The same energy as “entry level job, 10 years of work experience needed”.
I had terrible imposter syndrome when I landed a sw dev job. I thought everyone could tell that I didn’t belong. I was / am self-taught. Everyone had CS degrees. I thought I was a fraud. I later recalibrated to realize that I’d earned it even harder without a degree. But I had to get that spot to be able to leverage my knowledge. There are probably people who know a lot more than me getting rejected because they don’t have the right credentials.
I never managed to land a job in the field but of the 4 interviews I ever got actually related to IT every single one mentioned that I was technically overqualified for these entry-level jobs despite never officially going to school or working in IT, one of them called and had the lead back-ens guy come and sit in since I was a potential fit for an entirely different and much higher up role
Of course that’s probably the reason I was never hired over other options (as well as why I didn’t get many interviews, who wants the guy with 0 education if the other 20 applicants do?) and so now every time I do IT work for home I just get super sad. It’s taking a lot of therapy to undo that and it’s not reeeeally working lol
Brother, recently i landed my first official job as system administrator (I’m still in university as EE), even though i know almost all things, i just don’t know nuances of how they adapted these technologies we know of in their specific case, and i am too felt terrible imposter syndrome
CS degrees, at least in my experience, prep you for a bunch of things that honestly don’t matter too much. Like, I don’t think knowing what P versus NP means really helps me at my job. I think learning to use build tools and frameworks rather than just the language itself would’ve been more useful.
The best professor I had in that regard at college was younger and also working at a “real” company while also teaching (I believe he was getting a master’s degree). He taught us about Spring and Maven and had us make a REST API. The only downside is that this course was about making GUIs and the majority of it was about Swing which nobody really uses. I have a feeling he added the other assignment because it was.more relevant to things most folks do with Java.
It’s because computer science degrees aren’t really programming degrees.
A computer science degree sets you up to be a scientist, most common dev jobs are just glorified Lego sets patching libraries together and constructing queries. There is skill, knowledge, and effort in those jobs, but they are fundamentally different.
Most common software dev jobs are closer to the end user than not.
Don’t think I’ve ever actually heard a company say “forget everything you learned in college”.
…there were a couple things I learned in nursing school that I benefited from forgetting. Mostly the racism and sexism.
because they don’t
Its not about learning, its about paying your dues to the church of capitalism
For the US, id certainly agree with you. College is free here and some employers require it (less and less though). A coworker once told me a degree shows you can be serious for one thing and see it through. It shows you are capable of achieving a goal.
I believe your coworker is right to some extent. Getting a degree is a lot of work. It demonstrates your ability to do work and get things done… Among other things.
Having any degree/post secondary diploma, generally says you have the ability to work on something without being forced into it. IMO, HS is generally expected and more or less forced on everyone, so it doesn’t really count.
While I believe that’s the motivation behind needing a degree to get a job, I also, personally, don’t agree with it. There’s plenty of hardworking people who never even considered college/uni after HS. Some of them are much more motivated and hardworking than the people I knew from my time in college.
I work in IT, and see degree requirements on all sorts of job postings. It’s bullshit, since there’s haven’t been IT centric degrees until very recently, outside of CS/development. Most of these jobs don’t require any programming whatsoever. They’ll be for helpdesk, system administration, networking, etc. Programming knowhow might help but it’s definitely not required. I don’t need Java, or C++, or Python, or any other language to know how to click buttons on dialogs in Windows.
that’s still such an ableist take. (as someone in the usa)
Employers are inherently ableist. They discriminate against people who are unable to do the job. They also discriminate for reasons unrelated to job performance, but then measuring job performance is very difficult even when someone has been working at a company for years.
Note that in professional sports and in Hollywood it’s quite easy to measure performance. Accordingly, you see athletes and actors compensated in a way that’s much more in line with their job performance than other industries.
Can you expand on this? I’m curious what you find ableist about it.
some people are just unable to go to college due to finances, physical/mental health, or other things like being a single parent. i was never able to go to college because i couldn’t mentally handle the stress due to serious trauma of various kinds that i was just coming out of. i couldn’t find a job to adequately support me and i had health issues and undiagnosed learning disabilities preventing me from having the energy or time to focus even on part time studies. i had no family, so no safety net. i tried taking college thru a work program but the college ended up being unaccredited.
and keep in mind some people have several/all of these things to deal with.
so to say that seeing someone went thru college shows they can stick to something, it’s negating all the hidden struggles that the rest of us work every day to get thru. I’m on year 7 of my current job, so i can clearly commit. but saying that college is the measuring stick is kinda disrespectful for those who had a different path.
Imo university most important task is to teach you the basics and how to accumulate and use the knowledge you need to do a job.
Yeah, some of the computer science theory I learned occasionally comes in handy when I’m reasoning about problems or when I’m picking apart some spec. My husband who attended a code school instead is a perfectly apt developer, but he struggles more. College also just gave me the time and resources to get a survey of knowledge outside of formal coursework. On the job, I tend to go more in-depth on topics closely related to the job.
Nursing school was basically,“here’s how to not kill anyone while you spend a year working to become a nurse.” They give you the license when you prove you’re unlikely to kill someone, but you don’t really have any idea what you’re doing until at least a year in and even after that 90% of nursing knowledge is still gained out on the floor.
Most university level nursing education is either specific role related (teaching or management) or useless fluff, especially standalone bachelor’s programs (you already have and have been working under an associate’s). Even NP school is mostly fluff too though unfortunately. The assumption is that the candidate is a senior nurse with several decades of experience, but in practice that’s not always true (I maintain that new grads going to NP school should be banned; it’s dangerous).
We need to figure out college in the US. There’s way too much dead weight meant to justify tuition in most programs. I’m sorry but I don’t need to know how to write research papers to do half the fields taught in college. Dropping that dead weight would make college far more attainable for so many people.
If we can’t stop businesses from requiring degrees, and we can’t, then we need a hard look at what’s in a degree.
Also, the government needs to back off requiring degrees for so much stuff too. For example they want a degree to tell people nearing retirement age what their options are and to do the paperwork. I’m sorry but that’s not what college is about. Unless there’s a technical need that cannot be fulfilled with certifications or practical tests, (code a coffee machine for me, and build the stack), it should not require a degree.
Going by job listings you’d think literally everyone other than construction, military, retail, food, and security, has a degree.
“Forget everything you know about slipcovers!”
