Re: Re: [Israel.pm] Is University Really Necessary?

On 3/24/07, Nir Simionovich <[email protected]> wrote:

>   As an employer, I can surely say that for some roles I would rather take a
> person with a degree, while other roles require someone who has none. When
> taking somebody to work inside a large team, I would rather take someone
> with a degree, as I know that they are "programmed" to do what they are
> told, and their paradigms are well known and fairly predictable. When a role
> requires a somewhat of a "lone gun-man" approach, I would prefer a
> non-academic background, as this approach requires "out-of-the-box"
> thinking, an ability to go beyond the paradigms and in some cases, breaking
> a rule or two along the way.

Hey Nir,

You're being very stereotypical. You're assigning properties to
people's character based on their education.

I would say that there are good people and excellent people. The good
people can benefit from higher education (by learning to treat
problems in a structured way), and the excellent people cannot be
ruined by higher education, and can sometimes benefit from it.

I can say that I have benefited from my Technion experience (I'm a CS
BA). I've learned, mostly, humility. I used to be able to just wing it
in high school, to the extent that I would read the response to my
homework from a blank page, doing it in my head as I pretended to
read. The Technion is the first place that challenged me in a major
way and taught me that winging it is not enough, that sometimes it
does pay to sit down for a moment and do structured work.

It has nothing to do with being a "lone gunman" or thinking outside
the box or bending some rules to a well-calculated pre-breakage point.
This is where you need someone excellent, regardless of education.

Being able to both think outside the box AND enjoy the benefits of
structured work is even better. What's more, higher education gives
you a common language spoken by the top people in our industry, and as
you well know, communication is sometimes as important as mad skillz.

To sum it up: The people who "do what they're told" and are programmed
with paradigms are good, and they probably benefited from higher
education. They probably made a wise choice. The people who are
excellent, might be refined by higher education but you can't take
that edge away from them.

I have a lot of examples to show you of both kinds of people,
including people we both know.

-- Arik