One of the most frustrating things over the past decade or so has been watching companies shut off the path to advancement. They made it pretty much impossible to get your foot in the door and basically apprentice and work your way up. You make less, but not everyone has the time to go to college financially. This doesn't mean you shouldn't get a chance. Some of the brightest minds here have been high school drop outs. But those people would never be able to lie their way into getting into these companies these days due to the schooling requirements. Make no mistake you have to back up your lies with real knowledge, but you'd never be able to fib your way in now. And yes, everyone fibs a little bit to get jobs sometimes. They will test you anyway.
When a bunch of companies decided recently they were going to drop the college requirement, I felt it was like a breath of fresh air. It's the only way for people to get real hands on experience in a job climate of increasing complexity.
So this morning when I saw an article celebrating this new rule I went over to see which ones are signing on. Because I think this is a really good new development. And boy did it piss me off. Let me tell you why.
Other than Google, IBM and Apple these are the companies who have signed on.
Costco
Whole Foods
Hilton
Starbucks
Nordstrom
Home Depot
Chipotle
And Lowes
How the fuck do you need a college degree to work at Chipotle? Please tell me this is shoddy reporting. Seriously. Fully half of the companies listed should have never needed this requirement in the first place. It's complete insanity.
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All those companies need someone to sweep the floor, clean whatever and do the basic meet the public jobs. Come'on down "we're hiring!, no degree required! We promote from within!"
ReplyDeleteThe college is needed for the back room bosses & their higher-ups. Can the floor sweeper become the boss without college? Sure, anything is possible!
In my whole life - perhaps not even 10% of the people I've ever met worked in the field in which they went to college. And that is being very generous. Having said that - if you paid for a degree and you are working at Chipotle (even in management) I'd say your life went way off track.
ReplyDeleteHmmm, Home Depot has never required a college degree for hiring on at the store level, at least for department manager and down (I've never looked at the requirements for store manager). And I'm pretty sure that Lowes was the same the one time I applied there. Never seriously looked at the rest of them, but I'll bet that for general sales floor stuff they haven't either. So thats a bit odd. Looks more like the reporter started calling businesses asking if they required a college degree for jobs and compiled a list of everyone who said "no" even if it wasn't actually a change.
ReplyDeleteWhat gets me the most about the college degree requirement is that half the time they don't care what the degree is in. They just want a degree. Which is even more stupid.
That's what I though too. That maybe it was a non change. Because really if it's only Google Apple and IBM - it isn't much of a story. ~It's still a good thing. ~ I mean, Silicon Valley imports H1B visa guys so they can pay them less, and really you could just hire someone from here with less experience and grow them from within. And you can still pay them less. It's like interning.
ReplyDeleteI think they feel a degree is the equivalent to a certain amount of work experience so, unless your doing something in STEM it doesn't matter that much what the degree is. Even if you just went to college and partied the whole time.
OMG THE HURRICANE IS COMING RIGHT FOR US
ReplyDeleteWell, actually, it is ...
Early Tuesday morning's wake-up call: bolting on sections of 2x8 to cover the windows, garage doors, and pretty much anything that I thought would get the crap kicked out of it. (I have these materials on hand at all times, so there was nothing to shop for.)
Breakfast: loading up one of the vehicles with as much useful gear as I could gather in a short amount of time before driving over to McDonald's. (I also have a "bug-out bag", so you can make fun of my Preppah Survival Skillz now.)
After breakfast: remembering to take more battery packs for the Dewalt drill before attaching more 2x8 sections over the remaining unblocked doors. (The Dewalt drill is now more or less my key to get back in because everything's barricaded.)
Lunch: somewhere in Alabama, and late.
Dinner: also somewhere in Alabama, and even later.
Arrival: somewhere in Tennessee along I-24 when I got tired of driving.
I am looking forward to whatever the nearby "Southern cooking" restaurant has for lunch because that's going to be my breakfast, just as long as it doesn't have any pig meat in it.
Also, barbecue. :-)
I had the good sense to check in for a few days, so I'm not about to get run out on a rail in a few hours by the hotel as a consequence of being too cheap to pay for more than a single night.
But I am sore, I am tired, and I am not riding out this shit in the path of the storm, so I will actually get some rest soon once the coffee wears off.
We'll talk about STEM in more depth some other time, but my company's HR policy on degrees was simple and straightforward: degrees are disregarded entities, but amateur radio licenses were not.
Someone with an Extra class amateur radio license was always a better bet than BS, MS, or PhD ...
Well...well...well. If it isn't Redneck Riviera Refugee! You can tell I've been waiting a minute to say that. I'm glad you evac-ed. I figured you were right in it's path.
ReplyDeleteI have to say... all the places you've suggested I move have been hit with hurricanes.... and then I remember why I still live here. At least when we get earthquakes all your crap is still here in a heap. Not blown away or floating down the river. But I can see why they call it the RedNeck Riviera. Seeing it all over TV made me think... maaaaaybe.
Then you got tagged by a hurricane.
Eat your weight in BBQ. Hope everything doesn't get too destroyed. In the end it is just still "stuff". And I know it sounds trite - but I've lost all my stuff and you really do get over it eventually.
I think you don't understand the Florida hurricane mentality: four fried chickens and a Coke, please, and no, we're not on a mission from God.
ReplyDeleteThe hurricane took a path away from us, and my place is somewhat inland, but the hurricane arrived with category 4 force so anything was possible.
Nobody's been calling about how things are broken or messed up, which has been the first good sign.
The VPN into the remote cameras still works, and the exterior cameras show some blown-over stuff (that isn't mine), but the interior cameras show the windows are very dark and very intact (because of all of the boards).
That's usually the biggest risk if you're not hit head-on: if the windows break, you'll lose a lot of stuff because of the pounding water. Other people use plywood, but I use 2x8s because I've seen plywood fail to hold up before.
But the network's up and the power's still on, which is a great sign because it means my place is still intact. :-)
In the meantime, there's a really cool knife shop over toward Knoxville that might necessitate my checking out a day earlier ...
And there's a kick-ass book shop in Knoxville, so I have probably made the wrong choice in driving up I-24 instead of I-75, but my attitude at the time was to drive perpendicular to the storm course.
I'm actually somewhat surprised at myself that I didn't drive farther west and north ... like Nebraska or something. I tend to do that sort of thing when I'm really pissed off at the weather. :-)
"Southern cooking" was very Southern ... the fats I can handle, that's part of the keto diet, but the greasy carbs I'll try to avoid next time.
And yes, I know you've been waiting to call me the Redneck Riviera Refugee, but I'm no refugee because I'm going back.
Did I mention that I can't even find my old place in Austin? I think it's somewhere underneath a new road that went in after I left. I tried to find it on Google Maps satellite view but I can't find it. There is literally no home in Austin for me to go back to.
I'm a refugee from a lot of places, actually: one of my old childhood homes is buried underneath a more or less permanent layer of volcanic ash that keeps growing. The top of the tallest building finally got buried under the ash a few years ago, and so you can't even tell there was really ever a town there.
So the idea of longer having a home to go back to and losing some stuff?
Well, that's par for the course here ...
I feel a little sad you didn't make it as far as Kentucky. If you do, try to make it to this place I know the tots aren't for you, but I literally stole this recipe and make it all the time now. I've put very kind of meat on it now. Ribs, steak, roast. It's just delicious.
ReplyDeleteThat would be weird to have the place you lived in not to exist anymore. I mean, when you lose your stuff, it's sort of like your history doesn't exist - but to have it actually not exist I think would feel weirder. It sort of like those things keep you teathered to this earth.
As I had it explained to me,,, A college degree shows that you had the stickttoitness enough to finish that.
ReplyDeleteRob: By the same explanation, a high school diploma shows that you can finish something as well ...
ReplyDeleteWhen I ran across someone with serious tinkering skills and a GED, someone with an Advanced class ham radio license, that was more impressive than someone with a PhD from a major US engineering school with an EE/CS background that did not include how to use a soldering iron.
The NE555 and LM741 circuit examples I probably mentioned sometime in the past?
Those were interview "questions" in the form of leaving someone in a work room with a fume hood to build a prototype circuit out of wire, components, solderable proto-boards, and solder. In later years, that included no-clean solder flux because we were using RoHS solder even for prototyping.
I have run into EE people who can't build a prototype without a solderless plug board, who have no idea how to use a soldering iron, who don't know what the no-rinse soldering flux is for or how to use the soldering iron tip cleaner.
We had some scary people almost burn themselves where we had to stop the interview ... and they didn't get the job. These people had incredibly good-looking resumes and knew the answers to a bunch of things that most employers in the field might want, but they were absolutely dangerous with anything requiring hands-on work.
Since the products involved were typically process control and monitoring systems where we'd implement new types of sensors, hands-on prototyping and tinkering were absolutely essential.
We didn't have time to wait for PCB fabrication until we were ready to start shipping some units, and sometimes we settled for a few early prototypes made with single-sided copper boards, laser printer toner transferred with a modified document laminator, hand-drilled holes, and etching done with a heat lamp and some Diet Coca-Cola so we could get units out to the field to test.
That kind of tinkering just isn't taught at American engineering schools.
It should be, but it isn't, and that's why there's still room in the engineering world for self-made engineers. They're absolutely essential, in fact, because the skills haven't been taught widely for decades except possibly in trade schools.
So the people with "just" high school diplomas who went into college for a while and left, but are super-talented? They're often the people who knew when it was a good time to leave to do their own thing, at least the way I'm seeing it.
In fact, when I'd run into PhDs wanting into some of these jobs, I had a better question to ask: "You spent all those years on your education ... well, why didn't you just start your own company with all that knowledge?"
The bottom line: truly talented people with drive and goals don't wait for some affirmation of their skills from some official source.
Michael Dell is still a good example of the principle in action, just to think of someone else from Austin who's like that.
I think rob is kinda right - but that rule I sort of antiquated now.
ReplyDeleteI've been watching the race between book smart and street smart my whole life for obvious reasons. Having a degree will get you better pay, but I think us street smart people have to work twice as hard because of our lack of education. We sort of have something to prove because we were never suppose to amount to anything in the first place. So we work twice as hard to prove we do..