add to the fact that I don’t know what the hell universities are teaching these kids but I’ve worked with several recent fresh grad devs that don’t know jack all. Not even the most basic stuff. a couple weeks ago I had to teach a junior dev basic div stuff. divs! it’s like HTML 101! It’s also like reading and reading comprehension has gone out the window. I was absolutely blown away that some of these kids can barely read. How the hell do you get into a university/collage and can barely read or simply comprehend what you’re reading?
Previous generations (ours) really set these kids up to fail. I mean dealing with AI and lack of jobs in tech is one thing but we need to address what the hell is going on well before that also. It all reminds me of the movie Interstellar where they tell kids the moon landings didn’t happen to discourage them getting into science and tech fields in order for them to simply become farmers. It’s like we’re purposely raising a generation to just do the most basic of labour because that’s all they’re qualified for.
I actually liked this way of teaching since understanding the base concepts allow you to use basically any language. Once you learn the base concepts you can quickly pick up any language. It will still take you time to be fluent in a new language but you can be productive even on day 1.
But yeah, I’m pretty I wrote 0 lines of HTML for a course as an undergrad.
No Child Left Behind. If a kid failed a grade, the school got less money, which eventually leads either to the school going into a financial death spiral and closing, or just passing kids regardless of whether they understand the work. There are teachers who failed kids, only for the principal overrule them and pass the kid anyway. The next teacher inherits the kid, can’t make up the various learning deficits, and is also forced to pass the kid.
Teachers have been warning about this for like 20 years. Several years ago, college professors also started warning about it. If you read through some of the threads on /r/teachers, you’ll see some common comments: kids struggle to read and do math. They have no reading comprehension skills. They want everything spoonfed to them, and have no curiosity or drive to find things out for themselves. There’s a group in college now that has no social skills: when they show up to class, they never talk to their classmates, they just sit there staring. They want step by step instructions on how to things, but they often don’t mentally retain those instructions for subsequent exercises, and they rarely generalize that knowledge. They don’t look at manuals to follow processes or resolve issues. When they hit a roadblock on doing something, they just sit there and wait for someone to come, figure out the issue, and tell them how to proceed.
/r/teachers has been saying for a while now that they’re graduating cohorts of students that are unprepared for the world and explicitly unprepared for working independently.
It’s not every kid, of course: there’s occasional talk that they’re seeing kids move from a bell curve distribution to a K-shaped distribution: that the classes divide between kids who are curious, or have learning support at home, or whatever, who are doing fine as always; and the other half just aren’t.
I don’t know what to tell you: mentorship programs help some who are struggling, but businesses don’t want to spend money training people anymore. Questioning candidates about how they’d solve individual problems, or their approach to solving problems in general, may filter out some of the bad candidates but (as with “what’s your worst quality”) that’ll only last until they come up with a standard answer.
Remote learning really screwed up some kids, and they never really recovered from it. Anyone who graduated last year would have had their senior HS year and first year of college done mostly remote. Many Parents weren’t making sure kids even attended their remote classes. Add to that kids trying to use LLMs to do work for them a couple years later. Schools have been struggling every since
add to the fact that I don’t know what the hell universities are teaching these kids but I’ve worked with several recent fresh grad devs that don’t know jack all. Not even the most basic stuff. a couple weeks ago I had to teach a junior dev basic div stuff. divs! it’s like HTML 101! It’s also like reading and reading comprehension has gone out the window. I was absolutely blown away that some of these kids can barely read. How the hell do you get into a university/collage and can barely read or simply comprehend what you’re reading?
Previous generations (ours) really set these kids up to fail. I mean dealing with AI and lack of jobs in tech is one thing but we need to address what the hell is going on well before that also. It all reminds me of the movie Interstellar where they tell kids the moon landings didn’t happen to discourage them getting into science and tech fields in order for them to simply become farmers. It’s like we’re purposely raising a generation to just do the most basic of labour because that’s all they’re qualified for.
To be fair I was never explicitly taught divs in university. Most of the courses teach theory. The courses basically taught us one imperative programming language © and one functional (scheme) just so we have something to work with and basically for the rest of the curriculum you just learn concepts. Half the courses don’t have a specific programing language so you can use what ever you like while the other half has a lanuage chosen by the professor. I’ve had courses in Java, C, Cpp, Haskell, OCaml and Lisp, ELF and x86 assembly.
I actually liked this way of teaching since understanding the base concepts allow you to use basically any language. Once you learn the base concepts you can quickly pick up any language. It will still take you time to be fluent in a new language but you can be productive even on day 1.
But yeah, I’m pretty I wrote 0 lines of HTML for a course as an undergrad.
No Child Left Behind. If a kid failed a grade, the school got less money, which eventually leads either to the school going into a financial death spiral and closing, or just passing kids regardless of whether they understand the work. There are teachers who failed kids, only for the principal overrule them and pass the kid anyway. The next teacher inherits the kid, can’t make up the various learning deficits, and is also forced to pass the kid.
Teachers have been warning about this for like 20 years. Several years ago, college professors also started warning about it. If you read through some of the threads on /r/teachers, you’ll see some common comments: kids struggle to read and do math. They have no reading comprehension skills. They want everything spoonfed to them, and have no curiosity or drive to find things out for themselves. There’s a group in college now that has no social skills: when they show up to class, they never talk to their classmates, they just sit there staring. They want step by step instructions on how to things, but they often don’t mentally retain those instructions for subsequent exercises, and they rarely generalize that knowledge. They don’t look at manuals to follow processes or resolve issues. When they hit a roadblock on doing something, they just sit there and wait for someone to come, figure out the issue, and tell them how to proceed.
/r/teachers has been saying for a while now that they’re graduating cohorts of students that are unprepared for the world and explicitly unprepared for working independently.
It’s not every kid, of course: there’s occasional talk that they’re seeing kids move from a bell curve distribution to a K-shaped distribution: that the classes divide between kids who are curious, or have learning support at home, or whatever, who are doing fine as always; and the other half just aren’t.
I don’t know what to tell you: mentorship programs help some who are struggling, but businesses don’t want to spend money training people anymore. Questioning candidates about how they’d solve individual problems, or their approach to solving problems in general, may filter out some of the bad candidates but (as with “what’s your worst quality”) that’ll only last until they come up with a standard answer.
Remote learning really screwed up some kids, and they never really recovered from it. Anyone who graduated last year would have had their senior HS year and first year of college done mostly remote. Many Parents weren’t making sure kids even attended their remote classes. Add to that kids trying to use LLMs to do work for them a couple years later. Schools have been struggling every since
Well you’re not getting the people smart enough to go to college you’re getting the people who can afford to go to college.