I’m not in CS, so maybe it’s different, but I don’t know how we can expect to get skilled biologists, mechanical engineers, psychologists, etc without something that’s very similar to the 4-year degree.
I'm not sure American universities are still issuing things similar to 1990s 4-year degrees. They issue documents claiming to be degrees, but the quality has dropped, and they aren't what they used to be.
Having taught the new engineers, and having worked with those 1990s mechanical engineers, I strongly disagree. It’s a recurring belief that the new generation is regressing. When typewriters became common, teachers worried about handwriting. When calculators became common, math teachers worried about mental math skills. If anyone alive was old enough to protest, “the greatest generation” probably would have a different name.
Edit: initially i said “ People bemoaned the loss of chalk-on-blackboard skills when paper and pencil got cheap”, but apparently that’s not true, it was first claimed in a piece of satire, and then became mistaken for the truth.
Yeah, people still go to college as high school students who don’t know much and come out as almost-engineers, so degrees definitely still have value. And I don’t see a lot of difference in skill between the generations after accounting for experience.
Yeah I never get what these other comments are talking about with college not being useful. I basically learned my profession in college and now hire people who have done the same thing.
My wife is a bench scientist. The perspective I get from her is that automation is typically much slower than doing it by hand, especially since there are tools like multi-channel pipettes that give you a lot of the benefits of automation without needing to do any coding. The general task of sucking up liquids is also tough to calibrate due to differences in viscosity. An automation engineer will need to spend a lot of time calibrating while someone who has a lot of experience can go by feel.
This is a very interesting comment because the project I am currently on is trying to assess viscosity with computer vision in basically the same way you are saying.
I am surprised you say that doing stuff is faster by hand, can you elaborate what you wife mean by this? Is the bottleneck the user-friendliness of programming the robots? Because I have a hard time believing the actual motion of the researcher pipetting beats the $500k hamilton liquid handlers... could be wrong though!
I see adds for these companies all the time on Muni buses. It’s very frustrating, and I wish the city would be more choosy about who they let advertise.
The system is run so that the corporations are #1 and people just there to feed the economy. That's why sports betting is allowed. Advertising in public spaces is another thing as you've noticed. Those bright electronic billboards are a net negative to society but still allowed. Guess who needs advertising come election time?
I really like browsing the non-fiction stacks of libraries for books like this. There’s a lot good stuff though it depends on a library; you need one that’s willing to keep things on the shelf for a few decades to get a really interesting selection.
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