Is the STEM push resulting in more failsons?

[Stalphos Johnson]

Increasingly I'm convinced that academia and medicine are part of the globalist cabal. The whole thing reeks of a Gnostic mystery cult.

I would certainly agree with academia. A lot of schools are heavily dependent on foreign donations and students. In May, the Department of Education found billions of dollars of unreported donations to US universities from China and other countries (Link). Within medical schools, much of the current rhetoric comes from the PhD's who have spent most of their lives and academia and there is a lot less from the professors who actually practiced medicine.

Medicine is more complex. Parts of medicine like Big Pharma are definitely in bed with globalism, along with doctors and other health professionals that shill for them and/or are part of the government. One of the more prominent examples of this is how pharmaceutical companies test new medications. They test a lot of their newer medications is very poor parts of the world, like Sub-Saharan Africa where they can easily dodge the strict requirements for clinical trials in the US and Europe. Individual health networks are harder to gauge. Most hospital networks in the US are still non-profit and tend to be focused on specific regions and states, and most health care professionals are not globalists. Insurance is a massive mess that I don't really want to touch.

The thing that concerns me the most about the direction of the health care industry is the increasing centralization. It's getting harder and harder to find a doctor who runs their own practice unless they are in a very high paying specialty such as cosmetic surgery. Increased top down regulation such as Obamacare has made it more expensive for a doctor to run their own practice and have forced many to join healthcare networks in order to continue to practice medicine. Examples have been the electronic medical record requirement, which required many practices to pay to convert all the physical records to digital, storage, enterprise level software, equipment, security, and contract with IT staff. They also have to maintain HIPPA compliance which dramatically increases the cost of all of these requirements. Naturally, the AMA and AOA have been worthless in trying to combat this, and have been focused on much of the Current Year agenda, along with the AMA trying to merge M.D.'s and D.O.'s with little resistance from the AOA.

I'm not sure what would be able to stop this centralization. Repealing Obamacare and reducing regulations would slow it down, but not halt it. Centralization will result the US healthcare system becoming an even bigger mess that it already is and you will likely see more and more problems with medicine as this centralization increases.

 

[Win98SE]

This is a story of you failing to match children's aptitudes with learning material that matched. There's plenty of computerwork to be done that isn't all programming.

As mentioned in the post, we referred them to other fields in IT/computer-based work as alternatives, all of which were outside the scope of the class (Intro to Programming.) But what we're talking about here is a larger issue of not being able to follow very clearly-stated instructions, something that would probably follow them wherever they'd decide to go in their career. Sure, maybe their focus would be sharper in a field more relevant to them, but I can only use the speed at which they lost interest as an indicator of something else being at play.

 

[Beard_Chan]

There are absolutely great software engineers who are self taught. Won’t deny that. But saying that over and over tells kids hey, all you need is a ‘learn to code’ book, you don’t need a formal education to be making 100k, and for most people that is not true. (I am including trade school and apprenticeships here in my definition of formal education). Really smart people will always be successful. If those self taught engineers were born in 1200 they would be brilliant theologians instead. The average 100 IQ person? No. Like sure they can get a code monkey or IT helpdesk job, but not the big bucks they’re imagining. Now, if the person is from a world where most people have a low paying retail job then IT helpdesk is a step up, but if they’re from a middle class or higher world then it isn’t.

Personally I found college easier than high school, and part of that is that I wasn’t overwhelmed. In high school I had to wake up really early and I had six classes every day with homework every day. In college you have more room to breathe.

Another issue is absolutely terrible writing and communication skills. Being a native English speaker is a huge advantage, yet I have met many native speakers who attended ostensibly good high schools who could not write well. It’s because of standardized testing, where short answer and timed essays are all you write. There needs to be way more writing in high schools, and not solely about books.

That is a good point, there are ceilings with intelligence. I've seen it in my peers, trying to teach them something I consider simple as best as I can yet they just can't pick it up. The thing is though you don't have to be smart to make money. I know plenty of sales reps and marketers who aren't the smartest, but just know their craft and dealing with people really well.

 

[Beard_Chan]

Bring up "acting white" in front of the wrong people, and prepare to get an earful about white supremacist myths. Even though it's not a myth, it's a well-documented cultural attitude that sprang up around the time of busing and integration in the 1960s.



The dirty little secret of IT is that we've had a glut of workers since 2001. You absolutely can not plan on getting an entry level job any more.

If anyone reading this is currently in college, whether CS or IT or IS or "business computing" or whatever they call it now: my big advice is code multiple projects on your own. You can not go into a job interview with just a degree; you need a degree, a CV, and a portfolio. (Class projects aren't enough, unless you went and enhanced them on your own after the class was done.)

Even if your entire "work experience" is a handful of web sites or Babby's First App, as long as it's in GitHub and you can send recruiters a link, you're in way better shape than someone with perfect grades and no projects.



There's too much knowledge rot right now to blame SocJus crap for it. We have useless software, Moore's Law dying 4 years ago, new drugs that aren't really effective or just fewer attempts to cure some diseases, etc. The pace of innovation was stalling out shortly before the SJW takeover. Arguably it might be the first victim of the decades-long takeover in academia, but considering the innovation boom of the 90s that can't be the only factor.

A pedantic argument about timing and source doesn't matter, only pointing out that the harm is already here. Any further critical theory/social sciences infestation from this point on simply exacerbates the situation. Blaming it on leftist freaks and rooting them out doesn't solve whatever the underlying problem is.

Degree is nice for IT / DevOps / Cloud Engineering but not necessary. The cloud is the future, and if you can get a certification or two learning online, a project you built, and talk about the details of it confidently you can get a good paying job or get your foot in the door and start getting that precious real world experience. IT branches off into so many directions and touches so many things in the software world, just don't let yourself stay in IT. Your goal should be DevOps or Cloud Engineer.

In this field I can say college alone doesn't prep someone for the industry. All the good people I've hired for these type of positions also did stuff on their own outside of school (cloud certified, personal projects, etc). I can tell after a 5 minute conversation whether someone is competent or not.

 

[Liber Pater]

I really like threads like this that get into discussions about careers, workplace experiences, the job market, etc.
I wish there was a dedicated board for this sort of thing. I see a fair number of threads in this general subject area, but they are scattered across various different boards.