Commenter AJ was asking a few questions at Eric’s More worthless than a degree from a diploma mill. AJ believes in the value of schooling. I do not. I believe in the value of education. Specifically – educating yourself.
I decided he deserved some answers.
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“I don’t understand how being an aerospace engineer without a degree allows you hold someone who received a degree in something with so much contempt.”
Well lets see.
I can’t tell you the number of times I replaced degreed engineers who didn’t know what the F**k they were doing. All that money and time and it seems they couldn’t do the job.
I remember one time I predicted total disaster – a PC board was designed wrong. Bad wrong. There were about ten degreed hardware engineers in the section I was working with – they laughed at me. (I was called in because they were short handed) The first prototypes worked. The preproduction prototypes worked. More laughter. Then production. About 90% failure off the line and 99% field failures of those that passed the line. Only one person laughing. Me. They asked if I wanted to join in with the disaster recovery program. I asked what is your plan? They said you will work on the line to help with testing to get more boards out. Well I could see more disaster in the making. I declined. There are some things I will not do. Even for good money.
And the information they needed was in the manuals for the parts they were using. I showed it to them. Right from the beginning.
All that money spent educating those boys. Wasted. And they didn’t even know it. Until they designed a disaster.
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(This was in response to AJ saying I was an exception – no degree, just ambish and study)
Of course exceptions aren’t the rule. That is why they are exceptions.
But with the cost of degrees up and the value of them down people may have to start finding their inner ambish.
On line education is available. And getting better. When I started all I had was books. With no one to ask questions of the way you can do online these days.
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“I mean, I understand there’s the “we are liberterians therefore we must hate (students, liberal arts majors, private school attendees, teachers, insert another group into ever-growing shit-list) but I dunno, do you think this is a winning proposition?”
Yes. When I signed on for this gig (the one I’m doing now):
ecnmag.com/tags/Blogs/M-Simon/
I flat out said few things:
1. I have an abrasive personality
2. I don’t respect chains of command
3. I hold in contempt the majority of degreed engineers
They said #1 and #2 were no problem and as engineers themselves and having seen the run of the mill they understood – despite holding degees themselves.
So yes. I do think it is a winning proposition because in fact it is reality.
Most people train for a job. I trained because I love it. Who is most likely to turn out better?
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And the cost of my training was negative – I got paid every step of the way.
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He added: “Combine that with government meddling in the student loan market that has artificially inflated the cost of higher education and young people are getting screwed over even worse than the country overall”.
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Any more questions AJ?
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Re: the McDonald’s cashier job. I find out later that McDonald’s claims it ain’t so. They say they contracted some one to place the ad. What I think is that the people they contracted with actually know the job market and were doing McDonald’s a favor by effectively pre-screening out resumes of people who had no chance of making the cut. There are lots of useless degrees out there. And they are going hungry.
What would I do if I was on the low end and not particularly good at schooling? I’d become a plumber or appliance repair man. Very good money in that and no degree required. People will pay good money to get their things fixed. You just have to be able to get your hands and brains working together. Not too different from an electronics bench technician – which is where I started out.
H/T to Eric for keeping me up to date on AJ’s reply.
Comments
5 responses to “What Is A Degree Really Worth?”
“I mean, I understand there’s the “we are liberterians therefore we must hate (students, liberal arts majors, private school attendees, teachers, insert another group into ever-growing shit-list) but I dunno, do you think this is a winning proposition?”
Well, I’m a libertarian, pretty much.
I was also a liberal arts (philosophy) major.
I don’t hate any of those groups.
I also don’t think any of them are special, which might be confused with “hate” by those not thinking very clearly.
(Want a Liberal Arts degree? Go for it.
But don’t demand that somehow it be remunerative, because it almost certainly won’t be.
If you love the discipline – whichever one under the Liberal Arts you’ve chosen – and find it fulfilling to dedicate years of life and piles of money to its study, more power to you.
In all seriousness, live that dream.
But, again, no complaints will be taken seriously when you’re done, in debt, and have no marketable skills outside of the constrained academic market.
It turns out that when one is seeking employment, that’s all that really matters to a prospective employer.
[“You don’t know what it’s like! I’ve worked in the private sector – they expect results!”])
I got my degree at the Institute of Inelastic Collisions.
Your printed circuit anecdote reminded me of one I experienced.
Fielded a phone call from a pair of engineers at a company that made web press controllers. All of a sudden they’re getting ESD failures all over the place on their new production run. My 1st response was that things don’t mysteriously start failing, they must have changed something. “Oh no, we haven’t changed a thing. Really, not a thing? No new vendors, nothing at all? No not a thing. Really? Oh no nothing, we just left out the ground plane.” Really happened.
What I hate is bad, ignorant engineers. I don’t care if they have a degree or not. Especially these new guys who thing a SPICE simulation tells them everything they need to know about how a circuit will work.
(Web press; van de Graff generator: compare and contrast)
MMM,
Too funny. And yet as a general rule American Engineers are the best in the world. That is depressing.
Yeah. SPICErs. A good simulation will get you to 5% – maybe a little better. Now suppose you need 1% or better. Fooked.
SPICE is OK for telling you what to change and in which direction. But accuracy? Nope. And all you need to know? Not even.
My e-mail is on the sidebar at
http://spacetimepro.blogspot.com/
want to do something? Or get publicity for your company?
SPICE can also be disastrously wrong – like telling you something that could never work is AOK fine. For an example, some distros include vacuum tube models. I wanted to see if the model’s large signal response at all resembled the real world. Turns out not so much.
According to SPICE a 12AX7 will amplify with -100V on the plate.
Bob Pease had a lot of fun with the “Taguchi Method” Taguchi’s circuit for a voltage regulator was upside down, backwards and dissipated 1500W in his poor little pass transistor.
Obviously simulated and never built.
http://electronicdesign.com/components/whats-all-taguchi-stuff-anyhow-part-ii
SPICE is actually good for fine tuning pulse forming networks. Helps a lot if the user has some intuition about how circuits are supposed to act.
I don’t understand the point of this post because it did not address anything that I discussed. The bio is great. Like I was saying, your story is impressive, but sounds to me like somebody has incompetence, security or envy issues – don’t highlight the accomplishments, just highlight everyone else’s deficiencies.
For all we know, you were working at a shitty company that could not competitively recruit, and was stuck hiring bottom of the barrel college grads.
He added: “Combine that with government meddling in the student loan market that has artificially inflated the cost of higher education and young people are getting screwed over even worse than the country overall”.
Its funny because the government used to provide education for a couple hundred dollars a year.
Re: the McDonald’s cashier job. I find out later that McDonald’s claims it ain’t so. They say they contracted some one to place the ad. What I think is that the people they contracted with actually know the job market and were doing McDonald’s a favor by effectively pre-screening out resumes of people who had no chance of making the cut. There are lots of useless degrees out there. And they are going hungry.
That’s a weird thing to say though. I already explained to you that the data demonstrates that these dumb Bowdein liberal arts majors end up doing fine midway through their careers and they are not ending up as baristas. Instead of learning how to say “Oh, I don’t know that, maybe I was incorrect” you divert off tangent and start talking about something nobody cared about.
The unspoken truth about the college market is that students from state universities and from non-profit private universities are generally doing fine. There is the outlier student with $150K debt but that student does not represent the median student. The problem really lies at the students who go to the ITT Techs, Universities of Phoenixes and other for-profit garbage schools that have 30-35% default rates. Of course, the liberal arts major at Swarthmore university is an easier target.