There really needs to be a trade school for software engineering. Not just a short boot camp, either. A rigorous 4 year degree that focuses on industry relevant skills and hands-on projects.
The biggest reason I got my 1st job out of college at Cloudflare was because I worked on a lot of personal projects and self learned Go and got experience with Postgres, Redis, and basic frontend. These things were not, or barely covered in my CS degree. No wonder new grads nowadays are struggling to get jobs. Schools aren't preparing them well for jobs.
When I went to a US university in the 90s there was even more extracurricular work needed than now, from my anecdata. I didn't even have any kind of group capstone project. It was understood that the framework college provided was the bare minimum and you needed to push yourself to stand out. And I did, and landed internships, and had no trouble getting hired. Lots of students do the minimum and/or use LLMs to do the work and they have trouble getting jobs for sure. The ones who push and use the school as a springboard get hired even in this downturn.
It would depend on the course load. Learning languages and how to use them can easily be encapsulated in capstone, software engineering projects, & internships. The goal of a CS degree, as opposed to a bootcamp, is for students to fully understand in intimate detail the background , history, ethics, & the 5 whys of the tool that they’re using. The way I would design a CS degree is:
1. for the first two years to be about general computing with an intro to programming via Java, Typescript, Python, & Go.
2. by the end of the 2nd year Data Structures and Algorithms should be mastered
3. Third year is for tracks , whether frontend, backend, full stack, Theory.
4. Fourth year is capstone project or internship
Some countries like Austria have a school type that combines high school with vocational training [1]. It's five years instead of the regular four-year high school there, but you start with 5h/weeks of C programming and write your own linked list implementation at the end of year one. They have similar schools for other vocations, not just software engineering (everything from construction to chemical engineering and accounting). At the end you graduate with a high school diploma that later also enables you to go to college, if you so choose, but gives you enough skills to get hired by industry.
They got a CS degree. Maybe we should have a degree for practical engineering prep, but the subject matter as organized is very beautiful and should not go away just to help people catch up to building apps in Java or whatever.
We run one in India (kalvium.com). The key differentiation is to being real world work for students for upto 6 semesters, leading to extended hands on learning.
> because I worked on a lot of personal projects and self learned Go and got experience with Postgres, Redis, and basic frontend.
Do you think you would have been able to do that project to the same caliber and as fast had you not had your degree?
> These things were not, or barely covered in my CS degree.
The degree isn't there to teach you a specific technology. Those come and go. Some people will work on web like you while others will work on games, graphics, machine learning, databases, languages, or other things. The degree is to teach you the generalized principles that all these things share so that you can learn the specifics you want. They try to cover a broad base to give you exposure because you likely don't know what you want to do or what you like until you get some exposure. That broad base also makes you more effective working with those other niches.
The degree isn't to teach you a niche, it is to make it effective in the broad field.
> No wonder new grads nowadays are struggling to get jobs. Schools aren't preparing them well for jobs.
What do you expect to be taught in only 4 years? Maybe you learned Postgres and Redis in the summer but I'm certain you wouldn't have learned it that fast had you not had other programming experience. It's not hard to learn one language once you already know another. Especially if that other language is low level or "mid" (like C/C++ or Java)[0]. The skills transfer even if the specifics aren't identical.
The problem is tragedy of the commons.
We question why train a junior if they're just going to leave instead of questioning why they will leave. We laugh at someone not "negotiating good enough" or hiring new employees at higher wages than we'll offer in raises.
We believe a new senior will be more effective out the gate than a mid level engineer with years of experience in the codebase. We act like institutional knowledge is meaningless. The senior might solve more jira tickets but their lack of institutional knowledge may lead to more being created and more complicated code that isn't leveraging existing libraries.
We act like training juniors isn't a shared community cost that builds a pipeline that we all rely on. Sure, maybe Google trains a junior that leaves for Apple, but Apple trains a junior that leaves for Google. Those costs balance out.
Juniors are having a hard time getting jobs because we've become myopic. We've created the richest companies ever but have become incredibly stingy. We care much more about the quarter than the decade. The customers became the shareholders instead of those buying the things we sell. We spend pounds to save pennies.
[0] it feels weird to call C "high level" in the days of interpreted languages and no memory management
it is not “engineering” - calling software development “engineering” is the craziest thing we’ve been able to squeeze through as an industry.
trade school won’t help here and 4 (even 8) year degree won’t help. at 4 years by the time you finish sh*t you learned the first year are obsolete. and everyone needs to spare us “the fundamentals” as that doesn’t exist - in my 3 decades in the industry the absolute worst colleagues were once with solid fundamentals (knows all of theory, can’t get any work done…)
> it is not “engineering” - calling software development “engineering” is the craziest thing we’ve been able to squeeze through as an industry.
Even ignoring the 'craziest thing' hyperbole in light of an industry that gave the whole planet depression and anxiety to increase 'engagement' how could you possibly defend this position?
Definition of engineering:
> The application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends such as the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes, and systems.
It's easier to get a training for those tech (that change all the time) on the job. It's harder to get the CS fundamentals later. Functional programming, type theory, etc are all very important and they are taught in CS schools
They have this where I live and it's great for pumping out web developer and generic C#/Java CRUD dudes. And to be fair, 90% of the work here is doable with their skills. It's just fucking wild talking to one and they have zero clue about theory or advanced algorithms the rare time it does come up at work. Like a deer in headlights blank stare sort of situation
Are trade schools four years now? When I was pursuing auto tech it was a two year program. I thought the benefit of vocational programs was the ability to be compressed because they don’t include the breadth of topics of a full undergraduate degree.
> why don't the kids themselves have the right to vote?
"Cortical white matter increases from childhood (~9 years) to adolescence (~14 years)," while "cortical grey matter development peaks at ~12 years of age in the frontal and parietal cortices, and 14–16 years in the temporal lobes" [1].
The latter processes emotions and language [2]. Its myelination continues significantly through at least 17 years old [3], through one's mid twenties.
I don't think it takes a lofty degree in statecraft to claim that five-year-olds probably shouldn't get to vote. Of course five-year-olds are a disenfranchised class, they are for a reason. I think we're just quibbling over the age threshold here.
> today we teach the importance of "universal suffrage" to kids, an entirely disenfranchised class
Universal suffrage remains both a myth and an experiment. From citizenship requirements to criminal disenfranchisement, the fact that we gatekeep voting is not exactly a secret.
Our civic education is also horribly incomplete in discussing why America was designed as a republic, not a direct democracy, an argument made extremely well by learned Athenians, Romans, Carthaginians, Vedics and Americans, most notably in the Federalist Papers.
> Others think similarly of other groups
Sure. Some of them are wrong. Some of them are right.
Unless we’re talking about giving every human a vote, it’s disingenuous to argue we should give children suffrage because universal suffrage is some divine diktat.
(Where we could have an informed debate is around whether letting kids participate in school and municipal elections makes sense.)
they are looking for cheapest labor they can squeeze out. I am highly educated with 30 years in, won’t answer an email under $250/hr. my neighbour coming out of HS will work for $20/hr
Similar to the Apple CEO who said who needs a degree. Meantime he has an MBA from Duke, and BS in Industrial Engineering from Auburn, not an absolute top school but a very good one.
I had an internship at HP when I was 16. I probably wasn't particularly useful, but I learned a lot about how the corporate world works. I'm glad I didn't have to wait until I was 18 to figure that out, and get on the right course for my education and career.
One of my high-school friends went to college for a teaching credential, only to learn at the end that he didn't like teaching.
College or not, it's extremely useful to be exposed to a field of work for at least a few months, before dedicating years if your life to it.
In defense of foobarian AFAIK driver code is famously the lowest quality code of just about any domain, even worse than academic code. The software is written by cost cutting hardware companies.
Everyone who has had to work with printers in a enterprise/production environment knows this... I'm amazed it's an industry that hasn't been disrupted. cough
As someone who has had to support printers.....its a spectrum of pain from "god why do they do this" to "I'm pulling hair out, because no sane person would want to use this product willingly"
Visit Phnom Penh (its not pleasant), visit the killing fields and the prisons. There are pictures of the child soldiers that were authorities at prisons, encouraged to report on adults and punish.
My first job was a dotcom startup who heard via social connections I was a bright high school student who could program. I think I was paid $15/hr to write Windows GUI code. In retrospect I think they were just happy for the cheap labor and I didn’t know any better. There was no mentorship or any other useful growth to make up for the low pay.
On the other hand, you were probably also learning on the job, which meant they were paying you to learn. Not a bad arrangement, especially if they did not demand senior-level code from you.
I was also fortunate to get paid to learn web development in the 90s. This was a work-study job so I was barely paid anything (I think it was something like $100/wk). But I was thrilled to be given a computer in an air-conditioned office. The alternative was to do some other dumb work-study job like making sure students swiped their meal plan cards when they walked into the cafeteria. Although it took me awhile, that job is what set me on the path I’m still on now.
Good thing college is not about memorizing random subjects and you can choose whatever major you want that 90% of your courses are dedicated to! I’m not saying college is necessary for everybody but when you say that it’s an insult to people who have put in four years of work into learning something they’re passionate about. One can also grow in more ways than one “intelligence” through the college experience. I was a highly intelligent 18 year old but was severely lacking in my emotional maturity and self confidence which I learned a great deal through college.
I graduated high school and went out to the valley immediately in 1995. I did well but I eventually got to a point where the natural language and machine learning stuff I was doing required more advanced math and statistics than I had the ability to teach myself. I went back to college leaving my successful career to “memorize random subjects.”
One thing I learned in college was you learn what you put into it and I put everything into whah I was doing. I learned that learning was the most valuable thing one can do because the process of learning new “random subjects” teaches you how to understand how to learn and think. Being intelligent is perhaps necessary but it is absolutely insufficient. Not a single moment I spent studying in college was a waste of my time, none of it was “memorizing.” In fact one reason I didn’t go was I was bad at memorizing - and I learned in college I could derive equations from my understanding faster than memorizing if I really understood the subject.
I graduated summa cum laude at a top engineering computer science program and dropped out of graduate school to get into quant trading at a top shop on wall street and have since done a fairly complete tour of FAANG and adjacent as a distinguished engineer, building stuff you likely use every day.
I never would have had my career had I stayed working without an education. Knowledge and wisdom and learned through education and being taught by those who have explored things you haven’t. Ability and experience isn’t just mechanical knowledge of a technical subject or intelligence.
I’ve done both paths, and I strongly recommend people to never memorize random subjects but to dive into college and learn and understand everything in total depth, then carry that into life. There is no greater gift you will ever receive in the work world than the gift of knowledge and ability to learn and appreciate life in all its complexity you will learn in college.
> Highly intelligent kids at 18 are ready for the real world
Highly-intelligent, disciplined kids should go to college. Others should go to trades, including coding and sales.
More pointedly, we live in a democracy. A population ignorant of the classics, of history, of the law, and only obsessed with personal practical concerns is going to do what such populations always do: swing populist and burn down any institution they don't understand because what isn't instantly comprehensible is obviously the work of the devil.
"What the deuce is [the solar system] to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work." (c)
One thing I discovered during decades of teaching at university. 18-year olds have little skill planning. Our first-year course had one-week assignments, but one more in-depth two-week assignment. This was at a time when students used computer labs, rather than their own equipment. During the first week of the bigger assignment, the labs were empty. About three days before the due date, the labs started getting busy. The night before the due date, students were waiting all night to get at a computer, and a delegation of students went to the Department Head to demand much bigger labs.
The following year, we used the same bigger assignment, but demanded that the students hand in the work for the first half of the assignment by the end of the first week (the markers were told just to check that it had been handed in, but not to mark it). Due date came along, and the overwhelming part of the class handed in acceptable work on time.
One thing that four years of university, perhaps including a study skills course, teaches you is how to manage multiple due dates with several concurrent projects in various stages of completion.
Intellectually yes, but it's surprising how hard a lot of 18 years olds fail at basic adulting. I've been indirectly involved with apprenticeship schemes here in the UK that place 18 year olds at various companies as software engineers. There's no problem finding 18 year olds who are smart and can code, but the challenge lies in getting them to consistently show up to work five days a week. It's doable, but it requires a lot more mentoring and support than you might intuitively expect. Standard corporate work environments just aren't very flexible on this.
Now, maybe this particular scheme is targeting a small number of exceptional individuals who won't have a problem with this stuff. But it would be a big mistake to assume that a typical smart 18 year old is ready for a typical corporate job.
Does a computer science major or engineering degree really need history or humanities classes? Sure, it might make more rounded humans but they are completely unnecessary. However, most colleges require these unnecessary classes to get a STEM degree.
I've been thinking recently about Hannah Arendt's description of Eichmann. He was good at doing his job, but had no ability to understand that he was doing a job that no human being should ever do.
I think about this in the context of the DOGE goons, who are so happy to show off their technical skills in the service of dismantling humanitarian aid to starving people.
The people that Palantir hires will have tremendous power in this world. I hope that they have the ability to think critically about the impact of what they are doing and why they are doing it. Learning the humanities helps with this.
Well, it's impossible to know if Eichmann really thought about the ethics of his job. With regards to his trial, it didn't matter anyway. Every captured Nazi official claimed they were just a cog in the machine and had to follow orders. The judges rightfully dismissed this, because otherwise Hitler would have been the only one responsible (how convenient!). They were all put on trial for their specific actions and decisions.
My take from Hannah Arendt's work is that normal people will do evil things if they think they can get away with it.
Some things however require experience, not just intelligence.
Also working on a surveillance machine should have a proven system of values to be aware where boundaries are being overstepped ... Oh wait, maybe that's the point.
Saw a meme on this exact logical fallacy of the 'well-trained dog'.
Panel 1:
Human standing, arms out stretched in a shrug saying, "Why should I study science, biology, mathematics, and physics? It is useless, I will never use it. I will not be a scientist."
Panel 2:
Same human with a rageful expression saying, "5G gives cancer. Vaccines have Mind Control Chips for the new world order. The earth is flat. I saw it on YouTube."
.
Albert Einstein credits the humanities with his successes in physics.
> "Otherwise he with his specialized knowledge—more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow men and to the community. "
> "This is what I have in mind when I recommend the 'humanities' as important, not just dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history and philosophy."
> "Overemphasis on the competitive system and premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included."
Couldn't you also argue that all education is a waste because it involves (some) memorizing? If I look back at what I learned during any stage of my life it's never any of what I "memorized", but it's all important stuff.
Not for any serious positions I bet. Only where they want to do dirty stuff like killing or stalking other humans. It's like recruiting for army- you get them before they learn how to use their brains.
A corporation, founded by a Stanford grad who’s been giving talks on the Antichrist, who’s business is to spy on everyone and create a panopticon, is offering a four week indoctrination scheme to susceptible teens.
Idk how our society gets out of this mess but the elites in charge are deranged and focused on destroying one of the west’s great institutions liberal arts colleges. STEM is great but liberal arts flesh out your mind and teach you to think critically and engage with the world. Something sorely missed in today’s age
My company has exclusively hired interns out of high school, including myself, since the mid 2000s. Every single hire was an intern first, either as a junior or senior in HS. The board is now 2/3rds former interns (I'm one of them), 1/3rds original founders.
It works extremely well. Any high school AP CS teacher we ask is delighted to send us their best students. We basically get to interview for 3-5 years during summers while they're at college and then hire (if we have a spot, we are a "lifestyle" company) when they graduate. Of course this means we don't hire seniors, which probably gives us some blind spots, and it means we can't silicon-valley-scale up, but we're very happy with growing software engineers vs hiring them.
If you're talented enough to pique a recruiter's interest in high school, you're much too talented to sign yourself away to a single company for the long haul in your 20s. Get experience in different industries, see what different corporate cultures are like, and learn how to negotiate compensation. Do these things early and often, because you don't have a spouse, or kids, or a house yet.
I think there are actually a lot more kids like this than you’d think. Like many of those kids, I was so desperate for a job (I needed a job, to pay rent and to eat) that I would have been happy to take any computer job, since the alternative for me was stuff like unloading trucks and stocking shelves.
Unfortunately the standard hiring channels are not very good at finding those folks because they have few credentials. Also, like me, they may be good at certain things and have huge blind spots in other areas.
It's an Alex Karp pet project that is less of an apprenticeship or professional skills program and more of a mini-uATX [0] style "great books" program [1].
Apprenticeship programs have value, but how this Palantir program is structured clearly isn't providing the technical chops needed, and is just an ideological bootcamp
Finally, if Palantir wanted, they could always just recruit from a more diverse set of universities or create a hiring pipeline out of community colleges. Yet Palantir is notorious about only interviewing and hiring candidates from high prestige programs.
This is a really important point. A lot of the "locked in" young types that I've seen in the startup ecosystem have very little experience of how the world works, combined with a tremendous arrogance about their own capabilities. They see the wealth and the power that some people have acquired in tech, and they associate that with success with goodness - or they become completely amoral.
I'm not sure how much these people would actually learn in college, but the idea is that some exposure to the humanities and the arts and to people who have different aspirations and life experiences would give them some interest in considering the consequences and moral worth of their actions.
Maybe that doesn't actually happen and these people will always be amoral. But that's the hope.
I wouldn't put it that way. I'm not talking about learning "how the world works" in the sense of how, say, a corporation functions. I'm talking about learning how to think. It's a much broader perspective on humanity than you get from an open office in Sunnyvale. Understanding human history and values and accomplishments.
Basic anti-intellectualism framed as if it's something revolutionary, but really for the purposes of finding easily-moldable loyal cogs for the coming corporate-totalitarian society. High schoolers have had one class of "Civics" at best, for which they likely just memorized the answers and don't really get the hard-won ideals at play. College is where students start to mature from having to manage their own independence, and have time to reflect on things like morals and society (albeit going a bit idealistically overboard). Can't have the latter gumming up the works!
It's both. Starting to mature at that age, independence of living on your own, and applying yourself to some kind of real work, but without all of that being colored by unrelenting abuse by the financial treadmill. One could probably replicate that kind of slack outside the university environment, but you still need some kind of direction to be learning rather than merely hanging around and playing video games, so such an environment would be halfway to higher education regardless.
Work has provided me with plenty opportunity to learn, at a foundational level even. It's also a question of how you approach work. Sometimes it's as easy as asking for a little bit of extra time or loudly considering a little side project as promising the insight that's required for the next task.
Work has grounded me in such a way that in hindsight I regret staying around uni as long as I did instead of entering the workforce as early as possible. While I was less than a brilliant student, I wouldn't go as far as saying that uni was a waste for me. There are some things that I might never have learned otherwise. But I would love to know the other paths I could have taken in my profession.
Talking about tech we can actually put this in very concrete terms.
What shapes of technologies have you been paid to learn? Do they promote decentralized individual liberty like secure p2p communications? Or are they top-down-control corporate-empowering centralizing technologies like webapps and bitcoin?
I'd say there is a prominent skew for the types of things you can get paid to work on, because software that creates individual freedom intrinsically means creating distributed wealth that can't be easily collected to pay returns on investment. And if you don't even have a general understanding of the whole gamut of what is possible, you likely won't even know what you are missing.
Indeed, this might have been laudable if a lifestyle company that makes CRMs did this, but some sectors and companies are, for lack of a better word, nefarious to society, and some of the most insidiously nefarious are also adept at hiding it. How many on HN/in hacker communities boycott Meta products vs the general population, how many despise OpenAI?
Not requiring a degree is one thing. Not requiring any basic socialization or life experience is bizarre, maybe cultish, and sounds a little like non-sexual grooming. Hire adults, weirdos.
There really needs to be a trade school for software engineering. Not just a short boot camp, either. A rigorous 4 year degree that focuses on industry relevant skills and hands-on projects.
The biggest reason I got my 1st job out of college at Cloudflare was because I worked on a lot of personal projects and self learned Go and got experience with Postgres, Redis, and basic frontend. These things were not, or barely covered in my CS degree. No wonder new grads nowadays are struggling to get jobs. Schools aren't preparing them well for jobs.
When I went to a US university in the 90s there was even more extracurricular work needed than now, from my anecdata. I didn't even have any kind of group capstone project. It was understood that the framework college provided was the bare minimum and you needed to push yourself to stand out. And I did, and landed internships, and had no trouble getting hired. Lots of students do the minimum and/or use LLMs to do the work and they have trouble getting jobs for sure. The ones who push and use the school as a springboard get hired even in this downturn.
It would depend on the course load. Learning languages and how to use them can easily be encapsulated in capstone, software engineering projects, & internships. The goal of a CS degree, as opposed to a bootcamp, is for students to fully understand in intimate detail the background , history, ethics, & the 5 whys of the tool that they’re using. The way I would design a CS degree is:
1. for the first two years to be about general computing with an intro to programming via Java, Typescript, Python, & Go. 2. by the end of the 2nd year Data Structures and Algorithms should be mastered 3. Third year is for tracks , whether frontend, backend, full stack, Theory. 4. Fourth year is capstone project or internship
Switzerland has this and for basically every other job as well. Apprenticeships are very common here, I did mine as a "programmer"
I further like how much diversity is packed into compsci programs in CH, e.g. time at the Paul Scherrer Institute
Some countries like Austria have a school type that combines high school with vocational training [1]. It's five years instead of the regular four-year high school there, but you start with 5h/weeks of C programming and write your own linked list implementation at the end of year one. They have similar schools for other vocations, not just software engineering (everything from construction to chemical engineering and accounting). At the end you graduate with a high school diploma that later also enables you to go to college, if you so choose, but gives you enough skills to get hired by industry.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Höhere_Technische_Lehranstalt
They got a CS degree. Maybe we should have a degree for practical engineering prep, but the subject matter as organized is very beautiful and should not go away just to help people catch up to building apps in Java or whatever.
We run one in India (kalvium.com). The key differentiation is to being real world work for students for upto 6 semesters, leading to extended hands on learning.
It's the case everywhere in Europe I know of.
The degree isn't to teach you a niche, it is to make it effective in the broad field.
What do you expect to be taught in only 4 years? Maybe you learned Postgres and Redis in the summer but I'm certain you wouldn't have learned it that fast had you not had other programming experience. It's not hard to learn one language once you already know another. Especially if that other language is low level or "mid" (like C/C++ or Java)[0]. The skills transfer even if the specifics aren't identical.The problem is tragedy of the commons.
We question why train a junior if they're just going to leave instead of questioning why they will leave. We laugh at someone not "negotiating good enough" or hiring new employees at higher wages than we'll offer in raises.
We believe a new senior will be more effective out the gate than a mid level engineer with years of experience in the codebase. We act like institutional knowledge is meaningless. The senior might solve more jira tickets but their lack of institutional knowledge may lead to more being created and more complicated code that isn't leveraging existing libraries.
We act like training juniors isn't a shared community cost that builds a pipeline that we all rely on. Sure, maybe Google trains a junior that leaves for Apple, but Apple trains a junior that leaves for Google. Those costs balance out.
Juniors are having a hard time getting jobs because we've become myopic. We've created the richest companies ever but have become incredibly stingy. We care much more about the quarter than the decade. The customers became the shareholders instead of those buying the things we sell. We spend pounds to save pennies.
[0] it feels weird to call C "high level" in the days of interpreted languages and no memory management
it is not “engineering” - calling software development “engineering” is the craziest thing we’ve been able to squeeze through as an industry.
trade school won’t help here and 4 (even 8) year degree won’t help. at 4 years by the time you finish sh*t you learned the first year are obsolete. and everyone needs to spare us “the fundamentals” as that doesn’t exist - in my 3 decades in the industry the absolute worst colleagues were once with solid fundamentals (knows all of theory, can’t get any work done…)
> it is not “engineering” - calling software development “engineering” is the craziest thing we’ve been able to squeeze through as an industry.
Even ignoring the 'craziest thing' hyperbole in light of an industry that gave the whole planet depression and anxiety to increase 'engagement' how could you possibly defend this position?
Definition of engineering:
> The application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends such as the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes, and systems.
Yup. Do all of that on the daily.
It's easier to get a training for those tech (that change all the time) on the job. It's harder to get the CS fundamentals later. Functional programming, type theory, etc are all very important and they are taught in CS schools
They have this where I live and it's great for pumping out web developer and generic C#/Java CRUD dudes. And to be fair, 90% of the work here is doable with their skills. It's just fucking wild talking to one and they have zero clue about theory or advanced algorithms the rare time it does come up at work. Like a deer in headlights blank stare sort of situation
Are trade schools four years now? When I was pursuing auto tech it was a two year program. I thought the benefit of vocational programs was the ability to be compressed because they don’t include the breadth of topics of a full undergraduate degree.
Best to recruit kids before they get exposed to dangerous ideas like the right to vote.
Palantir-youth, amirite? :) I won't translate that to German, it's obvious anyway.
[flagged]
Of course this is just a snide remark that doesn't contribute to the conversation, but it can be interesting to dive deeper:
For example, why don't the kids themselves have the right to vote?
> why don't the kids themselves have the right to vote?
"Cortical white matter increases from childhood (~9 years) to adolescence (~14 years)," while "cortical grey matter development peaks at ~12 years of age in the frontal and parietal cortices, and 14–16 years in the temporal lobes" [1].
The latter processes emotions and language [2]. Its myelination continues significantly through at least 17 years old [3], through one's mid twenties.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain_development_timeli...
[2] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/16799-temporal-lo...
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33359342/#&gid=article-figur...
Previously in the United States, schools taught "all men are created equal" to people that could see that they weren't being treated that way.
Similarly, today we teach the importance of "universal suffrage" to kids, an entirely disenfranchised class.
Apparently you think there are some characteristics of children that should disqualify them from voting. Others think similarly of other groups.
I don't think it takes a lofty degree in statecraft to claim that five-year-olds probably shouldn't get to vote. Of course five-year-olds are a disenfranchised class, they are for a reason. I think we're just quibbling over the age threshold here.
> today we teach the importance of "universal suffrage" to kids, an entirely disenfranchised class
Universal suffrage remains both a myth and an experiment. From citizenship requirements to criminal disenfranchisement, the fact that we gatekeep voting is not exactly a secret.
Our civic education is also horribly incomplete in discussing why America was designed as a republic, not a direct democracy, an argument made extremely well by learned Athenians, Romans, Carthaginians, Vedics and Americans, most notably in the Federalist Papers.
> Others think similarly of other groups
Sure. Some of them are wrong. Some of them are right.
Unless we’re talking about giving every human a vote, it’s disingenuous to argue we should give children suffrage because universal suffrage is some divine diktat.
(Where we could have an informed debate is around whether letting kids participate in school and municipal elections makes sense.)
Did you graduate before 1971?
I registered to vote when I was still in high school.
https://investors.palantir.com/governance/executive-manageme...
Four out of the five top executives of Palantir earned degrees from top 10 US universities.
The only person who doesn't have a degree listed is co-founder/CEO Alexander Karp. He has a BS, JD and a PhD.
And they list their credentials on the company bio page...
They’re not looking for cofounders.
they are looking for cheapest labor they can squeeze out. I am highly educated with 30 years in, won’t answer an email under $250/hr. my neighbour coming out of HS will work for $20/hr
So they're people that can't recognize the factors that led to their own success? Sounds like they have a promising future
Similar to the Apple CEO who said who needs a degree. Meantime he has an MBA from Duke, and BS in Industrial Engineering from Auburn, not an absolute top school but a very good one.
Steve Jobs didn't have a degree, but he seemed to very deeply value the liberal arts education that he did have.
It's not hypocritical to regret something you've done.
I look back at myself at 18 and damn I was dumb as rocks. I'm amazed I even had an internship working on drivers, the risk is too high.
I had an internship at HP when I was 16. I probably wasn't particularly useful, but I learned a lot about how the corporate world works. I'm glad I didn't have to wait until I was 18 to figure that out, and get on the right course for my education and career.
One of my high-school friends went to college for a teaching credential, only to learn at the end that he didn't like teaching.
College or not, it's extremely useful to be exposed to a field of work for at least a few months, before dedicating years if your life to it.
> dumb as rocks
> working on drivers
Yup, checks out :-D
In defense of foobarian AFAIK driver code is famously the lowest quality code of just about any domain, even worse than academic code. The software is written by cost cutting hardware companies.
Everyone who has had to work with printers in a enterprise/production environment knows this... I'm amazed it's an industry that hasn't been disrupted. cough
As someone who has had to support printers.....its a spectrum of pain from "god why do they do this" to "I'm pulling hair out, because no sane person would want to use this product willingly"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_soldiers_in_Cambodia
Visit Phnom Penh (its not pleasant), visit the killing fields and the prisons. There are pictures of the child soldiers that were authorities at prisons, encouraged to report on adults and punish.
What does this have to do with the post?
It's literally the thing Palantir is for.
Previously, in Palantir's opinions about young people:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12211296
My first job was a dotcom startup who heard via social connections I was a bright high school student who could program. I think I was paid $15/hr to write Windows GUI code. In retrospect I think they were just happy for the cheap labor and I didn’t know any better. There was no mentorship or any other useful growth to make up for the low pay.
On the other hand, you were probably also learning on the job, which meant they were paying you to learn. Not a bad arrangement, especially if they did not demand senior-level code from you.
I was also fortunate to get paid to learn web development in the 90s. This was a work-study job so I was barely paid anything (I think it was something like $100/wk). But I was thrilled to be given a computer in an air-conditioned office. The alternative was to do some other dumb work-study job like making sure students swiped their meal plan cards when they walked into the cafeteria. Although it took me awhile, that job is what set me on the path I’m still on now.
Highly intelligent kids at 18 are ready for the real world. Its a waste of time to make them memorize random subjects
Good thing college is not about memorizing random subjects and you can choose whatever major you want that 90% of your courses are dedicated to! I’m not saying college is necessary for everybody but when you say that it’s an insult to people who have put in four years of work into learning something they’re passionate about. One can also grow in more ways than one “intelligence” through the college experience. I was a highly intelligent 18 year old but was severely lacking in my emotional maturity and self confidence which I learned a great deal through college.
I graduated high school and went out to the valley immediately in 1995. I did well but I eventually got to a point where the natural language and machine learning stuff I was doing required more advanced math and statistics than I had the ability to teach myself. I went back to college leaving my successful career to “memorize random subjects.”
One thing I learned in college was you learn what you put into it and I put everything into whah I was doing. I learned that learning was the most valuable thing one can do because the process of learning new “random subjects” teaches you how to understand how to learn and think. Being intelligent is perhaps necessary but it is absolutely insufficient. Not a single moment I spent studying in college was a waste of my time, none of it was “memorizing.” In fact one reason I didn’t go was I was bad at memorizing - and I learned in college I could derive equations from my understanding faster than memorizing if I really understood the subject.
I graduated summa cum laude at a top engineering computer science program and dropped out of graduate school to get into quant trading at a top shop on wall street and have since done a fairly complete tour of FAANG and adjacent as a distinguished engineer, building stuff you likely use every day.
I never would have had my career had I stayed working without an education. Knowledge and wisdom and learned through education and being taught by those who have explored things you haven’t. Ability and experience isn’t just mechanical knowledge of a technical subject or intelligence.
I’ve done both paths, and I strongly recommend people to never memorize random subjects but to dive into college and learn and understand everything in total depth, then carry that into life. There is no greater gift you will ever receive in the work world than the gift of knowledge and ability to learn and appreciate life in all its complexity you will learn in college.
It’s hard to be ready for a world you do not understand, and the world is a lot more than engineering or any other single subject.
> Highly intelligent kids at 18 are ready for the real world
Highly-intelligent, disciplined kids should go to college. Others should go to trades, including coding and sales.
More pointedly, we live in a democracy. A population ignorant of the classics, of history, of the law, and only obsessed with personal practical concerns is going to do what such populations always do: swing populist and burn down any institution they don't understand because what isn't instantly comprehensible is obviously the work of the devil.
"What the deuce is [the solar system] to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work." (c)
Waste of time for who? The corporation?
I suppose if all you are interested in are productive slaves, I can see why skipping education would be seductive.
DOGE university
Department Of Greatest Education? :)
Like how to analyze requirements, how to document their work, or even how to problem-solve during debugging.
One thing I discovered during decades of teaching at university. 18-year olds have little skill planning. Our first-year course had one-week assignments, but one more in-depth two-week assignment. This was at a time when students used computer labs, rather than their own equipment. During the first week of the bigger assignment, the labs were empty. About three days before the due date, the labs started getting busy. The night before the due date, students were waiting all night to get at a computer, and a delegation of students went to the Department Head to demand much bigger labs.
The following year, we used the same bigger assignment, but demanded that the students hand in the work for the first half of the assignment by the end of the first week (the markers were told just to check that it had been handed in, but not to mark it). Due date came along, and the overwhelming part of the class handed in acceptable work on time.
One thing that four years of university, perhaps including a study skills course, teaches you is how to manage multiple due dates with several concurrent projects in various stages of completion.
Intellectually yes, but it's surprising how hard a lot of 18 years olds fail at basic adulting. I've been indirectly involved with apprenticeship schemes here in the UK that place 18 year olds at various companies as software engineers. There's no problem finding 18 year olds who are smart and can code, but the challenge lies in getting them to consistently show up to work five days a week. It's doable, but it requires a lot more mentoring and support than you might intuitively expect. Standard corporate work environments just aren't very flexible on this.
Now, maybe this particular scheme is targeting a small number of exceptional individuals who won't have a problem with this stuff. But it would be a big mistake to assume that a typical smart 18 year old is ready for a typical corporate job.
Intelligent kids at 18 are easier to indoctrinate.
Corporations love that.
If "memorizing random subjects" is all college is to you, or all learning is to you, then yeah, probably is a waste of time.
Does a computer science major or engineering degree really need history or humanities classes? Sure, it might make more rounded humans but they are completely unnecessary. However, most colleges require these unnecessary classes to get a STEM degree.
a acredited canadian engineering degree requires a technical writing class, law class, and stats.
otherwise, you get to pick one non-engineering course out of the whole degree.
i did a CS degree on top of a mech one, and all i had to do was the math and CS courses.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
> Does a computer science major or engineering degree really need history or humanities classes?
CS majors are members of society so absolutely without a doubt yes.
I've been thinking recently about Hannah Arendt's description of Eichmann. He was good at doing his job, but had no ability to understand that he was doing a job that no human being should ever do.
I think about this in the context of the DOGE goons, who are so happy to show off their technical skills in the service of dismantling humanitarian aid to starving people.
The people that Palantir hires will have tremendous power in this world. I hope that they have the ability to think critically about the impact of what they are doing and why they are doing it. Learning the humanities helps with this.
Well, it's impossible to know if Eichmann really thought about the ethics of his job. With regards to his trial, it didn't matter anyway. Every captured Nazi official claimed they were just a cog in the machine and had to follow orders. The judges rightfully dismissed this, because otherwise Hitler would have been the only one responsible (how convenient!). They were all put on trial for their specific actions and decisions.
My take from Hannah Arendt's work is that normal people will do evil things if they think they can get away with it.
My degree is in aerospace engineering. Worked in aer0space for 8 years, then became a programmer.
Yes, you really need history and humanities.
It’s the difference between getting an education and learning a trade… so yes.
Some things however require experience, not just intelligence.
Also working on a surveillance machine should have a proven system of values to be aware where boundaries are being overstepped ... Oh wait, maybe that's the point.
Saw a meme on this exact logical fallacy of the 'well-trained dog'.
Panel 1:
Human standing, arms out stretched in a shrug saying, "Why should I study science, biology, mathematics, and physics? It is useless, I will never use it. I will not be a scientist."
Panel 2:
Same human with a rageful expression saying, "5G gives cancer. Vaccines have Mind Control Chips for the new world order. The earth is flat. I saw it on YouTube."
.
Albert Einstein credits the humanities with his successes in physics.
> "Otherwise he with his specialized knowledge—more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow men and to the community. "
> "This is what I have in mind when I recommend the 'humanities' as important, not just dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history and philosophy."
> "Overemphasis on the competitive system and premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included."
https://www.nytimes.com/1952/10/05/archives/einstein-stresse...
Ready for the real world, no. Ready to forever exist in a corporate bubble, apparently.
Couldn't you also argue that all education is a waste because it involves (some) memorizing? If I look back at what I learned during any stage of my life it's never any of what I "memorized", but it's all important stuff.
Interesting. I wonder if this acts as a big banner saying, "College grads need not apply"?
Not for any serious positions I bet. Only where they want to do dirty stuff like killing or stalking other humans. It's like recruiting for army- you get them before they learn how to use their brains.
I don't know if I agree. Don't you need a 4.0 from MIT to change the button color from Aqua to Electric Blue? /s <- just in case
A corporation, founded by a Stanford grad who’s been giving talks on the Antichrist, who’s business is to spy on everyone and create a panopticon, is offering a four week indoctrination scheme to susceptible teens.
Idk how our society gets out of this mess but the elites in charge are deranged and focused on destroying one of the west’s great institutions liberal arts colleges. STEM is great but liberal arts flesh out your mind and teach you to think critically and engage with the world. Something sorely missed in today’s age
My company has exclusively hired interns out of high school, including myself, since the mid 2000s. Every single hire was an intern first, either as a junior or senior in HS. The board is now 2/3rds former interns (I'm one of them), 1/3rds original founders.
It works extremely well. Any high school AP CS teacher we ask is delighted to send us their best students. We basically get to interview for 3-5 years during summers while they're at college and then hire (if we have a spot, we are a "lifestyle" company) when they graduate. Of course this means we don't hire seniors, which probably gives us some blind spots, and it means we can't silicon-valley-scale up, but we're very happy with growing software engineers vs hiring them.
So you get 3-5 years of unpaid labor out of every employee first? Radical man
We pay the interns. Is that not usual where you are?
A lot are unpaid but I admit I haven’t looked around the internship space in quite a while. That’s good they are paid
You don't pay interns fairly? Radical man...
Why would anyone accept such a terrible deal
Why would anyone take a programming job over the summer fresh out of high school? What makes that a terrible deal? What is your counterfactual here?
If you're talented enough to pique a recruiter's interest in high school, you're much too talented to sign yourself away to a single company for the long haul in your 20s. Get experience in different industries, see what different corporate cultures are like, and learn how to negotiate compensation. Do these things early and often, because you don't have a spouse, or kids, or a house yet.
I think there are actually a lot more kids like this than you’d think. Like many of those kids, I was so desperate for a job (I needed a job, to pay rent and to eat) that I would have been happy to take any computer job, since the alternative for me was stuff like unloading trucks and stocking shelves.
Unfortunately the standard hiring channels are not very good at finding those folks because they have few credentials. Also, like me, they may be good at certain things and have huge blind spots in other areas.
https://archive.ph/https://www.wsj.com/business/palantir-thi...
I thought that works but I only see "Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker"
It's not the same source but this works
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/palantir...
Your's doesn't work for non-countries. MSN switches to the country you live in, location off or no.
This is basically taking options on human beings.
Employees are far more like goods in a commodities exchange than anyone seems to want to admit.
Hiring/layoff cycles follow the market value of an employee, not the growth/stagnation of the employer.
Better to hire kids that won’t ask questions
High school kids have less developed brains, more impressionable at the least.
It's an Alex Karp pet project that is less of an apprenticeship or professional skills program and more of a mini-uATX [0] style "great books" program [1].
Apprenticeship programs have value, but how this Palantir program is structured clearly isn't providing the technical chops needed, and is just an ideological bootcamp
Finally, if Palantir wanted, they could always just recruit from a more diverse set of universities or create a hiring pipeline out of community colleges. Yet Palantir is notorious about only interviewing and hiring candidates from high prestige programs.
[0] - https://uatx.substack.com/p/this-is-why-we-built-uatx
[1] - https://americanmind.org/salvo/great-books-is-for-losers/
And in 2 years they will be called “senior engineers” too, because the term engineer has no meaning nowadays, thanks to the engineers themselves.
Also its around the age you might start learning empathy, dont want that
This is a really important point. A lot of the "locked in" young types that I've seen in the startup ecosystem have very little experience of how the world works, combined with a tremendous arrogance about their own capabilities. They see the wealth and the power that some people have acquired in tech, and they associate that with success with goodness - or they become completely amoral.
I'm not sure how much these people would actually learn in college, but the idea is that some exposure to the humanities and the arts and to people who have different aspirations and life experiences would give them some interest in considering the consequences and moral worth of their actions.
Maybe that doesn't actually happen and these people will always be amoral. But that's the hope.
So in college you learn how the world works and in the real world you can't?
I can see how college can serve to lose one's arrogance, but why couldn't that happen while doing real work? (in general -- don't know about Palantir)
I wouldn't put it that way. I'm not talking about learning "how the world works" in the sense of how, say, a corporation functions. I'm talking about learning how to think. It's a much broader perspective on humanity than you get from an open office in Sunnyvale. Understanding human history and values and accomplishments.
You can't bank on college making you more moral than MBAs. All of those people went through college
Basic anti-intellectualism framed as if it's something revolutionary, but really for the purposes of finding easily-moldable loyal cogs for the coming corporate-totalitarian society. High schoolers have had one class of "Civics" at best, for which they likely just memorized the answers and don't really get the hard-won ideals at play. College is where students start to mature from having to manage their own independence, and have time to reflect on things like morals and society (albeit going a bit idealistically overboard). Can't have the latter gumming up the works!
Yes this is about hiring folks for low wages and limited ability to leave because they have less transferable skills
the lack of a college degree as a credential may also prove to be a barrier to leaving the company over time
Is it college, or is the age where many young people visit college, that the start to mature?
It's both. Starting to mature at that age, independence of living on your own, and applying yourself to some kind of real work, but without all of that being colored by unrelenting abuse by the financial treadmill. One could probably replicate that kind of slack outside the university environment, but you still need some kind of direction to be learning rather than merely hanging around and playing video games, so such an environment would be halfway to higher education regardless.
Work has provided me with plenty opportunity to learn, at a foundational level even. It's also a question of how you approach work. Sometimes it's as easy as asking for a little bit of extra time or loudly considering a little side project as promising the insight that's required for the next task.
Work has grounded me in such a way that in hindsight I regret staying around uni as long as I did instead of entering the workforce as early as possible. While I was less than a brilliant student, I wouldn't go as far as saying that uni was a waste for me. There are some things that I might never have learned otherwise. But I would love to know the other paths I could have taken in my profession.
Talking about tech we can actually put this in very concrete terms.
What shapes of technologies have you been paid to learn? Do they promote decentralized individual liberty like secure p2p communications? Or are they top-down-control corporate-empowering centralizing technologies like webapps and bitcoin?
I'd say there is a prominent skew for the types of things you can get paid to work on, because software that creates individual freedom intrinsically means creating distributed wealth that can't be easily collected to pay returns on investment. And if you don't even have a general understanding of the whole gamut of what is possible, you likely won't even know what you are missing.
Indeed, this might have been laudable if a lifestyle company that makes CRMs did this, but some sectors and companies are, for lack of a better word, nefarious to society, and some of the most insidiously nefarious are also adept at hiding it. How many on HN/in hacker communities boycott Meta products vs the general population, how many despise OpenAI?
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Not requiring a degree is one thing. Not requiring any basic socialization or life experience is bizarre, maybe cultish, and sounds a little like non-sexual grooming. Hire adults, weirdos.
Next: Palantir thinks high school might be a waste of time, so they are hiring middle schoolers.
Wait...