this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Token ring networks is what they spent quite a bit of time teaching us about, in 2016. Perhaps fair enough to mention it as a thing that existed but they taught this stuff to us like it was current.
That’s the biggest problem with learning tech from a college: developing, vetting, publishing, and adopting curriculum all take a good chunk of time. More time than it takes for new tech to arise.
It’s not hard to see going to trainings/expos/etc. on new/current/upcoming tech while working at a business is going to be a lot more useful than learning 5-20 year old tech in college.
Now, I’m mostly just assuming things as I did not go to college for tech, but I work in education so I know how things typically go.
I don’t feel college is about teaching you how to do so much as it is about teaching you how to critically think and teach yourself.
I’m currently working in healthcare IT as an EMR analyst, I’ve got a degree in biochemistry. My IT experience is from fucking with my own computer since ~1999. I don’t feel I missed out on much by not getting a degree relevant to my current career.
I never performed a Western blot a single time outside of a classroom lab but learning that process, how it worked, the precision and attention to detail needed to do the thing, how to troubleshoot a failed test, etc have been relevant regardless if I’m doing clinical lab stuff or implementing a new cardiology computer system.
Then again I also didn’t go to college for tech so maybe I’m not understanding the issue here. Are people in IT not expected to learn on the job about how things are done at that organization? That’s been my admittedly narrow experience in the field.
yeah the article is about companies literally not offering to train people and how skill gaps exist we aren’t filling because companies expect people to come in already knowing stuff and they basically only hire college grads for entry level answer phone bullshit and expect them to experiment on their own and learn their own shit if they want a real job.
I agree in general an AA is general knowledge and critical thinking, a BS should give you specific knowledge to your job, while maybe not exactly what you need to do, at least enough to enter and be able to figure out most things.
The problem with tech is A: how fast it evolves makes it hard to just teach old stuff and say yeah it just works the same because it very often is a completely different solution. And B: science has been around for ages so labs that can teach general skills actually necessary have been developed and businesses that deal with science understand you need to train employees on protocols and how to use your Lims system or whatever. Tech industry is just wild where people who don’t understand it also run it and thus assume everyone who knows it can do whatever because it’s all the same.
This is exactly why I dropped out of college for computer science when I got my first IT job. 30 years later and I haven't regretted it yet.
I had a similar experience where we had an entire class for Novell Directory Services. The reason our teacher gave for keeping the class in the curriculum? We MAY run into it in the workforce.
My org literally still uses Novell in conjunction with AD
I’m so sorry.