It is not a trade, nor is it career-prepping with the exception of a handful of programs (engineering, nursing, accounting).

So in your case, depending on your field, your education was designed to give you a basic understanding of the fundamentals that you will need and the critical thinking skills that will allow you to alter those fundamentals into something workable for the project you’re doing at Google or Facebook.

Edit: I once spoke to a MechE graduate from MIT. They held internships at one of the Big Three automakers. During our conversation, I asked explicitly: what do they teach you at school? engine design? safety harness mechanisms?

They said, “No. They teach us the foundations of engineering.”

You could ask the same to a law school student. Do they teach you the law?

No, they don’t. They explain the law to you and encourage you to apply the law under your own discretion. They do not give you simple A, B, C answers to a case. The example of “John murdered Steve, but Steve was a slave and John had a contract of borrowing Steve. Is John responsible for Steve’s death or is Steve considered property under federal statue — as he’s a slave — and therefore would not be protected by standard of care?”

As you can see, no true education gives you direct cause-and-effect answers, unless specifically those mentioned in my above paragraph.

Again, I’d like to emphasize that I personally have greatly enjoyed my time at the university, and have learned a lot of extremely interesting things. It’s just not the learning you get that is responsible for correlation between higher education and life outcomes. I recommend Bryan Caplan’s book “The Case Against Education”.

This is an exceptionally bold claim. Sounds dubious.

> Finally, many people have very successful careers in one field despite having a degree in a completely different field, which suggests that whatever people learn in their degrees doesn’t really matter all that much.

No it doesn’t. For that to be true you would need to demonstrate that, say, having an engineering degree does not influence likelihood or magnitude of success in engineering careers.

In reality there are likely going to be many recipes for success. Nepotism or social skills is one. Learned Competence is also one. Dumb luck is a third. The fact that you can succeed without such things does not mean such things are worthless

>...many people have very successful careers in one field despite having a degree in a completely different field...

This sounds a great deal like transfer learning. Applying format, structures, and approaches to unrelated fields. Much of an engineering degree is designed around learning to learn well. That's the only degree I can speak of, but it has been my understanding that other programs have similar intent.

You need to talk to lawyers and doctors too. Lawyers typically know jack shit about the law outside the fields they practice in. Doctor education varies greatly between countries. For example, in Poland medical school is whole 2 years longer than in the US, and the students have to learn all Latin names of all possible bones and muscles in the whole body. Every doctor will tell you that it’s absolutely useless in their actual practice. Do the two missing years make US doctors 25% worse? Clearly not, doctors forget most of what they learn anyway. It’s not like your rheumatologist remembers symptoms of all those rare internal diseases they had to memorize for the test.

Applying format, structures, and approaches to unrelated fields. Much of an engineering degree is designed around learning to learn well. That's the only degree I can speak of, but it has been my understanding that other programs have similar intent.

And engineering students, especially from top programs, typically are great at that, but not because they learned it at university, but rather because you need to be really smart to get into and successfully graduate with science or engineering degree.

Many people in western countries these days, especially the smartest and best educated, have extreme hard time accepting that innate differences in cognitive ability is a real, observable thing, and consequently their models of reality are deficient, because they put the causation on wrong factors.

That's interesting. What did you do at those positions?

I was at a different FAANG and used the hell out what I learned at university. RF knowledge, embedded systems, creating physics simulations, and a bunch of other stuff. Hell, I wish I'd learned more; some DSP knowledge would be hella handy right about now.

If people are finding that they aren't using what they learned at university in their career, it's the career that's the problem, not the university education. The university is not responsible for the career path people choose to take.

If people are finding that they aren't using what they learned at university in their career, it's the career that's the problem, not the university education.

This is a bit myopic with respect to how normal people view university education. For a typical person, the point of education is not to learn things, but to obtain a degree. The point of degree is to get a good job. If they manage to get a good job, that’s a success, and nothing more is expected from the university education: people learn how to do the job mostly on the job anyway. In this context, if people don’t use what they learned in the university in the careers, that’s okay, what matters for normal people is the career, not the learning. Of course, it might be different for you (it is different for me, I love learning for learning’s sake), but that’s observably not how most people approach life.

The point of a university, however, is for people to learn things. The fact that most people today treat universities as trade schools is unfortunate, and IMO is having a negative effect on universities and people (like myself) that went/are going there to actually learn something.

I only had a BA in comp sci, and almost every CS course I've taken has been useful to some degree. Operating Systems, Data Structures, Programming Languages, even Theory of Computation.

Sure most of the day-to-day is people skills and rote programming. Strategically Comp Sci has been very valuable in the long run.

My friends who only have mathematics degrees have jobs where their extensive training in abstract mathematics is mostly (eg insurance and finance jobs, which only use small fraction of what you learn in a math degree), or wholly (lots of them are software engineers) irrelevant.

At the same time, I’m almost 100% sure I wouldn’t be half as good at my job if it wasn’t for the stuff I learned in college.

Right from technical courses which taught me to analyze, and convert words and images (documentation) into actual working products, to the writing courses which mean I communicate much better than I would have otherwise to the economic and financial courses that help me understand the dynamics of the company that I work for.

With a BS in CS, I have two explicit examples:

* Understanding time complexity has helped with a couple performance issues, but one big one was recognizing a Schlemiel the Painter algorithm [0] that multiple other devs (including a senior) hadn't noticed - fixing it brought one process's the nightly runtime from something like 2 hours to 5 minutes.

* In an information retrieval course, we built a basic inverted index as a semester-long project. That experience has helped with understanding how Lucene and Solr do things under the hood, which helped with various things relating to it - understanding why it's fast, understanding why doing certain queries things didn't improve performance, and understanding what people are even talking about online when trying to diagnose memory issues.

If some of this (particularly the time complexity one) sounds basic, it kinda is. But that's the problem - my experience is that people who get into software development through bootcamps or are self-taught end up missing this foundational knowledge, because they don't even know it's something that's out there.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/