When I started working in the IT industry, like many others in my college I had some expectations and goals. I wanted to make money and get out of my parents’ house and I got to do all of those things, except the jobs didn’t give me any satisfaction.
I started jumping companies and found Zoho when I had almost given up. I was convinced that this industry was not for me and I had to study more to get work which will appreciate my strengths. I am, like most others in the industry, an electronics engineer, I studied biology in school instead of computer science. We didn't have proper course counsellors back then, we just picked what our parents' wanted or what our friends picked.
I went through companies faster than I would have liked and in spite of that I realized that coding was one of my strengths, but I took no programming courses in school or college. Whatever Java I knew was self taught, whatever SQL I knew, I learnt on the job. It started to dawn on me that I had spent so much time, money, effort on knowledge, information & an engineer's degree that I don't use and have already forgotten. I remember the late nights when I used to cram so much before the exams, trying to understand complex concepts of Digital Signal Processing, Optical Theory, Satellite Communication, etc.,. The way it drove me to my wits end and to think that they are for nothing, It was traumatizing.
On the other hand, although what I learnt in college was useless, the experience of going to college was invaluable. I learnt how to learn, take on challenging & interesting tasks and scenarios and go through boring situations. I would attribute my maturity (whatever that means!) to my college years, I didn't get that from any of my jobs. What I’ve found is that employers tend to do two things: make employees comfortable to retain talent or push them hard to extract the most out of them. We usually end up in a stressful job that we hate or a stress free job that we don’t like cause its boring. I ended up in the latter, most of us do. I haven't felt the adrenaline like when I was back in college, I have become a big fish in a small pond. And I keep outgrowing newer ponds that I try to move to. but now I am comfortable and for a couple of years I am in a rut because of that.
My thoughts converge at 'education itself is useless', but you may argue that most inventions that we take advantage of, most compilers and programming languages that we use were created in labs my academicians. Academicians are also at work and that is their area of specialty, I would not say that school or college education is useless to the point of being unnecessary but just that it needs a rewrite of its rules.
We have to introduce children to all the possibilities and we have to cover all the basics so having many subjects and papers in middle/high school makes sense. When you go to college you have to know what you want in life or at least you should have figured out what you're good at. So it needs to be much more focused and less wasteful.
Anybody with a high school diploma can write code, you need to be professional to be in a office. You can learn any skill in the world and become a professional in shorter time period than it takes for us to complete college. We gain little to no knowledge that would help us in our pursuit, what we need more is to have a structured education system which would allow for students to choose papers more easily and have very good course counsellors who would/should let know what you will be getting into, when you choose a course.
So kids, stay in school. Most kids in college, you're gonna regret it.
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