Why is our society so obsessed with school?

Well, if you would have stayed in school, you'd know what the big fuss is all about.

What do you mean exactly by "our society", because this is the way pretty much the entire western world works.

As far as the actual issue of degree vs. non-degree, there are a few reasons why a degree is preferred:

1. It shows commitment. You started something that can be difficult and time consuming, but was not required. You finished it, and many employers value that.

2. It guarantees you have a minimum training.

3. Anyone can lie about experience. However, falsifying degrees is pretty harshly enforced, and potential employers have flexible avenues for verifying a degree. Within the school, anti-cheating rules are strictly enforced, and there are entire positions in each school designed just to weed out cheaters. However, a past employer may be quite willing to lie for you about your experience if they feel bad about laying you off, or it could just be your friend pretending to be a company.

4. It does make for a more well-rounded person. Just having experience on the aspect you will be working on doesn't mean you have other valuable work-place skills, such as grammatically correct writing, verbal communication, etc.

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Original post by CodaKiller I've been thinking lately, it seems like the only professions which are decent require some type of degree. I know this is the simple principle of supply and demand but I don't think having a degree or going to school for many years is going to make you any better at the job then anyone else.

Every skilled profession requires a level of training. The question is whether you expect entry-level employees to be fully trained as part the job (such as in an apprenticeship) or whether you expect them to have a base level of skill to begin with (such as through formal training, i.e. college). Since most companies can't afford to spend two or more years training new hires to reach that base level of functionality, the system has gone for the latter.

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For instance a computer science degree can't really teach you what you need to know for every job, you could have been studying visual basic or java in school and then be required to build a game engine in C++ at a game studio.

If a CS degree is training someone just in a specific language, it's a pretty poor CS degree. Every CS degree I've been in contact with would teach a minimum of three languages as a side-effect of their class content, with the expectation that students could pick up the basics of a new one within a month if they had to. It's essential in programming to be able to pick up new languages.

After the first year of study, CS courses tend to no longer focus on teaching languages. They might teach new ones as part of another course, but the focus is on learning CS constructs. For example, in my AI course we were taught Prolog, but learning Prolog wasn't the focus of the course.

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The thing is the company will always prefer someone who has a degree over anyone else even if the training they received would have little to do with the actual job. I think someone who has worked at a similar job for 1 month without any schooling will probably have more useful knowledge then someone who has gone to school for 4 years to work in that field yet I think the person who went to school and has no experience real world experience would still be more likely to get the job.

If we're talking about game programming and comparing a similar level of student, I'd doubt that. A high-school graduate who completes a 4 year university course would almost certainly be a better fit for a job than the same high-school graduate who had spent one month in a entry-level job. A four year course would be something like Software Engineering or Computer Science with Honours, and a graduate would have to have experience with a few languages, comfortable with at least a first-year university level at maths, and would have completed several group projects, at least one of a significant scale.

Now if we were comparing a four year degree holder with someone without a degree but a kickass portfolio and a few team based projects under their belt that would be a different matter. If I were the hirer I'd still be a bit worried that the self-learner had some holes in their background, but I could certainly see why they might warrant an interview at least. But a total newbie who somehow had one month on-the-job experience? No comparison.

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Original post by CodaKiller Even a mechanic could have been trained to work on some type of standard automobile and then work for a company which builds fighter jets.

Alright, whose flamebaiting alt account is this?

For a more serious discussion it might be interesting to look at this from the angle of social class as it relates to the difficulties and ultimate outcomes of getting through a formal 4 year school versus something like an apprenticeship or trade school. From an economic perspective this is a no brainer-- over and over studies show that college graduates make more money. But if quality of life rather than economics is the criteria and you look at the increasing debt load, the rising tuition prices and the actual jobs people get when they take six years or more to graduate (or, in many cases, fail to graduate) then I don't know if we're wise to say dogmatically that everyone should go to school. Clearly there are folks who excel at post secondary education, but I'd submit that these folks would excel no matter what they did because they have minds and personalities geared toward novelty and continuous learning. But that's not everybody.

Another interesting angle, perhaps cynical but nonetheless (especially in this climate) realistic would be in examining the behaviors and motivations of schools as economic entities. If we're sentimental we might say that colleges are driven by altruism and the betterment of society. But how does this square against the need to generate revenue? Does a school have any responsibility, for instance, in matching the skills it teaches for a given curriculum with the economic realities of the world at large? Is it okay, for example, to generate far more graduates for a particular field than will ever reasonably be employed? (A very interesting question, I think, when viewed through games)

In my experience I don't think you can get by in the professional world without some sort of education. But I've personally seen, time and time again, that that doesn't automatically mean that the education has to come solely from a post secondary source.

So maybe the bottom line might be "you'll be richer, but don't think automatically that you'll be happier."

Rules are for those that can't live without being told what to do next. And it's perfectly fine and natural for this rules to exist. They bring order and help societies to perpetuate.

Schools are fine. Degrees are fine. What's not often fine is people itself wherever they study or not.

I kind of have a strange view on further education. I wouldn't consider it a "right" way to think about education. But it's none the less my view.

For many professions you need a degree. A piece of proof that you're consistent and complient to a number of needed pre-requisates for the job. I will not deny that further education in most professional areas is a way to ween out the passionate from the lazy and to teach the needed skills.

However I do believe that there are a few jobs in the game industry that you could or at the least should be able to obtain without a degree in something. Game Design and Level Design being an example.

Why?

Don't get me wrong. A degree is greatly beneficial in many aspects. How to correctly write, how to socialise, theory and just general self improvement that comes with the 2-4 years after high school of being able to not worry about rent and bills.

But game and level design As a job as our industry still relies on the persons ability to seek and understand it in their own time and in their own ways. It requires the person to play games to understand them. Try to get their head around the concept of what elements make a good game. And then you have the more worky side of design as well like how to handle a level design tool-set and how to write effective design documentation.

I've found for myself that the best way to learn how to make games is to..well..make some games! =O

In my experience with working with others and their views on education and their own experiences:

- The programmers saw it as important and worth the time.
- The artists usually considered it a waste of time.
- The designers considered it important but complimentary to the skill set they learnt themselves or through life experience.


Of course this is all rendered mute as most large company's have HR-people. Who will throw out 99% of resumes that don't have a degree written down in the education section of the resume because it's one of the most simple ways to ween down the 300 resumes they got for one position.

>>It just seems like our society is far to obsessed with school to me<<

aye, education wouldnt even rank in the top10 things of importance in society

>>1. It shows commitment. You started something that can be difficult and time consuming, but was not required. You finished it, and many employers value that.<<

I just had a quick google, the two most famous 3d game programmers, tim sweeny, john carmack both failed to finish their schooling.
An employer's gotta be crazy hiring those lazy useless uncommitted fucks :)

Schools also serve as reducing nepotism. If a certain profession requires a degree in that particular field, you just can't hire an unqualified person or pass your position to your offspring / other relative.

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The thing is the company will always prefer someone who has a degree over anyone else even if the training they received would have little to do with the actual job. I think someone who has worked at a similar job for 1 month without any schooling will probably have more useful knowledge ...

Usually the people who has a degree has already worked in the field as a trainee during summer vacations or while studying. Usually, in order to get the degree, a person must have at least a couple months worth of working experience.

cheers!

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Original post by CodaKiller Even a mechanic could have been trained to work on some type of standard automobile and then work for a company which builds fighter jets.

As a servant.

I guess you can get into programming industry with just tinkering, but the 5 years of engineering university would also be wasting of time? When we didn't have time to learn any design softwares (not even CAD), because of the tempo.

I guess medical university is the same. If someone is taught to gut out a frog, than he can do brain surgery on me.

A programmer won't be jailed if (s)he makes a fault, but an engineer/doctor/nurse/architect will, and his employer will be in trouble too.

And a programmer, who is only tinkering (like myself), may miss the principals of programming (like myself).

If I misunderstood you, and you were talking about the programming industry only, than sorry!

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Original post by szecs And a programmer, who is only tinkering (like myself), may miss the principals of programming (like myself).

When you are self taught you tend to skip the boring things. But in school they force you to do those boring things which makes you a better all around programmer. A CS degree shouldn't teach you to just be a code monkey but how to solve problems. Skills a high school dropout probably doesn't have.

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Original post by zedz I just had a quick google, the two most famous 3d game programmers, tim sweeny, john carmack both failed to finish their schooling. An employer's gotta be crazy hiring those lazy useless uncommitted fucks :)

Yawn. And how many millions of other dropouts are working deadend jobs for the rest of their lives? Living in your moms basement programming all day in hopes of becoming the next John Carmack probably isn't the best idea. Nobody says that having a degree is the end all and be all of getting a job. If you can code Doom 3 in your spare time then degree or not you can find a job. The rest of us poor folk need something else to demonstrate our skills...and surprise that is usually a degree.

Now you see, my complaint is that most "developers" aren't actually educated enough.

I worked for a company which wrote money handling software. One of several lead developers there was pretty proud of not having gone to uni and not had "fancy learning". As a result, he didn't believe in things like code audits and certainly not in race hazards subsequently found. He said that "race hazard" was a made-up term.

When the race hazard was subsequently found and exploited by fraudsters, the company shelled out several tens of millions of pounds in compensation to operating companies and in the costs associated with re-writing and replacing the software.

That's not even the most expensive error I've seen ill educated developers make -- the total cost of the most expensive I've seen is hard to reckon, but it actually involved the destruction of a new market segment. It had a directly attributable cost in the hundreds of millions (the lost investments when the project was closed down), plus anyone's guess as to what the future losses of being unable to sell into that market was.

I've never seen anyone kill people through lack of software engineering ability, but I expect to see it at some point in my career, and it will almost certainly be proceeded by someone saying something like "We don't need to do fancy things like PROVE it works, we TESTED it.."

A CS degree does not teach you to program. It teaches you things like how to actually write concurrent programs correctly. Every time people arrive on this board and talk about threaded code, everyone else winces. Why? Because there's a perception that threaded code is "difficult". And it is if you go at it ad-hoc without having gone and done "CS135 Principles of Concurrency"[1] and been taught formal concurrency theory. It's dull and dry and tedious as heck, but at the end of it you can write threaded code which works correctly all the time and which doesn't cause endless tears.

The proposed solution to the money handling was a program to test programs for correctness. We[2] pointed out that this basically maps to the halting problem which is undecideable. The lead developers said "It's easy to decide if a program will terminate -- either it does or it doesn't" and set off to solve it.

I quit and got a different job and for all I know they're still trying to solve it.



[1] Back when I was there, IIRC it was a 2nd year course called "concurrent programming concepts". They appear to moved it to year 1.

[2] By which I mean, those of us who'd been to uni and hence heard of Mr. Turing's work.

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Original post by zedz I just had a quick google, the two most famous 3d game programmers, tim sweeny, john carmack both failed to finish their schooling. An employer's gotta be crazy hiring those lazy useless uncommitted fucks :)

Perhaps that's why they started their own companies. :)

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Original post by Katie I've never seen anyone kill people through lack of software engineering ability, but I expect to see it at some point in my career, and it will almost certainly be proceeded by someone saying something like "We don't need to do fancy things like PROVE it works, we TESTED it.." A CS degree does not teach you to program.

Nor does it takes away stupidity. I've heard of (and seen) engineers doing stupid things like that. They would say something like "I can't be wrong because I've a degree" like if intelligence and common sense had nothing to do with a job well done. Then another good segment of people who gets a degree leaves university just like they entered (completely clueless) and go directly to a management position just to fuck the life of the people who actually gets the job done.

Good graded professionals are just as scarce as under-graded ones.

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Original post by zedz >>1. It shows commitment. You started something that can be difficult and time consuming, but was not required. You finished it, and many employers value that.<< I just had a quick google, the two most famous 3d game programmers, tim sweeny, john carmack both failed to finish their schooling. An employer's gotta be crazy hiring those lazy useless uncommitted fucks :)

I'm not saying that is how all of society should take it, or that because you didn't go to school, you are lazy and uncommitted. I am only saying that it is an easy way for a potential employer to tell at a glance that the person completed something. It doesn't specifically always mean something about their character. They may have been forced to go to school by their parents to keep from being kicked out of the house. But what else are employers going to make that decision on? A portfolio may not even belong to the person applying, as there is no institution to confirm it was completely made by them.

There are pro & cons to both formal education and self-teaching. Neither is for everybody.

To me, the main function of a degree (even if you're capable of self-teaching) is that a degree opens doors.

A point of interest: At my company (not the game industry) our most creative & productive programmers don't have degrees. Having said that, we've never hired someone without a degree (and) with no prior experience. That is the hurdle that must be jumped if you don't have a degree.

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Original post by Katie I've never seen anyone kill people through lack of software engineering ability, but I expect to see it at some point in my career, and it will almost certainly be proceeded by someone saying something like "We don't need to do fancy things like PROVE it works, we TESTED it.."

I agree with you in principle, though "proving" that a particular piece of software works becomes nearly impossible outside the realm of trivial programs. A major open question in software engineering is, in my opinion, how can you use testing to put an upper bound on the uncertainty that your program will follow the specs? No one wants a Therac-25 situation again...

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Original post by Katie The proposed solution to the money handling was a program to test programs for correctness. We[2] pointed out that this basically maps to the halting problem which is undecideable

Undecidable in the general case. From my understanding of Algorithmic Information Theory, deciding the halting problem for a given program requires a program whose Kolmogorov complexity is higher. This means their search for a testing program is not necessarily in vain, but that it requires more work than just writing the software itself!

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Regarding the school issue, I often wonder if some employers only hire people that look good on paper (i.e. with fancy degree) so that they can appear blameless if the new employee doesn't work out.

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Original post by DaWanderer No one wants a Therac-25 situation again...

Heh I just got done reading a computer ethics book from 1997 and it covered that in relation to responsibility and safety. Kind of scary.

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Original post by Wan Quote: Original post by zedz I just had a quick google, the two most famous 3d game programmers, tim sweeny, john carmack both failed to finish their schooling. An employer's gotta be crazy hiring those lazy useless uncommitted fucks :) Perhaps that's why they started their own companies. :)

Well said.