Isn’t there a strong argument that we put too many students in debt with a partially completed or useless degree in a well meaning push for “college for all”? The triumph the author describes - an increase in colleges - came at the expense of a reduction in vocational schools and programs.
Nearly half of college graduates age 22-27 are underemployed (i.e. such that bachelors degrees have jobs that only require a high school diploma or less):
According to https://archive.is/Gyl7y the usual suspects do poorly, such as performance arts, but also things like criminal justice, environmental studies and many of the STEM majors are near or over the 50% mark as well.
People trot out the "college grads earn more" lines ad nauseum but the numbers haven't been looking good for that argument for years.
> all of the STEM majors are near or over the 50% mark as well.
I am not seeing that? Computer Science, to use an easy example, is 19.1% underemployed. Bad, but not 50%. Even restricted to 'recent graduates' it does not look that grim? If I'm misreading the data, please correct me. I have kids approaching the age where they will be considering post-secondary choices so I am trying to keep an eye on things.
Edit: apologies, I just noticed my original comment said "all" instead of "many". That definitely isn't case as you noted.
Original:
Animal and plant sciences: 53%
Biochem: 42
Biology: 51
Chemistry: 42
Engineering technologies: 44
Medical technician: 47
Miscellaneous Biological Science: 47
Miscellaneous Technologies: 49
Those were the ones that caught my eye. I'm assuming the "miscellaneous" categories are for higher degrees in very niche or specific sub fields.
STEM covers all of science, math and tech outside of medicine/ health care, so the computer science and engineering tracks are okay. Even then, I'd be a little suspect, as I'd heard elsewhere that the number of graduates has increased by 110% but the market for jobs hasn't. The good old days of ZIRP and wildly too-small talent pool are likely over for good.
To my own discredit, I do often forget the S in STEM ;-). Thank you for improving the completeness of my knowledge with data.
I've long been under the impression (might be quite wrong, of course) that a number of science fields suffer from a problem where bachelor's degrees have very little practical value because the career expectation in the field is a graduate degree.
This is probably bias on my part since my most direct exposure to the phenomenon is a couple of my extended family members who got degrees in biology but then exited higher education. They can't get jobs in biology, they are stuck working jobs that would have been just as attainable right out of high school.
Wouldn't it also mean, that while ⅕ of CS grads initially work as support (for example), the people with just the education needed for that (vocational school) didn't get that job, because it went to someone with a better degree?
So it's not that bad after all. At least you got the job, while somebody else didn't.
This is just me thinking. Never been to the US and I'm guessing that's what the discussion is about.
Not necessarily. Many employers who don't require a college degree can be reluctant to hire someone who is "over qualified" because they are more likely to quit as soon as they get a better job, and they are more likely to keep looking for one.
With that said, there's also a lot of jobs that list a college degree as a requirement that absolutely don't need one whatsoever. I suspect this is largely to cut down on the number of applicants.
Back when applications were done on paper, I recall turning one in to a prospective employer, who set it on a stack of paper around 15cm tall, which just so happened to be right next to a trash can. Now that you can apply to 50 jobs in an hour because job application sites basically pre-fill applications for you, it's insane what hiring is like in any city bigger than a small town.
there was almost certainly a demand issue with graduates of technical schools. Also increased privatization leading to some really awful scammy institutions. I personally went to college and washed out, and would have been much better served by getting schooled in the trades, but I think this is really a pretty bad multi-dimensional corner we've backed ourselves into (primary, secondary, and post-graduate schooling, employment).
Discussions and concerns we simply dont have in Europe. There are costs, but nothing significant from public schools themselves, rather just accommodation, food, travel etc. Some folks still go to private ones, but those are mostly not for extra prestige but rather different focus, or those who are not that great students themselves.
Unpopular here, but I judge degree of development / maturity of societies on 2 major factors : 1) how it can take care of the vulnerable members in need - mostly heathcare, with som basic social support to help you bridge between jobs, plus obviously (mostly self-earned but managed by state) retirement; and 2) how well it invests into its future via education on all levels. Education aint luxury but empowering basic need. The question then is, how much does given country wants to empower potentially all its citizens.
It costs something, but doesnt have to be ridiculous. Apart from infrastructure and basic security & defense(since we have russia trying to conquer us all in Europe) the only really valuable investments.
> Unpopular here, but I judge degree of development / maturity of societies on 2 major factors : 1) how it can take care of the vulnerable members in need - mostly heathcare, with som basic social support to help you bridge between jobs, plus obviously (mostly self-earned but managed by state) retirement; and 2) how well it invests into its future via education on all levels. Education aint luxury but empowering basic need. The question then is, how much does given country wants to empower potentially all its citizens.
The test of Rawls' "Veil of Ignorance" is a pretty good way of cutting through the details and getting to what matters: if you had to be reborn as someone in any country (or, had to choose between two, if we wanted to e.g. rank them), and you couldn't control anything about the circumstances (race, social status, money, intelligence level, disabled or not, et c.) but were leaving it up to a die roll based on the demographics of the place—which would you choose? The ones you're more-inclined to choose are the better ones.
And yeah, stuff like ensuring the worst-likely-case for a resident isn't that bad, and that you get a significant helping hand to improve your lot, helps a ton to make a country more appealing, in this sort of thought experiment. Far, far more than e.g. making sure the few very-best-off really run away with the prize (which improves the appeal of such a place basically not at all).
In the US there've historically been great work and wealth-generating opportunities that weren't as readily available in Europe. That seems to come at the price of less safety net if something goes wrong e:g health problems, disability, job loss. In recent times Europe has become more like the US in the sense of cutting safety nets while being more entrepreneurial. I think this'll lead to less people choosing to move to the US from Europe, compounded by US now having possibly less opportunities and an administration that makes even well qualified legal immigrants feel unsafe. Which will become self-fulfilling, the opportunities of the future will increasingly be outside the US. As to why more Americans haven't historically moved to Europe, my guess would be its simply unawareness of how actually for a lot of people it'd give a better quality of life.
Beaming energy always sucks. Without some very fundamental discoveries in physics nobody will every make this work economically. This isn't just an engineering problem, it's a physics problem.
I recently rented a tesla from hertz - I had made sure my hotel had charging in it's parking lot. I arrive at the hotel to find that the tesla was missing it's j1772 adapter, which is what the hotel charger required. I had to hunt down a supercharger and hang out there for an hour. Pretty lame. When I returned the car I complained and was told that there is no guarantee from hertz that the adapter will be included. Without the guarantee renting an a tesla is a scary prospect - I probably won't do it again.
this from someone who has a model y at home as my daily driver and I love it.
the board was about to vaporize employee equity overnight - the secondary was days away and would have been life changing for many employees and significant for all of them. SA is probably a great a leader but the financial incentives for the employees to support him and ensure the secondary went through were huuuuuuge
Thats putting the carriage before the horse. How did the valuation get there, particularly when it did it before M$off, GOOG, etc?
It was the team. Who put the team together?
We will never know if OpenAI would have succeeded w/o SA. That's unfalsifiable. But they got to a life changing equity because the CEO helped get it there.
My point: SA was likely putting the scaffolding of a 2nd home run in place, right as the board got scared of being on 3rd base going for the run.
And therein lies the problem. The BoD was not playing the long game.
Yep, the boards failure occurred when they allowed the profit motive to take control of the organization. The crisis was merely a manifestation of the inevitable.
How did you market it and do you think listing on mls, having an agent show the house, or paying a buyers broker fee would have gotten you more and higher offers?
We didn’t market it. My found our current house through a friend. The wife of the couple that owned the house and my wife hit it off. They sold the house to use at well below market rate (in fact, afterwards we got a letter from the county tax office basically asking “uh… you bought this house well below the market rate… how did that happen?”). We figured out how much we needed to sell our old house for everything to work out. We told friends that we were looking for a buyer for our house and someone had a coworker that was interested. They came and looked at it and bought it for what we wanted. Everyone was happy at the end of the day.
That’s a great story! Do you know why your friend was willing to sell below market? Was it just 6% below market - what they would have spent on fees anyway?
Well, they built the house (the husband was a contractor). It’s an integrated concrete form (ICF) house. They raised their family in the house and had lived in it long enough that it was all paid off. They didn’t want it to go to just anyone, so they asked us how much we wanted to pay and we came to an agreement on a number. They wanted to build a smaller retirement house and were just looking for enough to build that house (as in, they planned on building it themselves).
I put mine on Zillow after interviewing a realtor and it sold for $1,000 less than the maximum amount he realtor said I could expect. Since I didn't have to pay his commission I came out ahead by a lot.
Reading higher in the thread, some Elixir folks are saying that the techempower benchmarks used the wrong settings (debug mode, etc) for their Elixir benchmark.
The fastest Elixir framework on the list, phoenix, is about as fast as uvicorn. (Both around 10 times slower than dragon.)
I was mostly responding directly to these 2 statements from my parent comment:
> They did savings by re-implementing their services and attribute those savings to the new tool / programming language.
> I wonder what the saving would look like if they chose another tool for the second / optimized system. I doubt it would differ much if they went with Go, Java or stayed with Python.
Talk to your manager or find a mentor within the company and ask for advice. Rather than framing it as “my colleges are all slackers” frame it as “what am I missing?” At big tech orgs success can mean a lot more than coding. It’s possible you are not doing things the others are doing… writing specs, documenting, interviewing, planning, etc. the bigger the engineering org the more time spent communicating. It may be they are doing more testing than you as well. It may be that this isn’t for you and you should return to the world of tiny teams where you really can code all day and “feel” much more productive because the communication overhead is so low.
