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

On Mon, Mar 26, 2007, ik_5 wrote about "[hackers-il] Re: [Israel.pm] Is University Really Necessary?":
> The thing is, that university is for rich people, that can invest all
> of their time into having some sort of diploma. And the higher you go,
> the harder for you is to find a job, and places such as the Technion
> will also prohibit people from working while making a degree higher
> then the BA (or BS etc..)

If your statement is true (and I have strong objections to it), it is doubly
true for free software activity. Writing free software requires either
being paid for it (which means being relatively well-off) or a lot of free
time. A poor person working his *** off and spending whatever time is left
to care for his N children, has absolutely zero chance of succeeding in the
world of free software.

> So why does “spill all your knowledge without interruption, at a
> giving time” is the right way ? How about “Arik, please write me a
> program that calculates the sum of all the digits of PI, oh and please
> submit it by tomorrow”  is not such a good checking to see your
> knowledge, and if you can handle giving tasks on time etc.. ?

Of course it does, and many courses have such longer exercises in addition
to, or completely replacing, the exams. In fact, at least half of the courses
I took in my masters degree (in the Technion, Mathematics) were like this -
with no test at all. But exercises have their problems too - they take up
a lot of time (so again we're back to students needing to be supported by
some rich person :-)), they are often much harder than tests (because
teachers assume the students have all the time in the world, and have access
to books, so they can't just give an easy exercise). And of course, if the
student group is large (not the 15 people in my math courses, it becomes
almost impossible to make sure that people don't copy the exercises from
each other, so a teacher basing 100% of the grade on them needs to be
extraordinarily naive...

> So why is it so hard for you and many other people that did go the the
> university that some people like to learn, but they can learn only by
> doing it on their own, with trail and error ?

Because the saying goes, "Learn from other people's mistakes - you won't
live long enough to make them all on your own"... Studying in the university
is one way to learn from other people's decades (or even centuries) of
mistakes and successes. Of course there are other ways to do it - you can
just read books. Most of the CS I know (as opposed to the Math I know), I
read from books, not from frontal lectures. But how am I supposed to prove
to a skeptic that I really read all those books? This is what a degree does
for you - it's a *proof* that you studied the material, with some sort of
measure on how well the professors thought you understood the material.
Surely you could have learnt the same material other ways - but then you'll
need to figure out other ways to prove that, to a skeptical employer.

The book "Freakonomics" has an interesting section about a similar issue -
of the value people place on confirmed information (in this case, a "degree"
is just confirmation that a person learned something). As an example, he
gives the fact that a 1 day old car is sold at a price much lower than a
new car. Why? Because the buyer can't be sure why the seller is selling
the car; If he was sure that the reason is that the buyer has to suddenly
move abroad like he claimed, even a 1000 shekel saving would have been enough;
But maybe the seller is lying? Maybe there's something wrong in the car?
Not being able to confirm this information, the buyer places a lower value
on the car. Similarly, an employer often places a lower value on a applicant
without a degree - just because he cannot really confirm that the applicant
knows what he's claiming. If there are other ways to confirm this (e.g.,
previous work experience), the applicant's value goes back up.

> And I can continue giving you filters for people ... the thing is,
> that the above filters are much better then  having a diploma. I know

Except, none of the filters you suggest are verifiable. If word got around
that employers liked people who program at home, every applicant will start
saying, "yes, I program 3 hours a day at home", and nobody will ever be caught
lying. You need verifiable claims (even if the employer usually won't try
to verify them). One such claim is a degree. Another is experience at
previous work. A third is experience at free software (which is "out there"
and can be looked at). I know several people who were hired for highly
lucrative and desired jobs because they had an excellent record on just one
of the three - one person with an excellent degree but no experience, a
second person with no degree and no free-software but work experience from
previous high-tech companies, and a third person with no degree and no work
experience, but a lot of free-software experience. The problem is that if
you have only one of these qualifications, you may find yourself competing
against someone with more than one. For example, if you just have free
software experience, you'll have a hard time competing with someone who has
free software experience *and* work experience *and* a degree.

> a person that have a BS degree, but he only knows things that giving
> to him by educational places, such as schools and universities, but
> nothing further then that. So why would you prefer someone like this,
> over someone that does not have any degree but does have good
> answerers to my filters ?

Of course not. In my previous job, I interviewed people, and I interviewed
many people like this, who could recite useless facts from the course they
studied the last semester, but had no interest or knowledge of what's
happening outside these courses. Obviously, we didn't pick these people.

> Then it means that having a diploma does not mean you know something
> on the subjects you have learned, it means only that you know how to
> get a diploma (what about buying them, or something similar ?)

The hallmark of a high-reputation university is that the only way to
"get a diploma" is to learn the material. In the Technion (at least when
I studied there, over a decade ago) you couldn't get a diploma (with high
grades) by becoming a better slacker, by bribing the teachers, by cheating,
or anything of this sort. Your only way to "learn to get a diploma" is to
learn the material the professors wanted you to learn - which in my case
was a whole lot of Mathematical knowledge which the professors decided every
Mathematician needs to know. The whole process more-or-less guarantees that
anyone that finished the Mathematics degree with a high grade has to be
good at math - there's simply no other way to come across these grades.

Of course, in other universities or departments, the situation might be
different. In some fake universities, your money means more than your
studies. This is why employers don't look as highly at a graduate of
Latvia (or whatever was that fake university which was recently in the news)
as they do at a graduate of the technion.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |        Monday, Mar 26 2007, 7 Nisan 5767
nyh-TS7m/[email protected]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |We are Microsoft. You will be
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |assimilated. Resistance is futile.


 
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