Comment by jxub
7 years ago
Usually, the employee screening at the entry level relies on assessment of education history of the prospect.
The problem is that educational excellence often selects for agreeableness, as there is no real reward of contrarianism in education.
From bullshit Liberal Arts essays where you are graded in function of the level of endorsement of the brain farts of the professor in question to even the CS projects that are supposed to be made in a specific technology, often some JavaEE crap avoiding using more powerful languages or ecosystems like Python, Elixir or Clojure.
I wonder how many billions has the economy lost as a result.
Not true. A CS degree from say, UIUC has no correlation to agreeableness I can see. I can't count the amount of jerks I knew in school. Cockiness, yes. Sometimes brilliant, yes.
The few girls in the CS program could easily verify the lack of agreeableness.
Yeah, I was a student at math.illinois.edu, but did a CS minor- man, that major had the highest proportion of fuckheads I've ever encountered.
> educational excellence often selects for agreeableness
Only to a limited degree. "The average relationship of academic performance with Conscientiousness (d = .46) can be seen as a medium-sized effect, the relationships with Agreeableness (d = .14) and Openness (d = .24) as small effects, and the relationships with Emotional Stability and Extraversion as relatively minor" [1].
Moreover, given "correlations with Agreeableness were least affected by controlling for intelligence" (page 26) and "increasing age was associated with declining correlations with Agreeableness" (page 29), one could argue that better-educated individuals will be more Agreeable (per the Big Five model [2]) solely due to being older.
More likely is interview performance, as "Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability are all associated with social desirability (Digman, 1997), which has also been shown to affect performance ratings (Murphy & Cleveland, 1995)" (page 36).
[1] https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle... page 22
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
> I wonder how many billions has the economy lost as a result.
Not a meaningful metric. The world is creating plenty of fake jobs and inefficiency to justify occupation.
> The problem is that educational excellence often selects for agreeableness, as there is no real reward of contrarianism in education.
Simply not true. Perhaps at second-tier and below schools this happens, but at a good university you are rewarded for contrarianism that can support itself with good arguments. You aren't rewarded just for being a contrarian, so no one is giving you free points just for saying 'you're wrong' without a coherent argument supporting your case.
If your education history is being scrutinized then the filter usually consists of 'I have heard of this university' && 'did graduate'; if your grades actually come into the discussion then you either are probably not qualified for the job or probably don't really want take the job even if they make an offer.
It is a very poor CS curriculum that requires the use of a specific framework; what does JavaEE has to do with science? Nothing.
And even as vocational training, would you hire somebody who went to school to study a framework?
So anyone can use any language for any assigent. How many runtimes do I need to install to grade your program? Howany languages do I need to know? How many frameworks do I need to understand? It's a problem of practicality.
I agree that any CS course focused on a tech stack instead of CS concepts is a poor one, but that's not the only reason we see specific languages being mandated.
I found assholes regularly got good grades.