Comment by acheong08
19 days ago
As a college student, I think I can respond to this.
> Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done.
At least for me, it's not that reading bores me - there just isn't enough time and benefit to it, especially for novels and literature. Literary books aren't going in my CV, nor providing any insight into how to write better code. When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position, can I really afford to waste my time like this?
Edit: note - we don't have any literary modules in my course - any reading would be voluntary.
> What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.
I distinctly remember being penalized for any insight that didn't fit marking criteria back in high school english lit. If ChatGPT-like writing is what'll get me to pass, so be it.
> Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.
Well, most lectures just aren't very helpful. They move slower than if we just read the docs. This is very uni/course specific though
> At least for me, it's not that reading bores me - there just isn't enough time and benefit to it, especially for novels and literature. Literary books aren't going in my CV, nor providing any insight into how to write better code. When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position, can I really afford to waste my time like this?
This reads as though the goal of reading is to bolster your career opportunities as a developer? If it's not connected to your career then it shouldn't be viewed that way, it should be viewed as a kind of leisure and the challenges/rewards involved should be compared to the alternatives there (i.e. is the investment in time of being able to understand more complex novels returning a level of personal fulfilment that makes it potentially a more rewarding focus than some more immediately gratifying leisure activity)
It may still be of very low value but viewing the prospect specifically as being damaging to your career opportunities seems like an incorrect perspective to be starting from.
Seeing everything in an utilitarian pov frightens me. I'm a university student, I love reading, I love acting, I love spending my afternoons riding my bike to the seaside or to the tuscanian hills. Nothing of this is going to make me a better developer. But I can't imagine a world in which I don't read, in which I don't get to know people acting or working at the venue meeting other performers, or feeling connected to the Earth with flowers blooming and birds chirping
I would love to do that. In fact my first year was way more relaxed and closer to your experience. I would spend hours wandering the countryside on foot and traveling the country.
Now that graduation is inching closer with no financial backing, it's just not feasible to spend time on anything other than maximizing employability
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I don't disagree.
I think POVs in forums are often much more about framing a thing to justify your beliefs than actually hitting at your own personal implicit values (it's plausible the poster believes leisure is a waste of time and lives by that belief but I doubt it) so I wanted to stick with the original POV approach to highlight the ways it seemed incorrect.
Wait until you work full-time then you understand it.
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> I distinctly remember being penalized for any insight that didn't fit marking criteria back in high school english lit. If ChatGPT-like writing is what'll get me to pass, so be it.
I Can't Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems
> Oh, goody. I’m a benchmark. Only guess what? The test prep materials neglected to insert the stanza break. I texted him an image of how the poem appeared in the original publication. Problem one solved. But guess what else? I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I’m a performance poet), I pause there. Note: that is not an option among the answers because no one ever asked me why I did it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19783650
It's hilarious to explain you can't be assed to read a novel for a class that is about literary analysis and then also say It scares me as well how little interest my peers have in actually learning.
Part of the idea of courses that aren't direct job skills is that you will have done it and learned from it.
This is nice when you have the time to sit down and enjoy literature at a leasurly pace. It's not nice when it's one of many obligations that comes with its own deadlines and tests.
In fairness, this is the standard university experience and has been for many decades. You either figure out how to balance your time and make the grades or you don’t.
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Oh we don't get novels to read for class in university. Any reading would be voluntary
The article you are responding to was about a professor who is assigning his students to read Dostoevsky.
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> When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position, can I really afford to waste my time like this?
If you think of education as trying to lead people into being whole humans, seems like literature and philosophy (properly taught) are some of most critical subjects.
I want this to be true, my arts degree says I even put my money where my mouth is, but university has largely become viewed as vocational training. You do it not to become whole, you do it to become employable.
I'll do that when I can be confident in my ability to afford food. Being a "whole human" just isn't a priority when you might literally become homeless
This feeling will never go away because it’s not caused by circumstances, it’s caused by anxiety.
You’re a student ostensibly studying computer science at University. Taking a few hours a week to stop a smell the roses has zero chance of being the thing that pushes you into homelessness.
When you start working the anxiety won’t go away. You’ll always have the next thing to worry about. What if I lose this job—I only have 6 months of savings. Then you get married and it becomes—if I lose my job my spouse will divorce me. You have a kid and it becomes “Sorry honey I have to work late. Dinner with the family isn’t a priority when the kids could literally become homeless if I lose my job and we can’t afford good schools.”
You can’t fix the anxiety by accomplishing the next goal. It’s never going to be enough. You have to learn to live with some uncertainty or you’ll end up miserable.
Also from a more practical perspective, there are advantages to being a more well rounded person. The best programmer is rarely the highest paid. Soft skills are at least as important. Being a well rounded human is a big part of those soft skills.
I’m not saying you necessarily need to be well versed in literary fiction. But having a wide breadth of knowledge comes in handy.
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> At least for me, it's not that reading bores me - there just isn't enough time and benefit to it, especially for novels and literature. Literary books aren't going in my CV, nor providing any insight into how to write better code. When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position, can I really afford to waste my time like this?
The disconnect here is that your professors are assigning you work like this because the purpose of a university education is to broaden your horizons, challenge you, and force you to think about _how to think._
The fact that you're treating it like trade school is your problem, not the university's.
> I distinctly remember being penalized for any insight that didn't fit marking criteria back in high school english lit.
Good for you. High school writing has nothing to do with university-level papers.
> Well, most lectures just aren't very helpful. They move slower than if we just read the docs. Some lecturers are also just incompetent with barely any understanding of what they're teaching in the first place...
Your issue, again, is that you're arrogantly assuming you don't have anything to learn from things you personally haven't prioritized. A major role of a university education is to beat that idea out of you by showing you how wrong you are. Pity it isn't sticking.
> ...though this probably wouldn't be as big of a problem in better universities like Ivy Leagues where the author works
What the actual fuck, dude? Ivy League? Right in the second paragraph: "I teach at a regional public university in the US."
I went into this article kind of annoyed at the stereotyping of "these kids today," but way to go reinforcing the article's points. Damn.
The disconnect here is that your professors are assigning you work like this because the purpose of a university education is to broaden your horizons, challenge you, and force you to think about _how to think._
this would be fine if it didn't cost as much as a new car and my career did not depend on it. I can broaden my horizons for free at library
> The fact that you're treating it like trade school is your problem, not the university's.
When (for many people) going to college almost necessarily means accruing 5-figure to 6-figure debt at the infancy of their careers, they sure as shit better have some sort of marketable skill to justify and remedy that debt coming out of it.
I understand the sentiment of higher education being useful for broadening one's horizons, challenging you, teaching you how to think etc; but you should be arguing in the _positive_ for these things to be available to everyone without a paywall.
Federal loans are enough to pay for a state school (especially if you do your general education at a community college). Income based repayment means you’ll never pay more than 10% of your discretionary income for 20 years (income above 1.5x the poverty level for your family size). If you never make more than 1.5x the poverty level, you’ll never pay back a dime.
College is financially attainable for just about anyone.
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There's so much to unpack here. I'll start from the bottom.
> better universities like Ivy Leagues where the author works
The author gives their background in the second paragraph of the article (did you read it?): "I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name"
> Well, most lectures just aren't very helpful. They move slower than if we just read the docs.
a) It appears that no one is reading the docs, as the author discussed at length (did you read it?)
b) A lecture is always faster than reading. A lecture is cliff notes. A lecture is the person who knows more than you teaching you the most important bits of the docs.
> it's not that reading bores me - there just isn't enough time and benefit to it
You stated that the lecture was too slow so you just read the docs. Here you state that there's not enough time and benefit to reading. Which is it?
> It scares me as well how little interest my peers have in actually learning
Do you see that you're demonstrating that same disinterest? Reading isn't worth your time. Lectures are too slow and the professors are dumb anyway. Etc.
> Literary books aren't going in my CV, nor providing any insight into how to write better code. When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position
This implies that there is some educational medium by which you are so deeply focused and involved in, that the author is unaware of, pointed directly at CV building and internship/job getting, that you simply don't have time for the lectures or books that the author's class covers. Is that correct? What is it? How much time are you spending on an average day CV building?
> can I really afford to waste my time like this?
Sweet summer child. You are a college student. You have all the time in the world.
Your post here, if anything, corroborates the author's perspective.
As a college student, feel like I haven’t met any college student with “all the time in the world” as the people say we have lol. Most of my friends who graduated feel like they have more free time after graduating than in college
That’s only because they got better at time management.
The average college student has almost a month off in December, nearly 3 months off in the summer, a week off for thanksgiving, a week off for spring break, and almost nothing to do for the first 2 weeks of each semester.
That’s nearly 6 months of nothing but free time.
People are just remembering how stressful it gets at exam time and near the end of the semester when projects are so and forgetting how much free time they had during the rest of the year.
> Well, most lectures just aren't very helpful. They move slower than if we just read the docs. Some lecturers are also just incompetent with barely any understanding of what they're teaching in the first place - though this probably wouldn't be as big of a problem in better universities like Ivy Leagues where the author works
Memories of my degree 20 years ago. We didn't have (many) pre-recorded videos of lectures available to watch whenever we wanted at whatever speed we wanted, the way we do now.
Now there's a good range of lectures given away for free, I'm not sure even the top 10% of lecturers (beyond the best individuals in the world on whichever topic) are adding much value — In theory one could interrupt the lecture to clarify a point, but that's also a thing one can often do alone with the internet.
And that's for the best lecturers. We had some good teachers, but also some bad ones.
The C lectures were fantastic, the practical security sessions were fun (started with ~ "if you've already hacked this WiFi box, please log out so I can show everyone else how to break into it"), etc.
For the bad ones… there was one in my final year where I was using my laptop to record the whole session at 44 kHz (audio only), and the lecturer claimed that motion capture recordings couldn't go for more than a few minutes because that would be "several megabytes" of data. There was another who was giving us an example of formal methods, but they got the proof wrong and didn't notice (and had a voice that meant nobody cared). Another had an impenetrable accent, I might have understood a total of two words in the entire lecture, though I could at least follow the written material projected on the screen.
>When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position, can I really afford to waste my time like this?
The ratio of internships to qualified students is far better than 1:1200. You don’t need to be in the top tenth of a percent to get an internship.
Worst case scenario you don’t get the internship you want and it takes you an extra year or 2 to get the job you wanted.
Take some time to enjoy your youth without worrying about min maxing everything. You’re never going to have fewer responsibilities than you do now.
>slower than if we just read the docs
Don’t take classes where the content of lectures can be replaced by reading the docs. Take theoretical classes. Learn the practical stuff on your own.
Also seek out the experts. Ask questions. Spend time with them. Unless you do to grad school, you’ll never have this kind of access to experts again.
> The ratio of internships to qualified students is far better than 1:1200.
To be fair, for a person with several years of industry experience it feels like the ratio of applicants to openings for tech jobs really is some absurdly high number - high enough to where you can be out of experience-appropriate work for years, plural.
I don't know if the overall market can generalize to university internships however, which may be the disconnect.
However, I remember one time in the recent past where I was offered to interview for a position that was designed for recent graduates with no industry experience. They offered this to me knowing I had graduated long ago and already had industry work for a while. My conclusion was that after a whole two months of interviewing candidates, they simply could not find any recent graduates qualified enough for their own recent graduates opening.
I did feel some guilt being offered that position knowing it was supposed to have gone towards someone with far fewer opportunities to get hired than me. I don't know if this is an indication of the state of universities, recent graduates, hiring managers who write up the postings and don't know what they actually want, the job market in general, or some other factor I haven't considered...
Oh there really are thousands of people that apply to each job. But that’s because people who have a hard time finding a job stay in the market longer. Think of it as if there are 1000 permanently unemployed people who will apply for any job opening.
But if you look at unemployment and underemployment rates, it’s clear that the ratio is nowhere near as what it feels like just from looking at the number of people who apply to a job.
We’re in a job market downturn. It is definitely possible to be out of work for years.
But unless you’re in the bottom say 20% of developers that’s not likely to happen.
Even after the dotcom boom tech unemployment only got to 6.5% or so.
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Looking at what you wrote about not seeing benefits of anything that doesn't directly contribute to your job fitness - please read this:
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/excuse-me-but-why-are...
It isn't a waste of time, I promise.
> Well, most lectures just aren't very helpful. They move slower than if we just read the docs. This is very uni/course specific though
You must be going to the easiest school ever.
I suppose so. 99% of what I learn is outside uni.
the author doesn't work at an ivy league, they work at an average school (your error here is beautifully ironic...)
Yeah I misread by clicking into their profile
> I'm a tenured philosophy professor with an Ivy League PhD.
The Ivy league isn't teaching Dostoevsky any differently than from an 'average' school, and have a significant number of legacy and preferential admissions who wouldn't otherwise pass the academic standards that everybody else had to.
That's not the point at all though. The point is that the author is talking about how college students can't read and comprehend material, and the student refuting clearly didn't read or comprehend the material.
the aptitude of the students and general motivation is different, though.