• 13 Posts
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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: September 22nd, 2025

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  • That’s a wild take. I’m pretty confident of most of the successful folks I know, that’s pretty untrue. The ones who work for the magnificent 7 knew no one in there beforehand. My engineering friends didn’t have connections, they had really good degrees and work ethics.

    That’s what they said about Coding for the last 20 years.

    And good coders aren’t hungry for work. They might have a harder time finding quarter million salaries these days but that’s a pretty good baseline.

    Edit: Oh, for the lawyers, maybe sort of? There’s a lot of networking etc to try to find a firm with a good partner track etc but that happens midway through law school, and your competence is essential.





  • Ford seems to be arguing for not taking any courses that aren’t directly beneficial to some economic purpose

    I mean, if you read the article, it’s pretty clear the students understand he’s talking about programs as a whole. Heck, most economically viable majors require you to take courses to become a well rounded person.

    I agree that people should expand their horizons but asking us to subsidize that, when there are a hundred open online courses freely available is a little silly. (And if you read my original comment, the notion that I’m helping pay for kids to watch movies in class because they refuse to do so as homework? Just gross.) Heck, my mom just finished a comparative religion course via Stanford online and had a blast.

    Money is a limited resource. While there are many fascinating courses, and heck, I could spend a lifetime learning if someone was willing to pay the bill, if you’re asking society to pay for you to learn things, society is willing to do that as an investment in the future. While medieval history is fascinating, that’s not a great investment for the rest of us.

    my non-tech uni courses were most beneficial to my overall capabilities in my tech job

    Yes but I imagine, y’know, getting the tech skills, was pretty fundamental to getting the tech job. If you’d applied saying “I don’t know a thing about tech BUT I am a well rounded person” they would have laughed you out the door.



  • Probably not put super well but the basic idea is fairly reasonable. I graduated with folks who majored in stuff they really enjoyed (critical lit, history, philosophy) and then had a rude awakening when it turned there weren’t many businesses with a burning need for someone who could explain the significance of the battle of Hastings.

    From the other side, I have a buddy who teaches a film course. According to him, if he assigns a movie as homework, only a quarter of the students will actually watch it. So he started failing kids. Well, the institution did not like that so now he legitimately shows movies in class for a huge chunk of his class time. I love movies and film fests but I feel less than ideal about subsidising a course on them and feel downright annoyed to subsidize kids sitting and watching fucking movies in class time.

    Like I say, I don’t hate Ford’s basic thrust here.