Yeah, the world is a social place. There's a reason European royalty sent their kids to etiquette classes, and even these days fraternities and sororities have formals. That's how the world works. Someone that's surprised by this in their 20s or 30s was failed by their parents or immediate community and this has nothing to do with college.
You need to be nice to people, you need to be friendly, you need to know people, attend events, be fun and jovial, etc. Politeness and relationships are the underpinning of our entire society.
But if you're introverted (like me), this takes very deliberate practice. Over the past few years, I've posted in every monthly "who's hiring" thread here on HN as just an exercise and to meet people (mostly local to LA). I've met dozens of really cool entrepreneurs, fellow engineers, VPs, C-levels, and other smart folks. Most of these connections will go nowhere, but I wanted to practice being more outgoing by grabbing a beer or coffee and talking about life/technology/anything with strangers. I was able to put together an investor I met with a friend of mine that's trying to raise money; was able to pitch some startup ideas to folks that worked in that domain; but more importantly grow my rolodex and become more comfortable with the art of networking.
The problem is that we're being sold the 'meritocracy' narrative in the academical and technical circles. You often see it in HN discussions about hiring decisions (reasoning involving the "top 1% programmers" without any indication as to what that means exactly). If you have the introverted, dilligent, keeping-your-head-down, got-high-marks-at-school mentality that I assume is prevalent on HN, it can come as a shock that despite following all the 'rules' you don't get to 'win at life'. Learning that there's no such thing as 'rules' (or at least, none of the rules worth following are public or written down or even fixed) or 'winning' isn't something that can be taught in class. 'Meritocracy' is the illusion that life, prestige and status attainment somehow work like getting high grades at school and we'd do ourselves a collective service by getting rid of the notion and viewing life and its opportunities in a more pragmatic way.
Or you simply view being sociable as part of Merit. In fact I'd wager that to do well in almost any job you need to be sociable. Merit is not just about technical ability.
Pretty much everyone has incomplete world views in their 20s/30s and gets a reality check as they make decisions and reap the consequences. It's just a matter of what particular lessons your parents / schooling / experiences failed to flesh out until then.
Parents only one or two life experience, and likely in a narrow range dictated by socioeconomic circumstances. They also have their own baggage in addition to any wisdom gained, otherwise we would be listening to them more.
I have no advice on how to overcome the wisdom/experience gap and unrepaired damage accumulated over time.
I totally agree. We live in a world that only values some very specific types of diversity, indeed. Sociability is not one of them. If you're not like the norm you have to put in effort to be more like the norm: you don't want to go to team socials, or go to spinning classes with a VP of engineering? Sucks to be you. And not only that, we'll tell you that it's your fault that it sucks!
It's that we live in a two-face system. The schools, companies, etc have policies that are supposed to eliminate or control bias. They claim it's a meritocracy. But then they tout having a network, "who you know vs what you know", etc. So why are bribes, gifts, etc tightly controlled and even illegal in many areas? So one type of bias is ok, but others are not?
You end up with people like me who are told by a friend that they will open up a senior dev position just for you. That means the other people who post to that role are putting effort into the interview process but all for nothing since I'm pre-selected. So I don't ask them to open posting so I don't take the position. So I think these backroom deals are wrong, have been taught that by society, and so I get screwed like every other unconnected person.
I don't think it is only about being personable. That is obviously very important but it is as much about being able to insert yourself into someone else's life and help them. You meet someone, they have a problem, and you can say: "Oh, I know X or Y". That is very big, being a connector to lots of people with skills is the same as having those skills yourself.
But I agree totally. Most of my family worked in the public sector, I had no idea about any of this stuff until I started trying to get a job. And some of the people who I grew up with who were totally incompetent but were sociable/well-connected ended up doing very well (I went to a private school, so my sample is quite interesting: I know a guy who was very smart, went to college, trained in law at the top law school in my country, worked hard, but couldn't get it together ended up becoming a chef...meanwhile a guy who got straight Ds, scraped into uni, did no work whilst there is working as a PM at a top fund manager...they don't teach you this part of life in school).
On the OP: college isn't real life, it isn't anything like real life at all because you don't need to be an expert or have knowledge to extract economic value (and that isn't a bad thing at all). As someone who went to private school and saw a decent amount of privilege, it didn't helped kids who came from poorer backgrounds. These kids went to college (which probably would have happened anyway, they are smart) but most (not all tbf) struggled in the real world because they had poor social skills. I have a long list of utterly mediocre human beings who are punching well above their weight in life (and tbf, this is a bad thing...the guy I mention above shouldn't be managing anyone else's money...not to be harsh, he just shouldn't), and a list of one or two people who came from a poorer background and got out. I think that is down to a combination of socialization, understanding business, and nepotism (I wouldn't overestimate the latter, all of the people who punch above their weight had the ability to walk into a room and make another person feel like they had known them forever).
Sadly this is true. I've had conversations with very smart people who can't find a job. They often attribute it to some hiring shortcoming or bias, and sometimes that's the case. But for a couple of these people the reason was obvious: they were not "presentable" and didn't have a personality that would enable them to function well in a team, i.e. they didn't dress properly, didn't look after their personal hygiene, and were quite unpleasant to talk to.
>i.e. they didn't dress properly, didn't look after their personal hygiene, and were quite unpleasant to talk to.
While I have not (thankfully) been in a hiring role for some time now, I can confirm that these three factors dq’d a ton of candidates when I was. Here is the reality…there are not a lot of roles in medium-corporate companies where a single interview with a single person gets you hired. So if you don’t tick that presentable box, even if you are technically skilled, I have to have a conversation with the next interviewer that goes like this: “I know this candidate comes off as a pompous ass with rumpled cloths and smells like feet, but…”
You better be beyond brilliant for me to sell you despite shortcomings that I have to caveat to the next interviewer.
Seems like there's a competitive advantage for some company to make room for people who are not neurotypical. Though I wonder what that would look like.
Those are also important factors in being successful in jobs; you need to co-operate with your team-mates, stakeholders, and leadership, and to do that well involves having good rapport with them.
Because the required level is shit. And it has been downhill since the implementation of modern math and the rejection of math in the modern era or elitist path at school. We see it everywhere and especially in France or Switzerland. 10 years old native kids who can't read fluently. 15 years old who would write 1/2+1/3=2/5. They will keep this level of skills through the end of high school and master degree thanks to grade inflation and/or curve notation.
Public school is at at least 2 levels if not more. Elite will remain in their own world. Rich will just pour money on their kids education, middle class and the poor are fucked.
In France, most 18 years old would fail the brevet (end of middle school degree) as it was given in 1950s/60s. All the exams are pure jokes, and we see it in international education survey (PISA or even better TIMMS, level are dropping beside for the top 5%)
Kids up to 11 years old in France are graded in colors, not numbers or A-F grading.
Also, baccalaureat now includes has a “Grand oral”, an standup exam where women succeed much better, where presentation matters way more than depth, and where positive discrimination can take place without leaving a trail.
On the other hand most people in the 50/60s would also fail the brevet (or baccalaureat for that matter). I can't speak for the math level but I do know that school in the 60s required you to learn every single prefecture and chef-lieu by heart in geography classes, and the name of every single bone and organ in biology classes. Sometimes modern reforms aren't all that bad.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. More people should fail. We as a civilization deserve higher standards than what can be achieved by the average student.
Was curious so looked it up in PISA[1] and TIMMS[2]. I agree the bottom deciles are being left behind educationally, but I disagree with the implicit sentiment that employers are able to objectively evaluate the intellectual achievement level of their applicants. That would be attributing the labor market with more meritocracy than it has.
Seems like college fails to live up to being “the great educator” in too many cases too. For those of you who interview new grads, what percent of the time do you interview someone with a degree in the field who can’t do the most basic things in the field? In my experience, it’s pretty high.
Even at the college level, education doesn’t seem to extend past “teaching to the test” horrifyingly often (horrifying, given the amount of time and money our society is spending on it).
I took a few English classes as electives, and it was astonishing to see the number of English students (in a third-year class) who struggled with basic grammar and composition. The majority of the students wrote at what I'd consider early high school level. I don't know why. Maybe the professors were all afraid of giving bad grades, or the freshman-level intro classes weren't filling the role they were supposed to. But those students were going into a lot of debt to coast through easy classes that don't teach them the fundamentals of their degree.
I saw signs of that academic dysfunction from other departments too. This was at a very non-prestigious state school, but that's the type of school that most students attend. There must be millions of people in the US walking around with degrees in subjects they don't know much about.
Some of my classmates were in nature just not cut out for engineering. Several would even tell you as much. But there's an implied contract- work hard, make the grade, get the degree. It might ultimately be more merciful if students with no aptitude could be ejected from the program- but how do you make this selection?
My alma mater didn't really push internships, but in retrospect perhaps a strong internship program would help students self select against employers.
What is the alternative, though? Even if schools taught actual skills and knowledge, and didn’t focus on teaching to the test, we’d still want and need some method to verify that they are doing so, and that the students actually mastered the material being taught. This means at least some kind of tests.
In my opinion, the problem is not with the testing regime, or even “teaching to the test”. It’s the tests themselves that suck. The top priorities for tests designed and used today are ease and efficiency at mass administration, ease of grading, and reduction of subjective in favor of objective measures. Is it any wonder that multiple choice questions are king?
When I went to university in Eastern Europe (majored in Mathematics), in many courses we had a final oral exam. The professor would drill into you, and would not get distracted by regurgitation of irrelevant memorized stanzas, he wanted a clear explanation of everything he asked about. This approach to testing is not perfect — for one, time limitations only allow to cover rather small part of the topic, and you might get lucky to get something you actually know. At the same time, there is really no way to teach and study to an oral exam other than actual understanding of the subject matter. However, this is insanely inefficient for the grader: this makes testing a full week’s worth of constant work, as opposed to few hours of just sitting on an exam, and then few more hours grading (even shorter if it’s mostly multiple choice problems). No wonder teachers prefer the latter.
Yeah I originally wrote this a while back and recently saw that press on twitter and HN. It's still the best example I've got so far, do you know of other programs that are doing a better job than Lambda?
This is why I think college should be saved for the adults. Because, sorry, this is a pretty basic lesson in adulthood. Competence is only a small part of getting hired. Contacts and charisma are a huge huge factor. If you don't understand this, you should probably take a year or two to work, learn a bit about the world, then go to college. I've met so many students who have been judged purely on their grades, who then encounter the job market and are mystified to discover that their grades matter zero, zip, zilch. It's not their fault; that's what they've been taught in high school and earlier.
I've tried to explain that for 99% of CS majors, your grades do not matter. If you're spending your time in college constantly studying and worrying about getting an A in your test because oh no your GPA will be a 3.8 otherwise, you haven't really assessed what's important. Go to college; do your best to learn because the material is useful and pretty neat; socialize, have fun; then find a job. That's it. A 4.0 isn't that important.
Yeah, there’s a big difference between “kid with a CS degree” and “kid who interned at Microsoft for 3 summers and knows industry dev practices well”. This is why internships matter; it doesn’t even have to be a well-known company as long as it teaches you how to work on a dev team (git, agile workflow, DevOps, cloud, etc).
In my experience it’s the tools and tech around working as more than a singleton. That’s the job. To be blunt, most industry jobs do not require a deep computer science background, so the content of the degree is worth less than the experience it gets you access to.
I was the "kid with a CS degree". My experience interning was "There actually aren't many tech companies in your city and it's 2008 so no one is hiring"
I was a broke student so I couldn't exactly afford to relocate for a summer internship, lose my apartment, store all of my belongings and such.
I started my career with basically no experience, spent my last money on a deposit and first months rent to relocate to a new city for work after getting a job. Lost that job four months later as the company failed to meet the projections they had.
It's been a rough road. I'm doing pretty good now, but overall my bachelor of computer science definitely did not feel like an equalizer.
It’s crazy how variable experiences of that time are across geography; I was living in a high-growth city at the time (where I went to undergrad) and we basically went from 30% Y/Y growth to 20% for a couple years, so we never really even felt the recession. I didn’t even have a CS degree but they were hiring anyone with a pulse and PHP skills.
Luck plays into career success to an incredible degree. I was just in the right place, right time to build a long career. I’m certainly not very talented or hard-working.
College was once a signal of competence. That cannot be true when you push half the population through the system; the normal distribution is still the same. Doubly so given the commodification of education, which creates perverse incentives for phenomena like grade inflation, further reducing the value of a degree as a signal.
The first assumption that needs to change in order to revert the status of the college degree is the well meaning but false idea that competence can be taught to anyone. It gives people a false sense of optimism which frequently results in angst, debt, and wasted years.
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Yeah, the world is a social place. There's a reason European royalty sent their kids to etiquette classes, and even these days fraternities and sororities have formals. That's how the world works. Someone that's surprised by this in their 20s or 30s was failed by their parents or immediate community and this has nothing to do with college.
You need to be nice to people, you need to be friendly, you need to know people, attend events, be fun and jovial, etc. Politeness and relationships are the underpinning of our entire society.
But if you're introverted (like me), this takes very deliberate practice. Over the past few years, I've posted in every monthly "who's hiring" thread here on HN as just an exercise and to meet people (mostly local to LA). I've met dozens of really cool entrepreneurs, fellow engineers, VPs, C-levels, and other smart folks. Most of these connections will go nowhere, but I wanted to practice being more outgoing by grabbing a beer or coffee and talking about life/technology/anything with strangers. I was able to put together an investor I met with a friend of mine that's trying to raise money; was able to pitch some startup ideas to folks that worked in that domain; but more importantly grow my rolodex and become more comfortable with the art of networking.
I have no advice on how to overcome the wisdom/experience gap and unrepaired damage accumulated over time.
You end up with people like me who are told by a friend that they will open up a senior dev position just for you. That means the other people who post to that role are putting effort into the interview process but all for nothing since I'm pre-selected. So I don't ask them to open posting so I don't take the position. So I think these backroom deals are wrong, have been taught that by society, and so I get screwed like every other unconnected person.
There is no world where social skills somehow are ‘bias’. They are core.
But I agree totally. Most of my family worked in the public sector, I had no idea about any of this stuff until I started trying to get a job. And some of the people who I grew up with who were totally incompetent but were sociable/well-connected ended up doing very well (I went to a private school, so my sample is quite interesting: I know a guy who was very smart, went to college, trained in law at the top law school in my country, worked hard, but couldn't get it together ended up becoming a chef...meanwhile a guy who got straight Ds, scraped into uni, did no work whilst there is working as a PM at a top fund manager...they don't teach you this part of life in school).
On the OP: college isn't real life, it isn't anything like real life at all because you don't need to be an expert or have knowledge to extract economic value (and that isn't a bad thing at all). As someone who went to private school and saw a decent amount of privilege, it didn't helped kids who came from poorer backgrounds. These kids went to college (which probably would have happened anyway, they are smart) but most (not all tbf) struggled in the real world because they had poor social skills. I have a long list of utterly mediocre human beings who are punching well above their weight in life (and tbf, this is a bad thing...the guy I mention above shouldn't be managing anyone else's money...not to be harsh, he just shouldn't), and a list of one or two people who came from a poorer background and got out. I think that is down to a combination of socialization, understanding business, and nepotism (I wouldn't overestimate the latter, all of the people who punch above their weight had the ability to walk into a room and make another person feel like they had known them forever).
If you are in the bottom, say, 10% in these factors, employers will pick other candidates. And obviously, they won't tell you why.
While I have not (thankfully) been in a hiring role for some time now, I can confirm that these three factors dq’d a ton of candidates when I was. Here is the reality…there are not a lot of roles in medium-corporate companies where a single interview with a single person gets you hired. So if you don’t tick that presentable box, even if you are technically skilled, I have to have a conversation with the next interviewer that goes like this: “I know this candidate comes off as a pompous ass with rumpled cloths and smells like feet, but…”
You better be beyond brilliant for me to sell you despite shortcomings that I have to caveat to the next interviewer.
After her PhD, she was writing cover letters that were screaming "I hate the recruitment process".
One day, something clicked. Her next cover letter read like the first chapter in her bibliography. And one month later, she had too much work. :)
Makes me think I should start a company focusing on recruiting in that community.
How do you know if you are in the bottom 10%?
If you can't look around the room and identify who the bottom 10% are, you're the bottom 10%.
Public school is at at least 2 levels if not more. Elite will remain in their own world. Rich will just pour money on their kids education, middle class and the poor are fucked.
In France, most 18 years old would fail the brevet (end of middle school degree) as it was given in 1950s/60s. All the exams are pure jokes, and we see it in international education survey (PISA or even better TIMMS, level are dropping beside for the top 5%)
Also, baccalaureat now includes has a “Grand oral”, an standup exam where women succeed much better, where presentation matters way more than depth, and where positive discrimination can take place without leaving a trail.
One fault is the drop in teaching hours : https://www.reseau-canope.fr/musee/collections/cache/a65f40c... this is a schedule from 1952.
We are lying to kids and parents : https://twitter.com/loysbonod/status/1356128734508679168
Or Pierre Colmez writting : https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~pierre.colmez/lettre.pdf and https://images.math.cnrs.fr/R-eduire-les-in-egalit-es.html?l...
[1] https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/PISA2018_CN_FRA.pdf [2] https://nces.ed.gov/timss/results19/index.asp#/math/trends
Even at the college level, education doesn’t seem to extend past “teaching to the test” horrifyingly often (horrifying, given the amount of time and money our society is spending on it).
I saw signs of that academic dysfunction from other departments too. This was at a very non-prestigious state school, but that's the type of school that most students attend. There must be millions of people in the US walking around with degrees in subjects they don't know much about.
My alma mater didn't really push internships, but in retrospect perhaps a strong internship program would help students self select against employers.
In my opinion, the problem is not with the testing regime, or even “teaching to the test”. It’s the tests themselves that suck. The top priorities for tests designed and used today are ease and efficiency at mass administration, ease of grading, and reduction of subjective in favor of objective measures. Is it any wonder that multiple choice questions are king?
When I went to university in Eastern Europe (majored in Mathematics), in many courses we had a final oral exam. The professor would drill into you, and would not get distracted by regurgitation of irrelevant memorized stanzas, he wanted a clear explanation of everything he asked about. This approach to testing is not perfect — for one, time limitations only allow to cover rather small part of the topic, and you might get lucky to get something you actually know. At the same time, there is really no way to teach and study to an oral exam other than actual understanding of the subject matter. However, this is insanely inefficient for the grader: this makes testing a full week’s worth of constant work, as opposed to few hours of just sitting on an exam, and then few more hours grading (even shorter if it’s mostly multiple choice problems). No wonder teachers prefer the latter.
Bad example. Lambda School had some pretty bad press on HN about having lower completion rates than advertised, etc.
Dead Comment
I've tried to explain that for 99% of CS majors, your grades do not matter. If you're spending your time in college constantly studying and worrying about getting an A in your test because oh no your GPA will be a 3.8 otherwise, you haven't really assessed what's important. Go to college; do your best to learn because the material is useful and pretty neat; socialize, have fun; then find a job. That's it. A 4.0 isn't that important.
In my experience it’s the tools and tech around working as more than a singleton. That’s the job. To be blunt, most industry jobs do not require a deep computer science background, so the content of the degree is worth less than the experience it gets you access to.
I was a broke student so I couldn't exactly afford to relocate for a summer internship, lose my apartment, store all of my belongings and such.
I started my career with basically no experience, spent my last money on a deposit and first months rent to relocate to a new city for work after getting a job. Lost that job four months later as the company failed to meet the projections they had.
It's been a rough road. I'm doing pretty good now, but overall my bachelor of computer science definitely did not feel like an equalizer.
Luck plays into career success to an incredible degree. I was just in the right place, right time to build a long career. I’m certainly not very talented or hard-working.
The first assumption that needs to change in order to revert the status of the college degree is the well meaning but false idea that competence can be taught to anyone. It gives people a false sense of optimism which frequently results in angst, debt, and wasted years.