37

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

Comments
  • 6
    @irene 😂 forgot to put a tldr.

    Tldr: if you are smart enough don't go into crippling debt for a piece of paper that won't get you hired.
  • 4
    @JKyll Crippling debt is easily avoidable, at least here in the states.

    Community college is cheap as fuck. An entire year of tuition is less than a semester of my tuition. Not to mention, some even have full ride scholarships. I could be at my local community college for free if I wanted to. But I wanted the Independence of a 4 year and living away from my parents.

    There's also need based grants that don't have to be repayed. I had enough of grant money to cover all my tuition and fees, leaving me to cover the living situation.

    People act like they HAVE to go to the private UNIs that are $40k+ a year. But you don't. And even then, those are estimates. Mine was estimated at $25k a year, but it's like half that.

    In today's world there's no excuse for not affording higher education. There's literally multiple ways to get help paying for it. And the debt shouldn't be a hard thing to pay off if you get a degree that's actually useful, not like some art history bullshit.
  • 4
    But that's just my two cents on the subject and being completely opposite of you lol

    Edit: Also, I acknowledge that it's not for everyone. But for some reason, a lotta people on your side have their heads so far up their own ass they can't realize that not everyone is able to learn as well on their own, and need the motivation of a uni.
  • 2
    @Stuxnet nice lol, as I said it's a pretty context dependent rant. I'm talking about the situation on my country for the most part which is radically different. Glad 4u

    My complain isn't that much about money but actual IT higher education quality in what I've seen.
  • 5
    Expensive toilet paper 🤣 I'm taking a note of that one!!
  • 1
    @irene pretty much the same here
  • 3
    I work at a unicorn in the valley and surprisingly I would say only half the engineers here hold a CS degree.

    Now there's no question in my mind that a degree is necessary. You need a degree to hold any respect. But it's my opinion that software development is a skill and not an education. If you're going into college you should be learning how to think. Studying mathematics or music or philosophy or physics will prepare you far better not for your SWE job, but for your SWE career. Just study CS as a side hobby and you'll probably get a lot further than your BS in CS brethren.
  • 2
  • 1
    Back in the day, I had thought about studying CS, but it was too full of theoretical math where I didn't really see practical value and went for EE instead.
  • 1
    Thats why i studied philosophy.

    Problems were presented thousands of year ago and yet to be solved ;)

    They also have great logic classes too.
  • 5
    Just gonna drop this here.

    It reads:

    --

    Giant tech company from Silicon Valley seeking for employees.

    - With practical experience.
    - Self taught
    - Interested in continuously learning
    - Common sense
    - Capable problem solver

    Important
    NO UNIVERSITY DEGREE REQUIRED

    --

    That is all. Make of it what you wish, it was an article published a couple weeks back in the newspaper.
  • 1
  • 1
  • 2
    free higher education and student tax benefits ftw
  • 0
    Completely agree... I'm still in college and from what I've seen, you won't learn anything productive in school that will help you in your career, especially of you're on the SoftDev/IT field. College nowadays is for the complete ignorant that wants to go from bring a florist to becoming a software dev etc... But I have learned more from Udemy classes than in 4 years of college/university. If you're smart enough just study on your own and you will do it quicker and cheaper. Of course, this only applies to certain career paths, if you want to be a doctor then you need to gotto med school, but things like soft dev and IT you are better off learning on your own from online sources than going to school, if you are smart enough and have the discipline.
Add Comment