The way college works is a scam in itself. You don’t need that much liberal art education. Four years and tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes hundreds of thousands) just to see if you can hack it in a job in your field? That’s insane.
Most jobs should be accessible right after high school in the form of paid internships. Programming is a trade, and most of the skills should be taught in high school. Not everyone needs to be a “computer scientist”, just like not every plumber needs to be a hydraulic engineer.
I’ve worked in a lot of programming jobs and zero of the people were what I would have called computer scientists. They were just coders who could write a conditional statement and a for loop. That gets the job done 99% of the time. (Obviously I’m greatly oversimplifying. My point is there’s no “computer science” involved.)
After a job in programming for a couple years, if you want to start working on the Linux kernel and write compilers, go ahead and go to school then and become a computer scientist. That’s so few people.
And then when there are no jobs hiring internships and computer science, you know not to focus on that. Do something else.
But big business hates this. They want everyone to prove in a gauntlet that you can work under super high pressure and tight deadlines that are totally arbitrary.
What if I told you that in the Eastern Bloc many of the high schools used to be professional. In those schools you’d study most of the standard arts and science subjects, but also professional subjects like machining, automotive (mechanic, driver), construction, engineering, programming, agriculture, textile, food production, and many more. They used to produce ready workers in those fields. As a kid you’d choose which field you want to go to and apply after middle school, pass the necessary exams and get studying. If you wanted to go to university, you’d continue past high school.
The way college works is a scam in itself. You don’t need that much liberal art education. Four years and tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes hundreds of thousands) just to see if you can hack it in a job in your field? That’s insane.
Most jobs should be accessible right after high school in the form of paid internships. Programming is a trade, and most of the skills should be taught in high school. Not everyone needs to be a “computer scientist”, just like not every plumber needs to be a hydraulic engineer.
I’ve worked in a lot of programming jobs and zero of the people were what I would have called computer scientists. They were just coders who could write a conditional statement and a
forloop. That gets the job done 99% of the time. (Obviously I’m greatly oversimplifying. My point is there’s no “computer science” involved.)After a job in programming for a couple years, if you want to start working on the Linux kernel and write compilers, go ahead and go to school then and become a computer scientist. That’s so few people.
And then when there are no jobs hiring internships and computer science, you know not to focus on that. Do something else.
But big business hates this. They want everyone to prove in a gauntlet that you can work under super high pressure and tight deadlines that are totally arbitrary.
What if I told you that in the Eastern Bloc many of the high schools used to be professional. In those schools you’d study most of the standard arts and science subjects, but also professional subjects like machining, automotive (mechanic, driver), construction, engineering, programming, agriculture, textile, food production, and many more. They used to produce ready workers in those fields. As a kid you’d choose which field you want to go to and apply after middle school, pass the necessary exams and get studying. If you wanted to go to university, you’d continue past high school.