>In today’s “labor market”, a college diploma doesn’t mean much. Everybody has one.
No kidding. I’ve been looking for programming jobs (I have a Bachelor’s in Computer Science) and during a couple of interviews I’ve been asked questions like “what is the general structure of an if-statement.” IMO, this is pretty insulting to anyone who has put in the work to get a 4-year degree in the field.
I’m told that’s because there are applying people who don’t know — which is surprising in itself with the posted requirements of the job.
If I were “in charge” of the hiring of the candidate, I’d make sure there was a “training reimbursement clause” (and another guaranteeing the legitimacy of the diploma). Then, in the case of fraud/misrepresentation such that an employee who didn’t know such a thing (as the if-statement) the company would fire and sue the candidate (fraud) and sue the issuing-school as well (further fraud).
Yes, more work for lawyers; but in the end degrees would QUICKLY come to have some value. (Consider how schools would react to being sued for incompetence on part of their graduates.)
>Employers are looking for people who are willing to work. IMHO.
This is true; but there seems to be a sort of lemming effect in my field. The sort of thing that allows PHP to be used in commercial projects*** because a) everyone else does it, and b) it’s “quicker”* and “easier”**.
So, I’m not sure it boils down to just being willing to work. (Unless that willingness to work includes the sacrifice of a commitment to providing an excellent product.)
* It’s ‘quicker’ because it allows a coder to go in and start making immediately visible changes.
** It’s ‘easier’ because cause it does a lot of “magic” type-casting and the like; a bad thing, I think, because it discourages thinking about the actual problem at hand.
*** This leads to why it’s a bad idea in a commercial product: there are a lot of hidden ‘gotchas’ which turn the production from problem-solving to correcting for the language. For example, let’s say you want to do something with the cent portion of a payment; the string ‘08’ is converted into the number 0; because the magic-typecast errors out (it thinks that an integer starting w/ zero is in octal; meaning digits of 0..7) and returns a 0 (indicating an error). The whole language is like that.
I have a degree in EE and was asked what is Ohm's Law? I got up and left, I was totally rude but I was pissed off. I just stormed out of the place without saying a word. For all I know the dufus thought I was a fraud and knew nothing about EE. But clearly my resume said BSEE on it so it is all retarded in the end....
For Freepers who can't understand this it would be like interviewing a Physician an asking him/her "So do you know what blood is?"