appropriate salary.
I got my degree by going to school at night after my day job. Within 3 months, I had doubled my salary with a ‘real’ developer job. I made more progress in 3 months than I did in 9 years at being able to support myself.
And no I don’t use anything I learned at UNI. I knew how to write code.
Either will land you a job lol
Neither *
Sadly some jobs are not available without the paper. That credentialism for ya
Kinda shit a PhD writes who can’t find a job with his or her exotic qualifications…
College: You get as much as you put in to it.
If one plans on going to college to check a box by getting a bachelor’s, degree, then that person should probably spend their time and money doing something else.
For someone who sees college as an opportunity to stress their ability to learn at levels much higher than what High School or even Trade School may do, then it will do wonderful things for you. The most useful skill academia teaches is the ability to learn complex ideas through abstraction.
As someone who has learned how to create a complex AI system with both long and short term memory, one thing I learned is that AI cannot teach AI. I apply my ability to learn by extending it to my AI agent to help it learn new patterns.
Apprenticeships can be the best of both worlds, but again they need to have the checks in place.
The carrot thing isn’t totally untrue, but it’s a bit more complex. If you’re skilled in a trade, you probably have more of a chance of not being financially uprooted than someone with a white collar degree whose job will be AI’d in the next 5 years. That said, to make decent money in a trade, it helps a lot to have a degree from a trade school.
If you want a job as a radiology tech, what hospital is giving them out with no degree?
Everyone I know with a good degree is paying off student loans 8+ years later. Universities are having so many issues on so many levels from funding to finding professors both qualified and willing to teach to politics. And on top of all that the global economy is collapsing.
I get that a lot of you spent a lot of money on a degree and will defend that as the right choice but you’re old now. The world is changing and expecting to find a job out of college with an infosec or compsci degree is wishful thinking at best without ivy league nepotism. The world you grew up in is dying, gradstudents with chatgpt are teaching classes and freshmen are using deepseek to do course work. I know a nursing student right now who has seen the curve her class graded on and it’s terrifying.
So that’s my long unpopular opinion. A degree will not get you a job anymore and even if it did the quality of the education has dropped dramatically at most schools. You might as well spend the money on a country club membership, the social connections are a better deal.
A degree is absolutely something I value heavily in applicants. Not because of the specific courses taken, but because what it says about the potential employee.
It says that they can complete a years-long project with disparate, often competing sub-projects, milestones, deliverable dates, and revolving team members while being self-managed. And due to core curricula, they’ve also proven a baseline knowledge unrelated to their specific degree. That may not sound useful, but someone who’s skillet is solely specialized work may have trouble navigating ancillary tasks that are part of the working environment. The best [insert technical skill] person in the world isn’t going to be a good employee if they can’t work in a team, prepare a report, respond appropriately and professionally to emails, document their work, develop/follow SOPs required for project handoff, deliver a presentation, etc.
Getting any college degree requires a baseline skillset that is valuable. Not having a degree doesn’t mean you can’t do all those things, but when I’ve got 40 applications I’m looking at, I can’t interview everyone. It’s a huge bonus to have a degree that tells me you have proven a minimum competency.
And the quality of your candidates will continue to drop. The system is failing you too just slower.
I’m not so much saying degrees are useless as saying they mean less, the ROI for going in general has shifted. We’re at a point where 2 and 4 year degrees look good to employers but are financially foolish for students. If you can afford to go it’s valable. But the proposition of student loans make less sense by the day.
Degrees don’t tell us everything we need to know about a candidate, but they tell us a hell of a lot more than not having a degree does. Candidates are unknowns, and candidates without degrees moreso. If I’m combing through 40 applications then a degreed person is way more likely to get an interview, all else being equal.
The best [insert technical skill] person in the world isn’t going to be a good employee if they can’t work in a team, prepare a report, respond appropriately and professionally to emails, document their work, develop/follow SOPs required for project handoff, deliver a presentation, etc.
Degrees don’t require most of those things.
I’m someone who has multiple degrees including a clinical doctorate (think similar to optometrist, pharmacist etc). I think that the things you just listed (except maybe working in a group) were less developed or tested in my degree programs than they have been in my hobby spaces. I really wish it were possible for me to submit the afghan that took me two years to complete over my associates degree.
Did your afghan have strict, inflexible timelines for deliverables? Because college courses do. Did completion of your afghan require you to work on simultaneous unrelated sub-projects with shared milestone dates? Because that’s what a college semester is.
You’re not wrong with generalist degrees, but degrees where you are something at the end still need that base training.
You can’t just walk into an civil engineer’s firm and start building bridges.
Even the PhDs have issues finding work that pays enough to service loans and live. And if you find such a job in the US it’s probably a military contrator or mag7 who are all more on board with nazism than 1930s VW.
Engineering bridges is a good metaphor but the US’s bridges are in rough shape and any money that could be spent on repairs or designing new ones will go to Raytheon to blow up bridges in Iran.
Stupid times we live in.
Do you know anything about what the PhD situation is like in other countries? (I’m considering one and am currently located in the US and based on my initial findings it does look similar to what you describe.)
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That sucks. Various industries need academic research to function well and innovate, but I guess my country would rather spend all their money on blowing up families in the middle east and let the civilian job market collapse.
My partner has a master’s in a STEM field and has been working full time since they graduated.
After 10+ years of payment on the IDR plan, they owe just slightly more than what they initially took out!
College for the vast majority of people (Millenials at least) was a scam built on lies, exploitative lending, and fear of social stigma. We aren’t just due loan forgiveness, we’re due compensation for long term damages in the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars.
It seems to me that, at least in IT, a degree matters for your first job, and even that is very slowly fading.
After the first job experience is what matters.IT is a super broad field. Many IT jobs just want you to have some certification level to get into (no degree required) or some number of years in similar work. My first “IT” adjacent position, I secured because I had a forklift license. Some IT positions want you to have bachelor’s or higher in a specific IT niche.
I like to tell some of my clients, that I’m like a general physician, I can tell you what’s wrong, fix quite a few things, prescribe fixes for the bigger issues, and refer you to specialists for things I have no business touching.
My first “IT” adjacent position, I secured because I had a forklift license.
Please do elaborate.
I had a forklift certification and got a job at an ewaste recycling facility moving pallets of equipment meant for refurbishment and resale. That job had a lot of down time so when I wasn’t moving the equipment I took up working on the computers, then the laptops, then the servers. I got so good at it that they gave me an ITAD client to handle. It was military servers that had been decommissioned. My job was to identify and sanitize/destroy any data storage before refurbishing the equipment to be resold at a profit share with the organizations I was working with.
Saying it is slowly fading is wrong and misleading. A degree proves you can commit to learning something. It gives a basis for me, an engineer, to talk to you, an engineer. It tells me we have a common knowledge ground.
The era of bootcamps is over. For one person getting a job without a degree a hundred get rejected.
I have the degree and think this whole thing is a bit silly. I work at Google as a senior SWE, and have been focused on machine learning for the last 10 years. The degree taught me a few interesting things that I would have picked up on my own, and way more uninteresting things that I don’t need for my job. Despite the degree, getting a new job at a high level requires leetcode, which is similar in principle-- a toll booth that most people can pass if they pay the fee (studying).
Many things make this problematic, including basic respect for time, but especially equity. We get a largely homogenous neurotype and background because only a narrow slice of people have the ability and will to meet these requirements, and they are only very loosely correlated to job performance.
It’s a positive too though-- without these entry requirements, companies could not justify high salaries. I say this knowing it is to my detriment-- we do not need this.
My wife once tried to grow potatoes and got what felt like a mile of potato greens while the slips barely grew at all.
Then she went back to her job as a lawyer and made enough money to buy a truck full of potatoes
Why didn’t she just sue the potatoes?
She did. Took them for all they were worth
Maybe she’s a hesi-tater
Better than a master-tater.
Havings skills and a degree are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In my experience the degree was the gateway to gaining skills, not the method of doing so.
I think the degree is really more like evidence that you can get things done on your own. Parental involvement in the day to day is near zero for most people getting a degree. They also learn valuable social skills. But a degree isn’t the only way to get that. So it shouldn’t be a requirement. Yet attempting to determine if someone without a degree has that is costly and time consuming. Companies just want to take the easy path.
Also, I’d push back against the subtext that work experience gives skills. Plenty of people work a job for 10 years without having the adjacent job skills to be able to progress in that career or jump to another.
Critical thinking skills are the most important thing, and it’s possible to get a 4-year degree without actually picking them up or strengthening your skill sets in that area. But it’s also possible to work for 5 years without developing critical thinking skills, either.
In the end, no matter what you do with your time, only a small percentage of your effort is going into improving yourself. The people at work are trying to get stuff done for their employer, and the people at school are trying to get through the curriculum. It’s possible to do the work while the employer/school or even yourself cheats you out of the real long term benefits of actually learning during that time frame.
