What's an aspect of your job that college didn't prepare you for?
What's an aspect of your job that college didn't prepare you for?
89 comments
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Like... Literally any of it. I'm a software engineer and my degree didn't have anything to do with software or engineering.
I'd have to really stretch to something like "time management" or "active listening" to find any connection, lol.
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Computer Science was great dont get me wrong, but I totally agree. Comp Sci helped with some of the basics, but didnt prepare you at all on the soft skills that get you ahead, nor why task management, version control, and other such concepts are so important.
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It's crazy that someone can go through college for comp sci and never touch things like VSC or PuTTY until they're in the workforce.
Meanwhile a programming boot camp or IT Security Analyst boot camp will have you digging into the tools of the trade immediately.
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Heh yeah. Lots of fresh grads don't even really know anything about application development. Like they have a handful of sorting algorithms memorised and can explain what a compiler does (and are thinking about writing one some day) but can't actually build anything.
Often, they can pick it up quickly, whatever the "it" is... But it doesn't give them that much of a head start compared to someone who did a shorter program or self-taught.
I've never used PuTTY either, tbh... Is that just what Windows users use for SSH stuff?
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How did you become one? Every job description I've seen says it requires like a friggin doctorate or some shit. Lol.
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You just apply anyway.
Usually they’re not willing to pay anywhere close to doctorate money for doctorates anyway, and will end up settling no matter who they pick.
I’m not sure if i’ve ever known any engineer who has met the listed job requirements for their role. They say requirements, but what they mean is “this is my ideal”. Put another way: think of it like a dating app profile. dude may act like he only dates 10s in his profile, but you show him some attention and suddenly you’re just as good as a 10, because he’s lonely and needs affection from someone.
Basically, for most companies, they’re essentially the corporate version of incels. Way too high of standards, but will settle for anyone who is into them regardless of what they think their standards are, because they just need someone ASAP, and their standards disappear quickly once you make yourself available.
I’ve enjoyed a 20+ year long career as a programmer, and I dropped out of college 3 months in because i couldn’t afford it. That’s because early in my career i took a few shitty jobs until i had a decent enough resume that i didn’t have to take shitty jobs anymore. That took study and practice and passion in programming, but i did that for fun years before i even showed up on the university doorstep.
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I dunno, most of the job descriptions I see say something like "a relevant degree or equivalent experience..." And lots of places don't even list an educational requirement, at least for more senior roles.
I basically self-taught while I was working in a different field, and then eventually found a bootcamp with a good alumni network and career placement services. Once you get a little bit of experience, it starts to snowball, but getting that first opportunity (or first few) can be a steep hill to climb.
Oh, and you gotta be pretty good at building software too, of course, but not as good as you'd think to get going-- Most of your learning is on the job, regardless of what educational path you take. In that respect, most go-getters with some diligence and aptitude can exceed the capabilities of a typical compsci grad inside of a year, I'd say.
There will always be employers who think the degree is really important, and there will be roles where it actually is... But plenty just want evidence that you can do the job well.
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Same except i dropped out of college 3 months in and have enjoyed a healthy career for the last 20 years anyway.
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How frequently business leaders will ignore advice from experts and "go with their gut" instead.
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I have friends who work in data. The amount of stories I hear about well drawn up reports, forecasts, and estimates they give leaders to only be thrown out with leaders saying "yeah but I don't think this is right" is just astonishing.
There really is a generational divide. Older leaders just go off what they feel. millennials and younger want some facts to back up those decisions
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Look buddy this business is run on vibes and vibes alone
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How long it lasts. Year after year after year. No end in sight. No summer, winter or spring breaks. One vacation a year and a few sick days.
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American? 🫤🫂
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You get a yearly vacation and sick days?
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Mostly the human factor in working in IT. It shows you have to manage systems and the larger concepts so that you can keep yourself up-to-date, but they don't prepare you for how bad some people can be.
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IT, at almost every level and position, is 50% psychology, 40% reading, and 10% working with technology.
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Honestly, I think it would be better if we had actual trained councilors / therapists to take some tickets, maybe as a different department that was trained on taking or working with the same ticketing system but also handling confidentiality correctly. The people who contact IT just to talk or to removed about the current state of the world as seen through a technology lens, or those who are overstressed about tech... I'm not really a people person, I'm a tech person, hence why I didn't go into social services or the like.
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Meetings, managing email/chat, valuing the team over your personal grade where all shocks when I first started.
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Working a deckade in retail prepared me for that.
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Most of it. I went to college for Funeral Directing. School will tell you it's an ancient and honourable job of serving people in a time of need. 50% of school is learning "the art" of embalming and the other 50% is rules and regulations.
In real life, embalming is becoming a rare option, so most funeral homes have one or two directors on staff who can easily do every embalming the business gets. The other directors are essentially just salespeople. Most funeral homes are now owned by a few large corporations who don't run it like an honourable service but rather like a used car lot. These corporations have found every trick to skirt regulations meant to protect consumers and drive up prices while lowering quality of service.
It hasn't gone unnoticed by the consumers, who will take out their anger and frustrations on the overworked and underpaid funeral director who are not in on the take. Directors are typically paid for 40 hours a week but are required to take on all clients who call. It's rare that a director can handle every client a week in just 40 hours. All places I worked were severely understaffed and burnout was incredibly common.
I eventually got burnt out myself and switched jobs. I would not recommend funeral directing to anyone. College acts like you'll be treated like a doctor or lawyer but they must just mean the gruelling hours because funeral directors get none of the pay or respect.
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Understanding benefits packages and basic labor laws.
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Office politics. I was a 4.0 student who was given an award by the faculty as best computer science student two years in a row. Despite being talented, extra hard working and driven, I had no idea how to play the game and my career stalled almost immediately. I watched others with weaker skills get promotions and raises because they knew the right people and served on the right committees. Being slightly autistic, I never realized the rules of the game. I quit after 8 years and started my own business, went back as a contractor getting 4x the pay, and it was awesome. There should be a class for people called "sucking up to management and gaming performance reviews."
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Yep, it is mostly apparent in big companies I would say. I could go on and on, but basically your work is so disconnected from the final output that what end up actually "mattering" is a bunch of made-up bullshit. Putting in quality work and improving your product/service does not benefit most of the people you interact with directly, unless of course you're working on the popular thing that will get people promoted.
Anyways, I also left the corporate world to start my own business. Life is so much easier when all you need to care about is the quality of your work and not political points. I like my hard work to rewards me, and not just some guy spending his days in meetings claiming credit for "his" "initiatives". Some of those folks would never survive a job that isn't a mega corp paying them to improv all day in meetings.
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Senior citizens being the outright meanest demographic. Not by frequency, but by intensity. The amount of stubbornness, entitlement, and just absolute resentment for everything around them shocks me. The way they react to things not going exactly how they think they should go is astounding. Don't get me wrong, the majority of them are pleasant and wonderful. But when an old person is mean, it's on its own level. I'd say middle aged people are more likely to be difficult, but they never even come close to the tantrums that seniors will throw. Part of this could be chalked up to mental decline, but the main part is entitlement. Plenty of people experience mental decline, and dont become vitriolic assholes. They truly think they're special and should get whatever they want at all times. Its exhausting explaining to an adult why I can't do something for them that our organization is literally unable to do.
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Workplace bullies.
Worst thing is when you don't even realise when its happening to you. My manager did and moved me to another team after a few months...
I now work elsewhere with much kinder and nicer people in a much smaller team 😁👍 but sadly the previous bullying has affected my life quite a bit, as well as how I interact with my partner.
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I’m a filmmaker. Allllllllll of it. What I really needed to learn is that the name brand of the film school you went to will ABSOLUTELY have a huge bearing on how high you can climb. If your film school isn’t name brand, drop out and start working in the industry instead. I went to art school and learned all technical aspects of filmmaking. If I hadn’t actually worked on set while I was in school, I’d be absolutely clueless.
In the end, I have come to realize that it’s who you know.
Lesson: if you go to film school, at least make it a name brand like NYU, AFI, USC, etc or you will basically be a carnie because those rich kids look out for the kids they went to school with and NO ONE ELSE.
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Office politics and networking.
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How crappy leadership destroys culture and employee's mental health.
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The crushing pointlessness of it all.
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They never told me I couldn't get a job as a programmer. I just reset passwords all day.
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I'm sorry to hear that mate. Hope you find something better soon.
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All the meetings that either have no relation to your job or could've just been an email or text conversation.
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Oh, college prepared me for that with unrelated classes that were requirements. And random other bullshit.
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At least then I got the opportunity to learn something, even if it wasn't ultimately useful.
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How often my patience is tested by corporate platitudes and meaningless work.
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The high level of sheer incompetence at all levels, but especially in management. I'm lucky to work with competent folks directly, but the sheer amount of work created by stupidity outside of my department is soul-crushing. I can present definitive proof of systemic failures all day long, and no one is interested in doing a damned thing if the people or departments in question are politically powerful within the organization. Neither I nor my immediate colleagues are perfect, but we acknowledge our failures and try to create solutions. So many others, though, seem so invested in the status quo beyond all reason.
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Employment.
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Corporate "motivational" nonsense. Leave the woodpile higher, write everything in pencil, drink your most expensive wine first. Some companies base - quite literally - everything on these nonsense blurbs.
That, and the way many [past] jobs tried to cover up the lack of compensation opportunities and bumps by things like basketball courts, restaurants on "campus" (sigh), goat yoga... I can't feed my family with a basketball court at the office. I guess I could feed them a yoga goat but I surmise it would be frowned upon.
Thank goodness for WFH. Never going back.
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Drink the expensive/good stuff first is generally good, though. I'll appreciate the good stuff more while I'm still sober/buzzed, and once I'm drunk the cheap stuff is easier to drink.
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That assumes they're having more than one drink. I took it a different way, basically don't delay gratification you've earned.
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I basically double majored in international affairs and economics but ultimately became a software engineer. I actually think both my courses of study were valuable. I’m basically self-taught as a developer (though I had mentors) and other than Comp Sci or Physics, there’s probably no other majors I’d pick as a base.
For international relations, it’s just always good to know about diplomacy and history. We had courses where we studied successful negotiations. The military history wasn’t so useful but there’s way more history made without guns than with them.
Econ is a good default major for a lot of fields. You learn to make statistical models and there’s strong math requirements with more of a focus on practical math than theoretical. (There’s even a little coding involved.) There’s classes on how businesses are run at a high level. Behavioral econ is helpful in small, but important ways (like designing little user interface nudges and prompts).
If I could redesign college, I’d make everyone in STEM majors do a minor in one of the humanities (and vise versa). We’d all be better off.
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The military history wasn’t so useful but there’s way more history made without guns than with them.
I'd argue that a lot of people have found Sun Tzu useful way outside of a military context, but also it's useful IMO to see where force fails or succeeds, and not just militarily. I might argue (as just an armchair person) that hostile takeovers etc might have some analogs. Stuff like comparing how various empires handled integrating conquests might sort of apply to mergers (though maybe that's not exactly military)... Even just the importance and limitations of morale in sprints etc.
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All of it
I work a job that doesn't require a degree
Edit to specify: I'm a forklift inspector in the LTL industry, I use excel a lot but that's something I learned on my own for personal reasons. Basically everything I do now is something anybody could do for little to no education except perhaps some training for the spreadsheets I made to make my job easier and our terrible software that I wish I could change. And I make about $30 per hour. So that's nice.
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Nice! What's LTL? Does your job require a lot of walking, standing, or physical labor?
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LTL stands for Less Than Truckload
Basically if you have a business that doesn't move enough product to need their own trucking network they'll use LTL shipping.
In general you get a decent amount of walking, little to no standing, a decent amount of physical labor (must be able to lift 100lbs), and you drive a forklift all day.
It's pretty chill for the most part but one thing to keep in mind is that safety is of the utmost importance.
In general injuries happen because someone wasn't paying attention, don't be that person who sends someone to the hospital because you didn't look behind you when backing up.
Edit: Specifically what I do now is inspect the forklifts we have for defects and needed maintenance and if it's something small to take care of it myself. Also making sure we're in compliance with the state for our forklifts (the scales, needed safety features, etc) and doing a lot of paperwork.
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Risk assessments.
These days my job doesn't have much connection to my degree subject at all, so there is very little that it prepared me for. But my previous role - ranger - was very much tied into the subject that I took: Environmental Science.
Risk assessments are not unique to this area, of course and some of this is due to it being 20 odd years ago that I that I got my degree, but even so, looking back, I am surprised that risk assessments didn't feature anywhere. Not during that degree nor during the - much more practically based - arboriculture course that I took shortly before.
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Tight deadlines. In college, we were given 2 weeks to complete projects. Of course that time also took up other assignments from other classes but it was manageable. In a real job, sometimes we need to get something done TODAY, or even 3 hours from right now.
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In a real job, sometimes we need to get something done TODAY, or even 3 hours from right now.
I work third shift and it's so much worse in this case. I walk in the door at 10 PM to an email saying I have to do a training module that takes an hour, and it has to show completed before midnight. Then they wonder why I wasn't able to get my work area set up and make progress on a long term project in that same time frame.
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Douchebaggery and ultra elites.
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Shitty management.
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I have to say, I think I was very lucky because College prepared me for most aspects of my job.I really can't think of one that it could have prepared me for that it didn't - like it didn't teach me the specific bureaucratic processes for purchasing or getting approval from management etc, but how could it? I'm also lucky to be working in my field many years on.
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They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results.
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Ehhh, I'd say that expecting results really varies by the job. Or at least the results are usually KPI that are easily gameable if you don't care about trying for a random bonus. I kept a job and got pay raises by basically doing the minimum and slacking off pretty hard for a while. I worked another job where they mostly wanted someone to be a warm body ready to talk to a customer, but otherwise didn't really know if / what you did.
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I posted a quote from Ghostbusters lol.
But yes it isn’t too hard to game the system and get rewarded for minimal work. I had to put a shit ton of hard work in to get to that point but if I felt like it I could do minimal most days.
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Also, most places don't even know what KPIs are.
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Ironically, understanding the lived experiences of college students.
I’m a professor now, graduated from college in 2010. I actually work at the same school I went to, and I often still feel completely out of touch with what my students actually need and how they approach their education. I have to put real work into connecting with students to meet them where they’re at and create classes they will get something out of. Fortunately I really love that aspect of my job. Most professors don’t give a shit and just assume college is the same now as it was 10-20 years ago.
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Wow that's a really amazing answer and you sound like a great prof!
Can you tell us a remarkable example where you learned that students today have different need than you had in the mid 2000s?
Is it some kind of generation gap or were you just an extraordinary student when you were studying?
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It’s more of a persistent thing than a series of examples, but a moment that comes to mind is earlier this year teaching a kind of broad social sciences class. I was trying to make a point about something or other and the psychology of capitalism and asked who had ever consciously chosen to stop studying or working to go to sleep or watch tv or otherwise be unproductive. Everybody raised their hands. Ok now who has felt guilty about doing that? No one. Not a single hand. I was astounded.
And in my millennial mind my first thought is of course “wtf are these kids doing at this elite college if they don’t hate themselves properly?” Second thought is “oh cool, these kids don’t hate themselves.”
But following up on what they thought that meant as far as the material we were talking about, it became a conversation about evolving pressures. For me, the concept of “self-care” in college was really the same as “laziness,” which is obviously not great. For them, “self-care” is as much a responsibility as homework, but not necessarily in a good way. There’s a social responsibility to be a certain kind of anti-capitalist while still succeeding in a capitalist system. I had a student say she felt more guilty about breaking her streak on her mindfulness app than getting a bad grade because she didn’t work hard enough.
But at the same time, they truly HAVE to get excellent grades. I might think grade inflation is a huge problem and that they should consider an A- to be a good grade, but the reality is that A- might be the reason they don’t get into law or med school. It’s not like that A- means they don’t deserve or can’t succeed on med school, but it might mean they’ll never get the chance. Do I stand on principle and grade like grades are supposed to mean something, or do I give them what they need to have the future they want?
What about using AI ethically and constructively? I was told I wasn’t going to have a calculator in my pocket by idiots. I’m not going to do that to a new generation. What does it feel like to have to pack extracurriculars to get a post-bac internship even more than they did to get into college? What does it mean to come of age in the era of BLM, COVID, and Trump instead of 9/11, don’t ask don’t tell, and the Great Recession?
It’s just not the same experience. I can’t be. That’s not a problem, but it’s a challenge.
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Do you have any tips for books, websites, or whatever on how to get started? I love computers and the whole topic of programming is fascinating to me, but I don't have the money (or time (or energy)) to go to back to school.
I work in a dead-end retail job and I really really really need to get out. Lol.
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I got out of a 7 year retail streak and into technology through support. Many organizations or BPO's see a lot of churn in technical customer support and have on the job training to get your feet wet. Then the ones who stick around and learn the product move up or laterally within the organization. A good org will farm from support. A good org will provide up-skill and training opportunities, subsidies etc to help people progress their career and stay at the company.
Find a local call center or look for remote support jobs if you are tired of retail and then use the company perks to progress.
Source: I left retail for tech support in 2012, 2 years at a BPO, 8 years working with varying tech and progressing titles learning new things and getting free certifications. Now I manage a support team of 14 because I like helping people. Former colleagues from the same BPO are now directing program management, engineering teams, development etc.
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As a structural engineer, spatial skills.
I luckily had these skills, but my job requires a lot more spatial comprehension than gets taught in class. I've seen people graduate college and are able to use design equations, but completely fall apart when you ask them to point out on a plan what they are designing.
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The basic hand on aspect of experimental science (then engineering) it's one thing to have lab work where the setup works and is often ready. It's another thing to deploy electronic, azay from the main lab, and sometimes under bad weather. Suddently, everybody expects you to know how to use a soldering iron or configure a network
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I went to school for computer science and I'm a construction superintendent. I decided I really hated sitting in an office all day.
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People have "feelings"
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