All part of the zeitgeist I guess.

News is fake. Science is fake. Schools are barriers. Everything is subjective, objective reality is nonexistent.

How do we have productive disagreements going forward?

Funny you describe it that way. I'd argue that young people in STEM fields, including IS/CIS/CompSci undergrad programs, think everything can be objective when that clearly is not the case.

You don't need to go to college to press buttons, fill out spreadsheets, or input code until you get the output you seek. You need to go to college to make the subjective decisions, which don't have a clear right/wrong answer.

Why do you believe that college can teach making subjective decisions?

The humanities are glossed over at best in public high schools across the United States. I don't know of one that requires a PHIL intro course of students.

College is not vocational training (unless you're a law or medicine student), it's for learning how to think.

I'm not sure how much weight this argument holds.. The whole "gen ed" thing is a rather US-centric concept.

I don't know of any universities in the UK that require a PHIL intro course of students. When you go to university, you overwhelmingly study the one course ("major") that you picked beforehand. There's often a small amount of room on many courses for optionals from other fields, if you want to take them, but this is by no means mandatory and I'd say the proportion of folks doing philosophy modules studying a different degree at my alma mater was slim.

Yes, gen-ed is ubiquitous in the US. If you're in any humanities related program in the state I live in (Texas, so that's probably 25-30 large universities total), you'll have to take an intro PHIL course at least, which will probably be Plato and a random survey of 19th century European readings.

More is highly recommended for students looking for law school admission after their undergraduate degree at the state-owned college I attended.

The vast majority of philosophy classes are absolutely garbage at teaching either of those things. Sure, in theory, logic is part of philosophy, but in any of the philosophy classes I've taken, we didn't talk about logic. The things we did talk about were often examples of how not to think, yet they were presented as equally valid next to much more rational ideas.

For example, one of the things we covered in my ethics class was Kant's categorical imperative. The categorical imperative falls over instantly if you apply even the most basic logic to it, but no mention of this was made in any of the course discussion or materials. I'm sure lots of people walked out of that class thinking that the categorical imperative was a perfectly reasonable way to make ethical decisions. If this is the sort of "learning how to think" philosophy classes are doing, then I'd prefer we didn't--I'd rather let people figure out how to think on their own than to teach them unequivocally incorrect ways of thinking. Philosophy could be useful if these classes were taught as, "Here's a bunch of historical ideas, and here's how we apply logic to prove them wrong." But until that happens, I'd strongly oppose introducing any more philosophy to curricula.

Other fields are better-equipped to teach people logic and evidence. Science is all about evidence collection, and logically applying the collected evidence to the evaluation of hypotheses. Math, especially around proofs and derivations, is all about logic, and probability and statistics give you tools that are very broadly applicable. History, if taught well, teaches you how to logically analyze artifactual evidence and logically contextualize the present in terms of the past.

But, there are two problems: first, many college students don't focus much on these areas. And second, the parts of these fields which I mentioned aren't particularly well taught even by these fields. Many students get A's in science classes thinking that science is memorizing a bunch of facts about chemicals or living things, without ever having learned how to obtain new facts themselves. Many students get A's in math classes having memorized a bunch of formulas without being able to derive even basic proofs. Many students get A's in history classes having memorized a bunch of historical events, without knowing the difference between primary and secondary sources, and without ever considering that an author might have bias. Even the classes which do teach people how to think, to some extent, generally do a piss-poor job of it.

That's not to say that these fields (and other fields not mentioned) have no value. Even if you think well, your thinking is only as useful as the evidence you feed into it, and colleges do a very good job at moving vast amounts of evidence on a variety of subjects into people's brains. Further, colleges often do a lot of work getting people skills: lab techniques, using computers, effective communication, etc. You can argue that the purpose of college is learning how to think, but the implementation of college is much better at teaching people information and skills. Learning how to think would certainly be valuable, but de facto it's not what colleges are doing, and the things colleges are doing do have some value.

That said, modern colleges often put teaching of any kind behind profits, and that's not something I see any value in for society or students.

There is more to critical thinking than formal logic, I'd argue. The classroom format of a typical humanities college course has a lot to do with this. For example I would argue that a person without any background in the classics and some basic theology is going to struggle to get much from Paradise Lost. It's dense, difficult, and you have to know some things going into it to pick up on the nuances. But 30 people discussing it collaboratively 2 or 3 times per week, with the expert professor's guidance when they stumble on certain parts makes for a lot of interesting discussion. Thirty different people will pick up on thirty different bits and pieces in every classroom session.

I'd guess that a big part of the reason there is such a glut of humanities graduates who can't find professorships is that people simply enjoy the classes enough to keep going all the way through graduate degrees. You get discussion and debate in those classes that you can't find anywhere else.

I don't think the above is true of many other disciplines of study, with so many degrees offered being pitched for purely profit motive as job training, as you mentioned above.

I can't do a better job of describing this than this professor who puts his public lectures on youtube for free..

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpO_X3dhaqULiItXg84O9...

Well, if you look at literary criticism, there are a bunch of different ways to do it. The oldest ways, such as authorial intent or historical criticism, aren't that divorced from history as described in my previous post, or from just normal old formal logic. But a lot of the ways popular now, such as Marxist criticism or feminist criticism, are forms of reader-response criticism. In the worst cases, this sort of criticism can be used as a pulpit for professors to pass on their ideologies, which is deeply problematic--rather than teaching students how to think for themselves, it's teaching them to think like the instructor. In the best case, it can teach students how to evaluate literature in relation to their own goals--but I would argue that this is just an application of formal logic. The reality, in my limited experience, is neither of these extremes--classes I've taken and my friends have taken have mostly been "these are some of the ways people have thought about literature"--it's more about passing on information than about teaching how to think.

As I've said before, there's a lot of value in giving people information, I just don't think it supports the "college is about teaching people how to think" narrative.

That said, I'll give two caveats here:

1. My own formal training isn't in literary criticism, and beyond some general-ed requirements and second-hand experience from friends/partners in literature programs, I have very little experience here. My impressions here may very well be off-base, which is why I didn't mention literary programs in my previous post. A notable bias in my previous post is that I talked most about the fields I'm most familiar with.

2. Up to this point, I've basically been speaking about teaching facts versus teaching how to think as if they were two different, mutually exclusive things, but it's worth noting that that's not quite true. It's true that simply giving a student a fact doesn't teach them how to evaluate whether something is a fact, but if you give a student enough facts, eventually they come across discrepancies and begin to experience cognitive dissonance. Over vast swaths of facts resulting in a few discrepancies, a student will eventually begin to come up with their own framework for evaluating discrepancies, and hopefully that framework will look a lot like formal logic and evidence collection. I'd argue that this is a very, very inefficient way to teach students how to think, but eventually I think it does work.

I've read this a couple times, I'm curious about what you're saying here, do you mean that your class just reviewed some writing on the categorical imperative on its own, or read Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals?

The trouble, I think, is that making ethical judgements requires wrestling with ethical conundra oneself, and that is not something a professor with 300 undergrads to teach can provide any useful guidance to the majority of them for. The idea of accurately assessing performance is even more unrealistic. Maybe it's a function of the kind of university I attended, but the vast majority of my fellow students who were taking these 'subjective' courses were simply gaming a rubric in their writing. And this is true even of those who were genuinely interested in the subject matter, they saw it as a price of admission.

Which seems to me like an impediment to actually learning what was traditionally taught on more of an apprenticeship than an industrial model. If your own undergraduate experience was different, I'd be curious what your university did differently.

I don't remember a lot from my undergraduate course on Ethics, but I do recall that literally in the first lecture, the professor presented us with questions about things like how should one behave or treat others, and then presented us with "edge cases" that directly challenged what most of us had answered.

As a young person, it's very easy to think that our problems are novel and unique, and the ethics course very clearly showed that many of these problems are millennia old, with people having given names to better-realized versions of what most of us think of as the way we should behave, and that people have spent lifetimes of work writing and arguing about the ramifications and "edge cases" of such philosophy.

I feel like the biggest benefit from the course was not any particular ethical guidance, but rather the challenging of our beliefs, and the realization that these things _are_ hard, and are not something we can trivially answer with something that fits on a Hallmark card.

>Why do you believe that college can teach making subjective decisions?

Lol, most people actually believe that common-sense can be taught to people. I don't.

In the US, maybe. Do people take ridiculous loans for their degree outside of US? Some loans, sure, but loans that amount to 5-10x their future yearly income? I don't know...

[1]http://www.collegescholarships.org/loans/average-debt.htm

Yes. In the UK. I had a relationship with someone who specifically learned German in school, and went to Germany to tutor in a cross-education outreach program after she graduated to go scout for Universities she wanted to attend in order to avoid having to take out massive loans like her siblings did back home. Very smart girl.

She and I enrolled into online classes, I had already complete my Bsc but wanted to do this with her; but she felt she was missing on the 'campus life' part of the University experience and went into Pedagogy to the Masters level and now teaches back in the UK.

In a post Brexit World, that is just not possible.

The EU is still pretty favourable in terms of University costs being hidden and obfuscated via VAT for the students, but many Industries within it's local economy (PIIGS, Romania, Hungary, Slovenia in the Eurozone, and just about most of the periphery member nations) cannot provide adequate jobs let alone a career to its graduates within their sectors so they have to go to Germany, UK, Holland and as things have gotten worse France to a much lesser degree than when I was there.

The ideal being landing a job in the US or China where they can make obscene amounts of money in certain fields like Tech or Medicine with little to no debt, and subsidized advance degrees. Which still opens it up to the work visa lottery, and uprooting your life during some the most critical years of your entire Life (late 20s to early 30s) in the hopes it pans out.

The best thing that can happen is to disrupt it entirely and level the playing field and re-structure it in such a way that its both affordable and accessible to all motivated to want to go in and meet its requirements. And incentivize them to stay in their home towns a build a solid community and tie it to the needs of its actual needed labor force: hopefully doing away with the notion of studying Civil Engineering for Oil Rig drilling if you're from Iceland kind of thing. As it makes no sense, and doesn't reflect the value system or the job prospects of your community let alone the job prospects of a Nation that is entirely dependent on renewable geo-thermal.

How exactly the Lab portion of STEM gets solved is still a mystery.

I propose the building auxiliary wet-labs in Libraries within their communities. The net benefit here being that students should be required to teach children and adults of their community the topic or subject they are studying as a graded portion of their grade for the privilege of having such a model and build community in the process. Or perhaps that should be the only real on-campus (at both Universities and Community Colleges) component to what is an otherwise entirely Online system?

Just look at this example, which having to attend my midterm and practicals during one of the largest fires in San Diego History (I was literately trapped in my car on my way back home to OC for 7 hours after they closed campus when we were sitting down for the exam as the classroom filled with smoke) and during my finals during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, I can understand this from both sides:

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/ucla-professor-suspended-af...

That hot button issue could be entirely mitigated, whether you're pro or against the BLM protests is irrelevant. On just a practical and logistical matter you could just overcome this with the current technology that we have and avoid the certain backlash to the professor, department because of it from the irate student body and opportunistic Media.

I saw a rant from a UCLA professor pretty much lining out how he, and his entire profession have not seen a single decrease in pay since he left University in the late 80s as a TA and saw how the CSU/UC extortion system was being assembled in what was once the envy of the entire US' university system--which followed the EU's model pretty well, and was low to no cost if you were local, but had the ability to employ its graduates as the California Economy could support it. Which was a net benefit that significantly contributed to CA becoming the 8th largest economy in the World.

I can't seem to find it and really wish I had saved it as the very employees in the system are to the point where they know it went too far. And are perhaps even afraid of what may happen at what an angry mob can do these days.

I think people like the one you're responding to would agree and increasingly think that association with institutions of higher learning send a strong signal to avoid dialogue. It doesn't necessarily look like anti-intellectualism to me, any more than filtering out people who didn't graduate high school is necessarily elitism. I could see myself rationalizing either, depending on the kind of conversation I wanted to have.

And at end. In my intention to post, I was solely being altruistic, informing whomever reading that if they were to read this article and consider getting a degree from U of the P that they should consider the risk. Just a gesture. However, I think my writing style might have been misunderstood as some semblance of pseudo intellectual attempt or such. Do know, for the record,that as the 1st to reply to the post, my intention was to inform.

But I am intrigued and inspired. How about we both try to post an article that invites our versions of intellectualism! Ready set go.

We are barely having any of those right now in the greater society. As long as we can't argue facts, objective-reality and do so without feelings, we'll continue descending into anarchy and divisiveness.

Some news is fake, some isn't.

Some science is fake, some isn't.

Schools are barriers, but for many elements of a school, the fact that it's a barrier is a good thing--we don't want ignorant people performing in roles that where knowledge is required. The problem is that many elements of schools are barriers which are poor at achieving their purpose, or are directly counterproductive to their purpose.

> How do we have productive disagreements going forward?

That's a complicated question, but oversimplifying the opinions of people we disagree with and then labeling it ("cynical anti-intellectualism") isn't the answer.

This is not objectively true but I understand what you're trying to say. I'm sad to hear that your experience of science and truth has been only that which society has given you, or at the least that you feel that others are only experiencing it in that way

A lot of it is like Bostrom's idea of the decentralized electroshock dystopia: even though a significant proportion of people are witches, everyone's afraid of reprisal for not actively hunting witches, so the witches-in-hiding hunt their own when they're unmasked.

But this is the way of things; this wave will pass, eventually, as well. And like the soviet scientists who kept their heads down and mouthed the party line, the secret iconoclasts will survive till the current order is replaced by the next, with its own peculiar tabboos.

The short summary is: Two people sitting in a bar, discussing how there is no objective truth, or that "science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order" and stuff like that, all day long. And then a third person comes along and smashes their brains with a barstool. In some variations, the first two people are a scientist and a priest. But the third person is just some dude with a barstool.

Where do these mythical jobs exist where being able to write well is a requirement for career growth? Certainly not at engineering companies.

I wish what you said were true, but in my experience, "being able to write and communicate well is critical in the workplace" is one of the top lies taught to me when I was at university. We had to take a regular writing class, and a technical writing class to graduate with an engineering degree. And when I get to industry, I see no signs of people practicing what they're taught, and it doesn't hold anyone back.

Edit: I should say my experience is more about writing than communicating as a whole. People do need to be good speakers/presenters. But writing? Not really.

I've updated my original comment to reflect that I was referring to writing and not general communications in general (although I wrote it more broadly).

I've seen people really value presentation skills and PPT. Persuasion on 1:1 and via presentations is definitely valued.

But via writing? No. They're atrocious when writing emails. And they rarely write docs/briefs. If they do the latter, it's really meant to be a teaser to get someone interested, and then that person will go talk 1:1 to get the details or ask for a presentation.

My experience at work: Writing anything longer than 1-2 pages is a good way to ensure no one will read it. And again, if I have a good enough "lead", what will happen is the senior person will read the lead, stop reading, and schedule something to talk to me in person so he can understand in detail. At some level, I understand why he would do that - it can be an interactive conversation where he can interrupt, ask for clarification, etc. Whereas if he read the thing, he would have to write up a response, or even worse, make notes to ask me the next time he sees me.

I almost never get anything as well written as a typical HN comment. Even (internal) documentation/manuals/Wikis are poorly written.

1. You often have to write design docs to communicate what you are making and gather feedback. These documents if badly written won't be as well received.

2. At many companies, you have a million things to work on, so in a way, you get to choose who you work with at some level. If someone communicates badly to the point of annoyance, it will take something special for you to decide to work with them or not.

3. To convince execs and managers to approve your project ideas, you often have to write a document explaining your idea. If it's badly written, the exec isn't going to be as interested in it.

4. To get fame as an engineer, you often should write compelling blog articles. Badly written blogs tend not to be read.

5. Good docs make popular libraries, popular libraries get attention.

Which leads to:

6. Promotion is often done by a committee of people who don't know your work, and all they are going to do is review what you wrote. And promo is often based on leadership of projects. And how do you become the leader of projects? You write compelling documents.

Bad writing is not a good sign. It's like saying, at my company, we don't write tests and we don't have alerting & monitoring on our servers.

This sounds somewhat idealized. As much as writing well is an asset, the understanding and ability to navigate office politics is what increases one's chances at career advancement. In the simplest form, just doing what the boss wants/expects one to do, not doing the unwanted things. No matter big or small company, a lot of subtle things that are said and done matter more, than the ways things are put in writing.

Also how do you become the well paid boss that tells people what to do? You get promoted. You often have to communicate to your subordinates on what to do through writing and so on. Otherwise your known as a bad boss and the best might not want to work with you.

There're many different ways how the communications end up being. Some ways/bosses are better at writing, others are not as much. If anything to notice is that some well-writing bosses scale down to very short one-paragraph emails, almost slack-style. Even more, these already short messages may have typos (how?? the spell check is ftee!!). Well, that's the busy-boss style, as writing long replies or bothering with minor corrections just takes the time away from the tons of emails in the queue.

Which brings this to the next point, that, perhaps, a _comprehension_ skill is of equal importance for success in any kind of team. And that goes beyond what's written.

Some people/bosses won't read long texts, others want details, yet others want structure; many prefer visual depictions (hello, white board), some would rather write the whole thing in their own words.

As it's said - write for your audience. I'd add, that one needs to communicate to the audience's comprehension level, and you'd stand a better chance to be understood.

I think you and GP have quite different understandings of office politics. I know the GP's perspective: Most office politics is done over coffee/lunch. Then the followup is "Can you present your stuff in our next meeting?" And if not that, then "Do you have a PPT with your proposal?"

People in my company like looking at PPTs. Reading a few pages? Not as much. Just today a senior exec sent out a 4 page whitepaper on the key initiative our department is working on. I probably should do a survey in a week's time to see how many people bothered to read it.

And once again, I think your perspective is biased a bit towards certain SW companies. Most engineering companies don't have remote work (although there's talk in my company to continue allowing it once COVID blows over). It's a well known tech company, but definitely a very traditional one.

> Also how do you become the well paid boss that tells people what to do? You get promoted.

As I pointed out earlier, most companies don't require a formal writeup for promotion beyond the annual review. When I got my last promotion, my manager told me "Both I and my manager are quite familiar with your work, so this paper you're writing is merely to fulfill an HR requirement, and I'm here only to make sure you don't claim something you didn't do," We don't "apply" for promotion. It is granted based on the manager/committee's opinion on how well you're doing. I didn't know I was getting one till it was granted.

Oh, and those annual writeups are a thing of the past. So now your bonus/promotion is entirely based on your manager's opinion. People did protest this change, but I actually welcomed it - I knew the act of writing things up in the past was viewed by most teams as a mere formality, so why waste time on it?

Our company has lots of mentors who do 1:1 or group presentations on career growth. What I write here is reflective of what they say. Not once did they advocate "writing well". Networking, getting to know your manager's needs (or his/her manager's needs), etc are the usual ways to do well. And presenting in front of audiences (for networking, not for promoting your idea - that is secondary).

> You often have to communicate to your subordinates on what to do through writing and so on. Otherwise your known as a bad boss and the best might not want to work with you.

There are plenty of bad bosses in my company. And that's where office politics come into play - "good" engineers in our culture are those who navigate around such bosses via politics (and don't spend time complaining). "Bad" engineers complain or leave.

(I don't agree with the sentiment, but that is the perspective here).

Probably a lot of this has to do with the fact that we have very few competitors. For most of the "best" engineers, going to a competitor is a step down. And from what I've heard from those who left, the culture isn't any better there.

Based on the responses to my initial comment, I'll concede that not every company is like mine - and that's refreshing. It is also clear that my company is not by any means an outlier.

I could go step by step, but really? This sounds to be so far out of reality. There is reason engineers dont write blogs - they dont matter.

Technical accomplishments only make you famous if people know about them - if you want to become Joel Spolsky or Bruce Schneier or John Carmack or Donald Knuth then either you're going to have to publicise the evidence of your brilliance, or someone else is.

Plenty of people don't particularly pursue fame - you can make plenty of money and get plenty done without it. But if fame is your goal and you hope to achieve it through code alone, I challenge you to name the maintainer of grep or openssl or the linux kernel bluetooth subsystem without looking it up :)

There are other routes to getting your accomplishments known, of course. Sid Meier and Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds aren't famous for blogging.

Also, Bruce Schneier is not a programmer. He can code, but the bulk of his work is not programming.

> 1. You often have to write design docs to communicate what you are making and gather feedback. These documents if badly written won't be as well received.

In my company this is entirely up to the culture of the org. Some parts of the company will require it. Other parts treat it as a formality (i.e. few will read it). And other parts don't require it at all.

> At many companies, you have a million things to work on, so in a way, you get to choose who you work with at some level. If someone communicates badly to the point of annoyance, it will take something special for you to decide to work with them or not.

The key phrase is "to the point of annoyance". If most people are poor writers, they are not annoyed at the fact that their peers are poor writers. Even worse, being a good writer is not an advantage.

If your culture doesn't value it, then it is not of value.

> 3. To convince execs and managers to approve your project ideas, you often have to write a document explaining your idea. If it's badly written, the exec isn't going to be as interested in it.

I addressed this in my comment and won't repeat what I've said.

> 4. To get fame as an engineer, you often should write compelling blog articles. Badly written blogs tend not to be read.

I suspect this is reflective of the SW point of view. My company is an engineering one. It is a giant, and is usually the top company in its discipline. I've worked with engineers who are likely the best in their discipline globally, and often way ahead of academia.

Not one of them has a blog - internal or external.[1] Very senior leaders tend to have them, and they usually are not technical, but corporate speak.

Keep in mind: Most of the engineering world is very different from your typical SW company.

> 6. Promotion is often done by a committee of people who don't know your work, and all they are going to do is review what you wrote. And promo is often based on leadership of projects. And how do you become the leader of projects? You write compelling documents.

In your whole comment, this most reflects how unreflective your perspective is in the engineering (and even SW) world. Yes, I do know some companies that do promotions via a committee of people who don't know your work (Google, etc). For the rest of the tech world, this is rare. People get promoted because they have a manger who will root for them in front of the committee. The committee is typically the next level manager, and he/she likely is aware of your work. There's no "promotion packet" that one writes. There's the annual review (under 2 pages), and the committee only scrutinizes it if your manager is pushing for a good bonus or promotion. And as long as its readable, it's good enough. Of course, this means that spelling errors and poor grammar are OK.

When you want to get to a really senior role (usually takes 15+ years in the company - less than 1% of employees reach that level), only then does a wider committee get involved and will scrutinize your work. Do you have patents? Do you have external publications? And this is only for a technical role. You're not subjected to this scrutiny to get into senior management. Which is why surprise, surprise, we have a larger number of senior managers than senior engineers.

> And how do you become the leader of projects? You write compelling documents.

Oh heck no. You get an idea and pitch it verbally to management.

Trust me - a very consistent feedback I've gotten from management at work is "You write too much. No one will read what you wrote" - almost always delivered after I write an email that has 4+ paragraphs. I'm not claiming I'm a great writer, but they don't give up because they find my writing hard to read. They give up after seeing that the email doesn't fit on their screen. If I have a "tldr" they'll read that and talk to me in person (only a tiny minority will read the actual email).

Culture is king. Writing well will serve your career only if you are in a company that values it. Let's not pretend that writing well will take you places in organizations that don't value it.

[1] I should say that they do not openly have a blog. Some may have ones they don't publicize. Having a technical blog you spend a lot of time on would not be viewed positively, and the more senior you are, the more people will be concerned you'll leak IP. The company is pointlessly secretive and senior management doesn't want to allocate resources to vet your blog's content for IP violations.

> You write too much. No one will read what you wrote" - almost always delivered after I write an email that has 4+ paragraphs.

Writing well does not mean writing a lot. Often it can mean the opposite. The same thing written plainly in fewer words is often better than the opposite. Apply Occam's razor to your writing and shave away the extraneous.

Also 15 years isn't that long of a career time, and eventually, you want to get to the staff engineer level where the promotion committee dynamic applies. Also at big tech co similar promo packet stuff happens for sr. management too.

4 paragraphs is "writing a lot"? Seriously? Since this whole thread was about writing classes in university, I don't think anything I wrote there was less than 4 paragraphs, and my grade would have been poor if I had.

How many whitepapers or technical docs have you read that were less than 4 paragraphs? Manuals? Changes explaining a product pivot?

Honestly, some of the responses to my comments fit in the category of "I'm unquestionably right. So if it's not working for him, he must be doing something wrong! Let me try to guess at what that is."

Not the most fruitful way of having a conversation.

^ not to be confused with strong writing skills!

Brevity is crucial. Learning to compress ideas, eg limiting emails to 5 clear sentences, is part of this rare and important skill. Sorry you haven't (yet?) experienced a work env where there's good writing. Such places do exist!

Definitely. Communication full of casual txtspeak and/or broken English all over. I suspected my first job's recruitment emails to possibly be some kind of scam at first because they were made in 3 different fonts in the same email with random words capitalized or colored various colors for emphasis, of course full of broken English - and I'm not talking about just terms like "do the needful" which are valid Indian English, that's fine, but even evaluating as that language so much of the communication is just terrible and nobody seems to care. I guess it works out fine and ultimately doesn't matter much but it still feels unprofessional.

Communication skills -- especially in writing -- are increasingly important, rare, and valuable.

I've been doing software-related work for a living since 1998. The trend toward remote and async collab -- which has only ever increased in that 22-year span -- strengthens my conviction.

I see some really brilliant problem solvers in my company, for instance, that are definitely being held back by their inability to communicate well. Communication allows you to scale your impact several times over.

I would think that writing well is at least a requirement for promotion into a technical leadership role (above senior individual contributors).

By writing well, I don't mean in the style of journalists or novelists. Rather, writing clearly and concisely to effectively convey one's points and reasoning should be very valuable in engineering.

Electrical, computer, and SW.

I'm not saying communicating well is not needed. I'm saying writing well is not needed. What I've seen: A good presentation (including PPT skills) is much more valued than writing. Decisions are usually made because of them, not because someone wrote a good brief outlining positives/negatives. Emails longer than a few lines tend not to be read, so people don't focus on it. Documents are usually not read by many except those beneath them, etc. I almost never see a senior management write anything of substance unless it is required by Legal/HR - they'll always get an underling to write them (and no, writing them is not how underlings become senior management).

I'm not saying I like the state of affairs, but it is how I've seen it.

Just in case you are serious, counterpoint for others who may not know, all forms of communication are very important to succeed and move up.

They're only low caliber people when it comes to writing. Otherwise they're exceptional engineers. The company historically and currently is a market leader. We're not talking about a small shop.

> I don’t consider people for positions who cannot write well

And this is exactly what I'm talking about. If you're in a setting that values it, and set up filters for it, then of course writing is important. If you're in my company where it isn't valued, then not only is it not important, it has little benefit. No point in writing well if people aren't going to read it.

> Really, can you take a poorly written engineering spec or RFP seriously?

In the case of my company, yes - if you want to keep your job. Unless it's inscrutable, I can't go to my manager and refuse to work on something because the spec is poorly written. He'll immediately tell me to go contact the author and sort it out. Occasionally the author will be nice enough to fix the spec and release a new document. But it's hit and miss. The reason many don't fix the formal spec in these cases? Their managers don't value it.

Specs are for major efforts. At the intermediate level: "What the heck is a spec? We just communicate requirements via PPT."

(No, I'm not kidding).

But that is your personal preference enforced only where you personally can enforce it. That is not imply your decision making is typical for industry.

Any sort of work, in say, nonprofits, or public relations, or marketing, or consulting, or any institution where you're at a level of management where your job is to present plans and preside over their progress while being accountable to oversight, and these are examples of the top of my head where I have at least some sort of familiarity, are places where strong writing is an asset. And I'm sure I'm just pointing to a small slice that I know from my own experience. These aren't special exceptions. These are the norm. The counterexamples make me wonder what, if any, actual career experience people are actually drawing from to claim otherwise, or whether they have the perspective to understand how representative those counter-examples actually are.

The lack of responsiveness comments have to one other on the internet is disorienting to me, because I would have thought that this would merit acknowledgement. Your anecdote may as well have dropped out of the sky in response to basically any comment in this thread.

Work is hard, but like most things you learn best doing the thing. Not saying SICP was shit. Just that I could have done that in high school and accelerated my time to money (and through it, contentment).

Maybe I'll let my kids do something like that if they feel the mildest desire to.

Two years later, I learned about regular expressions.

We had to go to computer lab at school to use the computer. But then my parents spent a fortune on getting us one. Now that I think about it, it was like half a year's rent. Jesus Christ, what were they thinking?!

Mostly played games. But then got a Linux CD from a magazine when I was 13. Wiped the drive accidentally trying to partition it. Disaster. Path to writing code begun.

Besides, plagiarism isn't really about writing. You can lump it into two categories: Cheating, which isn't most folks' intention, and more importantly, giving someone credit for an idea. This last one is something folks need to do in some professions. Don't take an employee's idea and call it your own, same for something your boss has you pass along. Don't pretend something is your own idea when it was implemented at a job you had years ago. This version of plagiarism is vastly more important than writing skills (which can be taught without needing to address plagiarism).

That's not really up for discussion though.

The degree itself will become utterly meaningless extremely quickly if we would actually generally accept that kind of reasoning.

The whole reason the degree is worth something is because it's perceived as a token of you having done the work and self-betterment etc.

It's not an empty token that allows you to have a middle class job. In practice it might be, but as soon as you openly accept that is just what it is, and only what it is, then you only get cheaters.

If you spend time in a university to just get a diploma and maybe some connections, you likely are wasting your time and significant money (remember, a student loan cannot be got rid of by a bankruptcy).

Welcome to the underlying systemic problem with some of Society's more critical institutions.

Fraud and corruption have become institutionalized, and lying and cheating are just the name of the game.

Explain to me how Banks got away with what they have if not fir this very root issue; blow up the economy because of reckless, risky investments: Bonus, bailouts, and golden parachutes for all.

Default on your student loans, utility bill or car payment? We'll ruin your credit for all of your miserable existence, while you slave away anyway because the former cannot be expunged.

I'm so glad I borrowed from family and friends instead of banks or the State. It was hard paying them back, but if I had to choose a creditor of last resort I think I made the right choice.

From talking to people further along the plagiarism spectrum than myself, they see it as developing good taste or almost coaching.

Yeah yeah in a writing class its hard to justify not learning to write. But in any other class...

Lets hypothetically say we're in a computer science class and our assignment is to write an essay on the supremacy of the C++ language. There's all these English department goals of becoming a better writer that would be met by my pitiful attempt to glorify polymorphism. But the C++ goal of learning to be a better C++ programmer would be best met by extensive reading and research to find the best Stroustrup quote. If I were involved in the academic scene of converting papers into salary via cooperation with other researchers, I need to quote my coworkers accurately to share the revenue appropriately. However what if I don't have the goal of playing that game? In a learning environment in casual verbal conversation I might tell my C++ instructor that C++ main() returns an int. Yet if I write that down as I just did, I'm committing the academic sin of plagiarism by not properly footnoting Stroustrup, that's a direct quote from him. But I'm not trying to play the academic game, I'm trying to learn to program, and develop good taste by copying the right people. It seems a little unfair to grade students based on playing a different game than they signed up for. Even if the institutional goal is to produce little academics, in practice almost none of the kids will become academics.

That's a very authoritarian example of copying a guy at the top; but it also applies to lower level copying.

They're not necessarily wrong or self destructive, just kids on a different path with different priorities.

Then to some extent I could sympathize with those who plagiarize. ... If it's to save time for something more on topic they think.

But if it's a writing class, then, no! Or writing about history or society etc

Uh, did I say that, or were you intuiting? Not exactly a learner's approach :D

> Plagiarizing some work doesn't really hurt the work, it hurts you.

Except when it benefits you? This is the subjective perception I was talking about. That their mindset differs does not instantly make them wrong, especially when you can throw a dime out the window and hit an educated professional who falls short of the best (heaven forbid the "perfect") ethical standard.

Ethics is, and should be, hard. If you put words into my mouth, is your position ethical? This stuff requires the ability to stick around, listen, learn, and stay in the game, moreso if you plan to claim the high ground.

The concept of competence as you describe it is also very much a vague, subjective concern out of which you've just attempted to carve a covert competence contract. This leaves your blind spot unguarded because you are unknowingly making the discussion focus on you and your own competence level.

And this is a big part of why "hyper ethical" subjective ethics people struggle--they assume their view is right and don't ask questions of others.

This doesn't have to do with me either -- the market will determine whether any one person is valuable enough to employ (or promote). My only claims are that being able to write makes one more valuable, and that plagiarizing assignments at school fails to teach one to write.

If students don't bother to do the work, they won't develop any competence in the discipline.

It would be like sending someone for Scala training, only to have them skip all of the work, buy the answers to the quiz, get the accreditation.

University is about much more than 'skill acquisition' but there is a lot of that. Cheating is almost universally pointless.

Except that it clearly isn’t. There are all kinds of people in positions of power who are clearly incompetent in many of the skills we would want them to be expert in.

Often cheating enabled them to pass the gatekeepers and attain their position.

Sure, that example absolutely works. One reason why you wouldn't cheat is that you know that a specific outcome you want requires something of you that you must learn. I found it striking just how rare this was, though. We can fault students for not having made up their minds, but I found that many of them are just really open to new directions, and this can help to enable part of the plagiarism equation, but it's also something of a gift...

Anyway, talking to my students I discovered that the discipline is really often completely up in the air. So while the rhetorical / imaginary student's path for the purposes of argument might be be "study math -> work in applied math," quite often it's "study phil -> work in I don't know what" or similar.

The students who plagiarize with this mindset are really quite something. It's nuanced--they're smart about it, leaving no final question on which points against them can rest. For example, the student submits a first prospective paper in which they quote-paste for pages on end and then plagiarize not by direct-copy, but by reading and then re-hashing someone else's conclusion from a book or another paper, and they get a C+. Well, if a B- is all they need in the class, they are good to go. Then they take a reactive / tactical stance and only change this approach in the future if they absolutely have to.

This pattern happens over and over. If you attempt to pin the student down on qualitative issues, they have a number of tools to use here. You have to be ready for extreme negotiation. They _may not be able_ to learn about quality, ethics, etc. Shocking sometimes but it's a struggle for many. One of the most common negotiation techniques is, "I just...I don't understand. I'm really not that smart" and then they start crying or leave the room in a rage. This can instantly shut down a professor with average or greater levels of sympathy. The student converted the negotiating professor's original value proposition into a risky interpersonal issue. If further negotiations occur, they will find ways to illustrate why things are unfair to them. What is the prof going to do about that? Do they even have time for it at all?

Then you can go back to students who are in the "study math -> work in applied math" group. You look outside of the math classes and you can see the same pattern. They know wasted effort when they see it, or think they do. And again--some, not all. Savvy employers also weed out some of these people but then other employers hire them because they desire tactical cleverness in their organization, and they recognize it when they see it. Maybe it's how they got the boss job in the first place.

> And this is a big part of why "hyper ethical" subjective ethics people struggle--they assume their view is right and don't ask questions of others.

That is itself quite the assumption.

What is it with this everywhere on HN these days where people assume every response someone makes is a refutation? It's a conversation, dude. People will take it places. Sometimes people will build on ideas you mention. Other times people will take an incident and draw their own conclusions. Other times people will draw on a similar incident or talk about a related concept.

I'll accept my off-topic downvotes since that is fair but this is so frustrating.

I just re-read what you wrote. If you're saying your response was not a refutation, given that you wrote "is not best characterized as," I think it's pretty clear as to why that could be misunderstood, to say the least. It seems clear to me that you were replying in direct disagreement and also projecting words I never said right into your reasoning. And further, it now seems as if you're claiming that I'm being assumptive. This is just compounding, not helping.

I think specifics are important here because it's unfortunately common for people to attempt to sweep pesky details under their subjective-ethical rug in the name of [hand wave]. Since this is an ethics discussion some due concern to communicating ethically seems reasonable to expect. If that's frustrating, maybe you can at least see the frustration on both sides.

Except learning isn't really the reason most go. It's to get a well paid job at the end of it.

Anyway, I notice a lot of younger students have this attitude and it frankly causes them to produce really crappy work. As long as they pass the class, they don’t really care to absorb the material.

I can’t help but wonder what kind of job they’re hoping to get when they leave school. What will happen when they get a technical interview? I can’t imagine them doing anything beyond answering phones at a company’s IT Help Desk.

I dunno. I listen to every word the professors say as if they’re telling me the secret to eternal life while half the class is dozing off.

My experience says you'd be very surprised. As in most fields, networking, charisma, and ability to bullshit play a substantial role in IT hiring.

This is absolutely brilliant.

> Except learning isn't really the reason most go. It's to get a well paid job at the end of it.

There's no contradiction here.

and a job well done is its own reward right? i think it's very pretentious to say that to a person who's attending school in order to improve their lot in life (because credentials count for so much); that what's more important than the credential is some abstract notion of improvement. you might as well cast it in terms of sin and salvation.

Sure, if the life you want is to be at a desk for 8 hours a day regurgitating your superior's existing biases back at them, go ahead. I find employers much prefer someone that can attack a real problem and think critically about potential solutions from multiple levels of analysis. If all you're good at is chewing someone else's cud and spitting it out with a slightly different word order then you're useless to people that actually want to solve problems.

And, sorry to say, credentials are counting for less and less every year. If employers have to take a year to train you to think critically, then what use does a credential serve as a filter? I wonder why that's happening...

The clients got the same value (they wanted a v1 policy, and they got one). I became better by doing the work, so next time I had a discussion on the matter I felt that I controlled the discussion instead of pitching in.

Faking it till you make it has the risk that you fake it forever and you become the paradigm of the Peter Principle.

Walking the walk takes more time but always benefits in the long run.

I have met plenty of people though that take the risk to never grow/evolve and stay in their comfort zone because they just want the base salary to fund their hobbies and they get no sense of accomplishment through their work (for many reasons)(I am not getting into this discussion).

Edit: Ps: I now work like this (when asked to develop a policy for a new client): spend some time thinking of key points (technology changes fast enough in some areas), drop a couple of examples for each bullet point, and then "plagiarise" from previously made work. This way I have prepared part of the downstream Procedures. You would think that a Policy is high (enough) level so it shouldn't need frequent changes, but different clients want different things.

If every person at the school had this reasoning, the credentials wouldn't count for anything.

The credentials only count for something if enough of the people graduating are actually fulfilling this promise of self improvement in the subject of their studies.

The cheaters are literally freeloading off the prestige of the credentials produced by the people who do put in the effort. If that group of people did not exist, the credentials would be useless to the cheaters as well.

Those credentials only matter insofar as they describe the likely caliber of the alumni that come from that particular school. Being a terrible student isn't going to help the value of your degree a whole lot...

Funny enough, this idea is almost certainly one you are plagairising. Perhaps you could find nuance, depth, and understanding by turning those words on themself?

Somehow I feel like most of the debate here centers on these words:

> The purpose of <foo> is <bar>.

That little word "the" there at the beginning seems a bit myopic to me. I mean, clearly, something like writing functions in more ways than one. Here are some other potential purposes of writing, off the top of my head:

* Deconstruct your personal ontology,

* Intrinsic artistic value,

* Emotional expression,

* Elucidation of unconscious grammatical habits,

* Social signaling.

Any of those are perfectly functional operations of the writing act, and a few of them actually benefit by plagiarising (Identifying these is left as an exercise for the reader). Of course, saying that "university should allow students to operate under any possible goal framework" is a different matter, but hopefully that at least points toward one way of thinking with more nuance about plagiarism.