BF2S Forums DAST Chat

jay is 40, i am 30. and i am not in a hurry to have children before i have finished my own education. i'm fine, old boy, don't you worry.

i still think you should perhaps be a little grateful for your excellent start in life, gratis of the taxpayer, and just a smidgeon more humbled before you start ranting on about 'taxpayer funding education'. you are a product of taxpayer-funded education and very quickly declined to 'pay it on' in the UK. instead you spend your time raving and ranting at 18 year olds who want to, shock horror, read books for their education. note that any humanities student today in the UK or australia is paying a hell of a lot more for it, and getting in far more debt for the privilege than you ever did for your degree.

shut the fuck up, basically. tilting at the same old windmills in 2020. christ.

the computer science graduate field is already flooded as it is. the earnings potential of new starters had its bottom drop out about 3-4 years ago. it was much-publicized in the news here in the UK, at least, where it has the highest unemployment rate of any degree. the same thing happened with law in the 90s and early 00s. 'do law', they said. 'law is a stable and great career', they said. fast forward 5 years and the law society is complaining that there's about 12 law graduates for every full-time contract, and it was depressing wages and creating life-long paralegals.

the same thing has happened to computer science. 'learn to code' is honestly a meme at this point. people have been saying it for like 20 years. it's not the yellow brick road that it once was. it's not even clear how 'coding' ability is going to fit in to the world of future work, where flexibility and constantly pivoting career is going to be the norm. graduates in many fields are going to have to think seriously about being lifelong independent contractors or freelancers. that type of job security really isn't for everyone. great for a childless dilb, though, living at home with his parents.

if anything, 'learn to code' is advice for people to not go to university at all. just skip the debt, outmoded academic languages, and theory that employers don't care about altogether.

Last edited by uziq (2020-06-21 00:24:31)

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

It's probably better to have a certain mastery over mathematics and the logical process of computer coding than to master any one programming language. These are things that can be utilized elsewhere.

Exactly, hence 'learn to code' not 'learn a programming language'.

all departments have to ‘adapt to survive’, please stop talking in such management platitudes as if you’re making a point.

dilbert vs the academic humanities. a riveting spectacle!

surely a change in australia’s funding model is exposing a fundamental flaw to the humanities! an existential threat!

My side point in all this anyway was that if you want to do anything at all related to computer programming, it's useful to have a working grasp of mathematics and computer logic. Makes keeping on top of new languages a bit easier than learning stuff top-down all the time. Other helpful skills involve being able to work well with other people in a project. Kind of funny when you think about it, considering how much I've seen group projects in school get panned by armchair educators who say schools should be preparing people for jobs.

I think knowing how to code and being able to get right into a programming project is rather the basic requirement for the job.

If I'd gone further down that path I'd probably have ended up trying my hand at indie game development upon seeing what it was like to get and keep that kind of job.

I have a friend who did a comp sci degree twenty years ago. Its set him up nicely, he keeps himself up to date, in fact he's an international guru and keynote speaker on something or other, he has a business with a single business partner, no employees and it allows him to spend six months of the year skiing.

But yeah I bet he wished he'd not gone to uni and really nailed Fortran when all the big companies wanted Fortran programmers.

Wait, I thought academic subjects at top notch unis were equally rigourous and valid forever.

After Brexit I think you'll have a struggle escaping Bristol's humidity and migrating to France.
You'd probably like it though, the south of of France is very erm multicultural now.

People who actually work don't care much except for your quality of work, and if you actually do any.

And there are plenty of entitled top-notch graduates flipping burgers.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-06-21 03:39:13)

Comp Sci has always had issues with the market moving faster than college courses, its been the case since the first transistor was fired up.
The theory barely changes though.

I guess the point is the govt believes physics and chemistry graduates are still more likely to be useful to the country than humanities graduates, hence they've stopped subsidising them and have moved the subsidies to subjects which are apparently useful and productive, Australia still being largely primary production and industry.

Asking universities to replace job training is a terrible idea. Asking the government to pick and choose winners and coerce people into certain degree paths is also a terrible idea. The only sane way to correlate market needs with specific degree paths is to let actuaries set loan rates based on default rates. Certain schools, and certain degrees, will have higher default rates and thus students taking out loans should pay higher rates. If nothing else, this would result in universities being more selective and abandoning programs that attract low achievers just looking for a parchment.

That out of the way, job training is not the responsibility of universities. There's no way for them to keep up, and they shouldn't want to anyway. A university degree is supposed to be foundational. It's where you go to learn theory and ideas, and not all of them will be useful in a job setting. So what? I had one elective in college that taught me rudimentary design, the rest was all courses in materials science, thermodynamics, fluids, machine design etc. and yes, humanities courses as well. No one should expect a recent grad to be fully formed and ready to go. Universities are not, and should not be technical schools.

Last edited by Jay (2020-06-21 05:09:50)

I see far too many people for whom education ended when they walked across the stage. For those people, a college education was a waste of time. They were just checking the box for white collar employment.

Lastly, the push to make every academic field have some useful place in society is also what has led to the present state where universities have trained people to be professionally aggrieved. Good work, utilitarians.