On Wed, 05 May 2021 15:39:59 -0400, wrote:

On Wed, 5 May 2021 10:57:49 -0400, Ralph Mowery
wrote:

In article , says...

Kids are pushed to the over priced schools and often are taking courses
that are interesting and fun but offer no practical use in job
performance. College is expected but real useful education is not
always chosen.



It does seem that college is being pushed very hard but many courses are
worthless. Seems they only exists to make more professors in the field.
Bill Gates one of the richest men in the world was a college dropout. I
am not sure about some of the Apple founders, but would not surprise me
if they never finished college either. Now other companies are getting
away from college students and training them their selves.

IBM trained its own programmers for some time. As secretaries became
superfluous, they retrained them as coders. At the time there was a
"no layoffs" policy in the company so it was a good idea, and worked.
Programming was set up so the specifications were so well done that it
didn't take a lot to write the programs from the specifications. The
design was done by the computer "scientists" and the actual putting it
into bits was done by "coders".

IBM trained all of their hardware people in house and was not
impressed by degrees. In the early 70s they tried some EEs and half
went into management or an engineering department, mostly Federal
Systems. The other half were just advised to seek other opportunities
somewhere else. The skills they brought were generally years behind
the current technology and that was changing yearly.
They did offer tuition refunds but there was little incentive to use
them. A CE with a degree was still paid the same as one without a
degree. It was not going to get you promoted either.
Most of us had plenty of classroom time, just keeping up with the
technology we were working on.