Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

Switzerland has this and for basically every other job as well. Apprenticeships are very common here, I did mine as a "programmer"

They got a CS degree. Maybe we should have a degree for practical engineering prep, but the subject matter as organized is very beautiful and should not go away just to help people catch up to building apps in Java or whatever.

Some countries like Austria have a school type that combines high school with vocational training [1]. It's five years instead of the regular four-year high school there, but you start with 5h/weeks of C programming and write your own linked list implementation at the end of year one. They have similar schools for other vocations, not just software engineering (everything from construction to chemical engineering and accounting). At the end you graduate with a high school diploma that later also enables you to go to college, if you so choose, but gives you enough skills to get hired by industry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Höhere_Technische_Lehranstalt

It would depend on the course load. Learning languages and how to use them can easily be encapsulated in capstone, software engineering projects, & internships. The goal of a CS degree, as opposed to a bootcamp, is for students to fully understand in intimate detail the background , history, ethics, & the 5 whys of the tool that they’re using. The way I would design a CS degree is:

1. for the first two years to be about general computing with an intro to programming via Java, Typescript, Python, & Go. 2. by the end of the 2nd year Data Structures and Algorithms should be mastered 3. Third year is for tracks , whether frontend, backend, full stack, Theory. 4. Fourth year is capstone project or internship

We run one in India (kalvium.com). The key differentiation is to being real world work for students for upto 6 semesters, leading to extended hands on learning.

It's the case everywhere in Europe I know of.

  > because I worked on a lot of personal projects and self learned Go and got experience with Postgres, Redis, and basic frontend.

  > These things were not, or barely covered in my CS degree.

The degree isn't to teach you a niche, it is to make it effective in the broad field.

  > No wonder new grads nowadays are struggling to get jobs. Schools aren't preparing them well for jobs.

The problem is tragedy of the commons.

We question why train a junior if they're just going to leave instead of questioning why they will leave. We laugh at someone not "negotiating good enough" or hiring new employees at higher wages than we'll offer in raises.

We believe a new senior will be more effective out the gate than a mid level engineer with years of experience in the codebase. We act like institutional knowledge is meaningless. The senior might solve more jira tickets but their lack of institutional knowledge may lead to more being created and more complicated code that isn't leveraging existing libraries.

We act like training juniors isn't a shared community cost that builds a pipeline that we all rely on. Sure, maybe Google trains a junior that leaves for Apple, but Apple trains a junior that leaves for Google. Those costs balance out.

Juniors are having a hard time getting jobs because we've become myopic. We've created the richest companies ever but have become incredibly stingy. We care much more about the quarter than the decade. The customers became the shareholders instead of those buying the things we sell. We spend pounds to save pennies.

[0] it feels weird to call C "high level" in the days of interpreted languages and no memory management

Of course this is just a snide remark that doesn't contribute to the conversation, but it can be interesting to dive deeper:

For example, why don't the kids themselves have the right to vote?

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Did you graduate before 1971?

I registered to vote when I was still in high school.

So they're people that can't recognize the factors that led to their own success? Sounds like they have a promising future

The only person who doesn't have a degree listed is co-founder/CEO Alexander Karp. He has a BS, JD and a PhD.

And they list their credentials on the company bio page...

They’re not looking for cofounders.

It's not hypocritical to regret something you've done.

Similar to the Apple CEO who said who needs a degree. Meantime he has an MBA from Duke, and BS in Industrial Engineering from Auburn, not an absolute top school but a very good one.

I had an internship at HP when I was 16. I probably wasn't particularly useful, but I learned a lot about how the corporate world works. I'm glad I didn't have to wait until I was 18 to figure that out, and get on the right course for my education and career.

One of my high-school friends went to college for a teaching credential, only to learn at the end that he didn't like teaching.

College or not, it's extremely useful to be exposed to a field of work for at least a few months, before dedicating years if your life to it.

> dumb as rocks

> working on drivers

Yup, checks out :-D

Good thing college is not about memorizing random subjects and you can choose whatever major you want that 90% of your courses are dedicated to! I’m not saying college is necessary for everybody but when you say that it’s an insult to people who have put in four years of work into learning something they’re passionate about. One can also grow in more ways than one “intelligence” through the college experience. I was a highly intelligent 18 year old but was severely lacking in my emotional maturity and self confidence which I learned a great deal through college.

It’s hard to be ready for a world you do not understand, and the world is a lot more than engineering or any other single subject.

I graduated high school and went out to the valley immediately in 1995. I did well but I eventually got to a point where the natural language and machine learning stuff I was doing required more advanced math and statistics than I had the ability to teach myself. I went back to college leaving my successful career to “memorize random subjects.”

One thing I learned in college was you learn what you put into it and I put everything into whah I was doing. I learned that learning was the most valuable thing one can do because the process of learning new “random subjects” teaches you how to understand how to learn and think. Being intelligent is perhaps necessary but it is absolutely insufficient. Not a single moment I spent studying in college was a waste of my time, none of it was “memorizing.” In fact one reason I didn’t go was I was bad at memorizing - and I learned in college I could derive equations from my understanding faster than memorizing if I really understood the subject.

I graduated summa cum laude at a top engineering computer science program and dropped out of graduate school to get into quant trading at a top shop on wall street and have since done a fairly complete tour of FAANG and adjacent as a distinguished engineer, building stuff you likely use every day.

I never would have had my career had I stayed working without an education. Knowledge and wisdom and learned through education and being taught by those who have explored things you haven’t. Ability and experience isn’t just mechanical knowledge of a technical subject or intelligence.

I’ve done both paths, and I strongly recommend people to never memorize random subjects but to dive into college and learn and understand everything in total depth, then carry that into life. There is no greater gift you will ever receive in the work world than the gift of knowledge and ability to learn and appreciate life in all its complexity you will learn in college.

> Highly intelligent kids at 18 are ready for the real world

Highly-intelligent, disciplined kids should go to college. Others should go to trades, including coding and sales.

More pointedly, we live in a democracy. A population ignorant of the classics, of history, of the law, and only obsessed with personal practical concerns is going to do what such populations always do: swing populist and burn down any institution they don't understand because what isn't instantly comprehensible is obviously the work of the devil.

Couldn't you also argue that all education is a waste because it involves (some) memorizing? If I look back at what I learned during any stage of my life it's never any of what I "memorized", but it's all important stuff.

Waste of time for who? The corporation?

I suppose if all you are interested in are productive slaves, I can see why skipping education would be seductive.

Like how to analyze requirements, how to document their work, or even how to problem-solve during debugging.

Some things however require experience, not just intelligence.

Also working on a surveillance machine should have a proven system of values to be aware where boundaries are being overstepped ... Oh wait, maybe that's the point.

So you get 3-5 years of unpaid labor out of every employee first? Radical man

Why would anyone accept such a terrible deal