The Diploma In Your Pocket
Stephen Gordon asks the question: what if an employer were faced with a choice of applicants between a person with a regular diploma from a nondescript school and someone who had successfully completed an online course at MIT? Who should he hire?
Imagine a personnel manager at a mid-sized industrial corporation in Kansas who’s looking for a candidate with a particular set of knowledge. There are two candidates: one from the local state school with an appropriate college degree, a second with relevant MITx certificates of completion.
Let’s say all other things between the candidates are equal. Which should be chosen? It’s true that an online education is not the same as the college experience. The candidate who went to college probably enjoyed his experience more, but how much is that experience worth to a potential employer? Unless he’s a member of the same fraternity, probably not as much as the college candidate would hope.
His formulation of the problem is good, but perhaps it is not general enough. What Gordon is asking is: ‘which is the better proxy for competence, the online degree or the brick and mortar one?’ But it may go beyond that. Consider these other other scenarios:
- An employer is asked to choose between someone with a computer science degree from Cambridge University and a high school graduate who has successfully developed a very complex, large scale software application.
- An employer is choosing between a person who has an MBA from Harvard and someone with a BA from Stanford who got to California as a political refugee having escaped from China by trekking over Tibet and making his way down to India impersonating a Hindu.
- An applicant for editor of an historical journal on the Napoleonic War is an senior academic who has taught the subject all of his life; the other is the recognized guru of a website devoted to the subject with millions of yearly visitors and who has walked every major battlefield of the Era himself.
In the general case you have two or more sets of proxy indicators for qualification at the task at hand. Sometimes one is traditional and the other is nontraditional.
Your job is to determine which of the two is the better descriptor of actual suitability. In an era when most people climbed steadily up a single career ladder the usual answer was to judge entry into the first rung by academic degree and to use job experience thereafter. In cases where people made a career change (shifted ladders) the basic idea was to predict suitability from one track record as to how the applicant might do in his new environment.
The two traditional repositories of proxy data were the diploma and the resume. The academic and job experience repositories. In order to make sense of this data, companies employed professional recruiters or human resources departments. But today things are no longer so simple.
In an era where the academic degree may be devalued by political considerations and when there are more alternative proxy indicators of competence than ever, the choices are no longer so cut and dried. The resulting multiplicity of indicators is challenging the old gatekeepers. Recruiters and HR departments now need to interpret a wider range of credentials to arrive at a value.
And what exactly is that value?
Wouldn’t it be really convenient if there were some market-validated way of assigning weights to different experiences and achievements and storing that as a secure hashed value? The value we are after would be a summary number, which for convenience we may call a reputation or alternatively, a decomposition of its components. That’s really what we want the HR department to compute.
But since people are good at manipulating their own reputational stores, one ideally wants a repository maintained by someone else. Perhaps by everyone in a transparent process. Now suppose each time a person did something cool in a valuable activity, the result could be stored in a log not as raw numbers, but as peer processed reputational data.
Such numbers could be positive or negative. Win the Medal of Honor and get a positive value. Rob a bank and get a negative value. Top the test scores at an online course and get a positive value. Top the class at MIT and get a positive value. Maybe do all of them together and let your mixed record speak for itself, at least to those who you authorize to analyze it. The first thing to realize is that the components are domain specific. A person with a Medal of Honor would be a god in some communities, but not necessarily among C++ programmers and vice-versa.
But this is an valuation problem and the employer can weigh them for himself.
The net result will be a world in which the school becomes not the Internet cafe, as Stephen Gordon suggests, but life itself. Rather than simply being a content delivery system for delivering subject area knowledge, a University could transform itself into a cross between an experience booking agency and a bank. The job of the University would be to enroll a student in jobs, expeditions, online courses, licensing exams and forum debates that are evaluated by peer communities other than the University itself. You can call these creditable activities, in traditional academic parlance.
The only restriction to enrollable “courses” would be that they are evaluable by others in the real world; that they produce results whose effect can be judged and challenged transparently by anyone qualified to do so. The role of University would simply be to ensure that the resulting reputation is decremented or incremented according to a secure process.
Your diploma would essentially become your reputation log, rather like the debits and credits that you see when you view your bank account. That is your “rep”; your human capital balance. In the end it will include achievements and bloopers that you may have forgotten yourself; including plaudits that will surprise you; or criticisms from others that still sting you and whose effects you have to work through, like the payments on the gold upholstered sofa you foolishly bought at a store.
The role of the University in such a world would be to add value to a student’s store of human capital over his working lifetime. To manage its students learning over time. It will suggest opportunities, make arrangements, put you in touch with others who might be interested in an entirely new ‘subject’. It would do far more than simply operate rooms in which a teacher lectures to students. It might still do that, but not just that. And that is exciting. Could this be the future of education?
Maybe not. It could be something different. But as education goes through a crisis of mounting costs and decreasing returns; as it struggles to throw off accusations of declining credential value, it is clear that higher learning must reform itself. One place to start is with the realizing that you don’t graduate once — to the strains of Land of Hope and Glory — but many times over your lifetime when your smartphone beeps to let you know that yet another entry has been made into the your online diploma.
Now, if they could only invent online beer.
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Hmmm, not only online lecture but an AI online tutor could work for a lot of STEM courses. I’ve looked at MIT online courses before,however my cheap complaint is that say for a course in single variable calculus, the text book cost $175 from Amazon. MIT stated they got 10% back from Amazon. There goes the incentive to offer a discount eBook version of the text.
I was doing the Khan Academy but lost interest when their testing for math seem to fizzle out at single variable derivatives and I got tired of waiting for them.
I’m curious how much MIT is going to charge for the certification process.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-faq-1219
5
Actually, Wretchard, where I come from, it’s not Land of Hope and Glory that we’ve strutted to, in our caps and gowns, starting with “graduating” from Kindergarden; bur rather one of the Sir Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstances marches.
Given that the role of the HR Department is to minimise hiring risk, for the recruiter, the qualification question is mostly used as a filter, rather than a predicter of future value. So who is more valuable: the safe choice who contributes but never stands out, or the difficult character who in the course of an otherwise undistinguished career makes one enormously valuable contribution? The HR Department knows.
“The job of the University would be to enroll a student in jobs, expeditions, online courses, licensing exams and forum debates that are evaluated by peer communities other than the University itself.”
I am a moldy old academic myself, and I think the debate idea is terrific. I’d have to think about whether I want my students (drawback: spite, laziness or fear of candor) or some broader online community (drawback: does the audience take the task seriously enough?) doing the judging. But re: the latter, does anyone know of any online locales or software that would allow such debates or crowd judging of student papers (my field is economics, and this would be a basic principles class) to take place?
oh come on now, people either hire in their own image, or follow the guidelines used here:
Monty Python – Summarize Proust Competition @ 3:52
actually, these days pretty much everyone beyond the executive office is hired for their docility, and hence all the major institutions are melting down. if you don’t believe me, check out the white house.
diplomas have never been more than getting a ticket punched, depending on the job I might prefer one type of background over another, but in any case I would want to see full resumes and even meet the meat, not just judge on educational qualifications (which we should note must also be verified).
But re: the latter, does anyone know of any online locales or software that would allow such debates or crowd judging of student papers (my field is economics, and this would be a basic principles class) to take place?
I think there is probably a fortune in whoever can implement this idea. I have no doubt someone will come up with a general scheme to do this and it will rock the education and training industry to the core.
Well we have areas of Texas that were settled by Germans in middle of the 19th Century, mostly political refugees. They keep the custom of beer. A professor of mine told me a tail from when he was an instructor at Baylor University, a very dry Baptist campus.
A freshman student from one of the German areas showed up to move into his dorm room. Everything was going smoothly until he opened the trunk of his car and started to take a couple of cases of beer up to his room. He had trouble grasping the fact that it wasn’t allowed and was worried about how he was going to make it. He made it but he was a stranger in strange land for a while.
I was hired into my first full time job by a special recruiter. The recruiter was chartered to look for exceptions to the rule.
Of course, having a degree in Physics from U.C. Berkeley certainly helped, but academic credentials of that sort were common enough and not sufficient for the job at hand. The president of the company was Trevor Gardner, famed for being the Air Force’s father of long range ballistic missiles, and much else. Mr. Gardner was looking for special talent and hired the recruiter to find such. Mr. Gardner had established a group of professional inventors. He recognized that the typical college graduate would not likely have the requisite talent to fit into that kind of outfit.
I stuck out because I did not go through the usual college recruiting process. Instead, I had decided to do things my own way. The result has been a long, and very successful career as a physicist, engineer and inventor (very many inventions and dozens of patents).
My experience suggests that, all along, there have been people out there looking for talents who do not conform. Perhaps that is the real reason that America has been such a success.
Answer to all scenarios: Neither. Find someone with a good work ethic.
“The only restriction to enrollable “courses” would be that they are evaluable by others in the real world; that they produce results whose effect can be judged and challenged transparently by anyone qualified to do so. The role of University would simply be to ensure that the resulting reputation is decremented or incremented according to a secure process.”
You mean like the scientific method and the investigation of “Global Warming?”
I like your idea but the devil is in the details.
In the meantime, here are some links to show how the present system is ending:
http://www.marcandangel.com/2010/11/15/12-dozen-places-to-self-educate-yourself-online
The problem is that private firms, or even government agencies, do not need what universities are producing and universities do not concern themselves with what their “customers” need.
Every organization employing a newly graduated student then has to proceed to teach that employee about what they want done. This is the basis for Robert Reich’s assertion that it does not matter what you study in college because your employer will teach you want you need to know. Of course, Reich’s assertion is in reality pretty stupid, since companies do need certain skills for certain jobs.
This situation often leads to assertions along the lines of “This job is not engineering.” when in reality what it means is “Colleges do not teach engineering.”
In my engineering career I’ve had to derive equations only twice. But in the company I work for now there are people who do it all the time and do it at a pretty fundamental level as part of developing computer models to predict what will occur in certain very complex situations.
So, the value of a graduate for a particular employer has to be done not against some abstract standard but rather against what the job really needs. And most HR departments are probably horribly bad at this aspect anyway.
Hiring people is a difficult task, at least if you have a round hole and are trying to find the matching round peg. A portfolio is usually more important than coursework or other credentials. The college transcript is mainly useful for the first job. A big part of the interview process is attempting to find out where the candidate is exaggerating or outright lying about his skills.
@talnik, I think it was Woody Allen who said that 90% of life is just showing up. I guess you’d agree. Good work ethic is mostly required for jobs like running a cash register or working on an assembly line. I’ve never had a job like that. Can you tell if @Chet Richards has a good work ethic? Morning people are always the ones talking about a good work ethic. Most of the programmers I know are night people.
“So, the value of a graduate for a particular employer has to be done not against some abstract standard but rather against what the job really needs. And most HR departments are probably horribly bad at this aspect anyway.”
HR departments seem most interested in limiting liability and meeting federal mandates.
Unfortunatly – those are the skills taught in most university classes these days.
I have had many different kinds of jobs over my career (often within the same company). This, of course, means many different job interviews. In a successful interview the technical skills part was over in the first five minutes. The rest of the time was spent socializing – which was always much more important than the technical.
P.S. not all job interviews were successful – even though I had the skills. The human thing is really the key.
Here’s good news – tortoises are smarter than previously thought.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228440.500-coldblooded-cognition-tortoises-quick-on-the-uptake.html?full=true
With no formal education at all.
I had the good fortune to attend California State Polytechnic College (now University) back in the Sixties. I say good fortune, because I was also accepted into the University of California System (Berkeley and Los Angeles), but chose Cal Poly because I liked their smaller campus.
Since that time I have worked with many engineers from the Cal system. Smart guys, but none of them were productive from day one when fresh out of school.
I was. We learned to weld, we surveyed and staked grade, we learned to draft (pre CAD) in the formats used by actual engineering offices, we learned to fabricate complex sheet metal shapes, we got hands on with mills and lathes, plus, of course, a lot of design classes.
We didn’t get as much math and we didn’t take as many non-engineering electives. (“Us engineers don’t need English”. Well,not quite that mind set.)
Plus, I got a post graduate course as an infantryman and then an ordinance officer in the Green Machine. (Army would not let me be a Corps of Engineer Officer: eyes weren’t good enough.)
So when I got my first job as an actual engineer, at Bechtel, I didn’t need to be trained. Supervised, yes, so I didn’t run amok, but I produced usable plans and calculations from day one.
My colleagues from the traditional schools? Well, it took them a while, but they mostly got there, but they rarely had the exposure to actual tools and construction machinery, so there was a knowledge gap.
I have since found that among small firms, (mine among them), that Cal Poly graduates are in demand and that military experience is a plus. Big firms: not so much.
When you get big enough to need a Human Resources Department, you are Too Big.
Are there any other institutions like Cal Poly out there? I don’t know, I hope so. But I know there a lot like Cal and a lot wanting to be Like Cal.
(Not knocking the Cal system: had three daughters go through it…but only one was an engineer and she got that degree after her Cal years.)
If the company is a bottoms up culture with an entrepreneurial emphasis , the right hire will be made more often than not because the team doing the hiring has to live with the person and his/her results. If the company is a top down hierarchy, the safe hire will be made.
I think once you reach a certain level in the IT field, you can do self study and get certifications in the subject. I am a self taught Java programmer and am studying for a database certification, it will be much cheaper than going to courses at a school.
erc @ 16
In Georgia we have both: GT and Southern Poly. One is the theoretical summit with all the research and worldwide rep (my MS), the other Teaches Engineering. Vast difference.
My undergraduate is in building science. A bastard stepchild of Civil/Structural. I managed to get a license. But am continually astounded at the ignorance of the dumb masses who profess to be engineers.
Hiring for a small business is very difficult and always a gamble. The role of each employee is unique and there is no backup. You don’t find out that the new employee is a manic depressive until he goes off his meds, goes AWOL and after a bunch of phone calls you track him down at a local hospital. It’s funny how none of his references mentioned his problem when you asked “is there anything I need to know that isn’t apparent from the interview and resume?” They don’t understand they are not helping him. Even knowing his problem you might still hire the guy for his skills and knowledge, but only for a limited number of functions that have minimal pressure and are not critical to business success. If you knew about the problem you would be able to keep him safe instead of unknowingly placing him in danger. Everybody has chips and scratches but it doesn’t make them useless.
Hires based on misleading information are a killer for the employer and the employee.
wc @ 20, in the US at least it’s legally dangerous to say much of anything about an applicant, otoh it’s a fireable omission by the applicant himself. none of the references you talk to are under oath!
the small business environment is different from the big business, because professional services you need don’t always come in bite-size pieces, so you tend to ask a lot of each person, and you tend to get second-rate skills in such an overloaded situation. otoh, if you get someone hot, there tends to be nothing in the small business environment to get in his way – very different from the big business environments.
Bruce Sterling wrote years ago how big equals dinosaur equals doomed … which is unfair to dinosaurs who ruled the Earth for millions of years, but you get the idea, and even that is unfair, because the smaller life survives because of neutral variation not because of more fitness, just that 95% death rate of big dinosaurs doesn’t leave enough to survive, and 95% death rate of cockroaches is just another day in the big city.
back to the small business environment, another aspect you tend to see there is exactly why the small business stays small, they do tend to make those kinds of choices (mistakes) that keep them small.
Re: 20. westerncanadian…
As a consultant I went on one job interview where my potential client, up front, informed me that he was a paranoid schizophrenic and would likely have a major breakdown during my contract. Actually I had previously been warned that this was the case so it did not catch me by surprise.
Indeed, during the contract period my client actually did have a verbally violent breakdown. It was a rather unpleasant experience! I solved the problem by simply informing him that I was a contractor, not an employee. My client had just enough residual rationality to see that he was at out of line.
The contract work was a success.
A couple of examples that should be grounds for caution wrt non-traditional learning, or for that matter, more ‘practical’ teaching by universities:
1) Regarding the first, the field of IT is pretty far along with the notion of various professional certifications — there actually has been a certain backlash or pullback, as the phenomenon of expensive week long ‘bootcamps’ for passing what are glorified multiple choice certification exams have been somewhat successful in gaming the system. So where the cert was supposed to be objective proof of your skill, the pendulum in most cases is swinging back to actual experience. I’ve even read of too many certs being seen as ‘reverse merit badges’, for people perhaps trying too hard to prove something.
2) Regarding more ‘practical’ education, be very, very careful. There is a very real tension between what skills shortsighted employers (the majority) might want *right now*, and what the graduating student needs for a long term career(s). There really is a difference between ‘education’ and ‘training’.
There are online reputatiom banks. They are called Credit Reporting Agencies. Congratulations, you are now enrolled in Experian University.
The premise of the post embeds a false choice. Potential employers do not evaluate only on the basis of the diploma/transcript and the resume. There is also pre-employment testing. The interview itself is a test. Good tests relate closely to the skills needed.
bftp @ 24: Congratulations, you are now enrolled in Experian University.
+1, LOL.
aka the school of hard knocks.
21. Josh
We ourselves were a Professional Services firm. The guy was exceptionally skilled, very experienced and had a good reputation. We had even worked with him previously on a joint project. He had performed well in other companies but not on the front lines. We put him on the front lines not knowing the risk and the explosion hurt him and us. As you correctly say, mistakes in a small business have a bigger effect than they do in a large one.
We live and learn but learning isn’t always fun.
Gotta agree with Josh about the huge difference between Big Business and small businesses. In small businesses the owners are generally closely connected to the hiring process and have a strongly vested interest in whether or not the new hire will work out. They are apt to strive hard to make the best composite decision they can.
Classify big business as any company large enough to have a HR department. Those guys are never going to be held responsible for whether anyone works out or not; a certain portion is always bound to fail. Their job – and this drives the hiring policies entirely – is to not do anything that would cause HR to be blamed for a washout employee, which means always taking the highest rank from some completely arbitrary but formally accepted scoring system. Who cares if it works? Not them, all they are looking for is plausible deniability for any failures.
For now, high grades from the Ivy League give plausible deniability to every HR employee in the country, no matter how big an idiot the candidate is. So they get the jobs, and if they stick they make sure to hire people just like themselves.
What Wretchard describes sounds a lot like Whuffie from the Doctorow story Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In fact, the Whuffie Bank has already been launched, although I don’t know that it is very influentual compared to other similar endeavors such as Klout.
Hanoi Paris Hilton (2), “Land of Hope and Glory” is set to one of the Pomp and Circumstance marches.
When I interview for our small business one of my favorite questions is “How do you get along with your father?” or “What’s your father like?” We simply cannot afford to have someone with ‘father-issues’ transferring those problems onto the owners or a supervisor. When hiring for the retail side my approach also tends to be: Hire attitude and a smile. You can train the rest, but attitude and temperament are more or less innate and I don’t have the time (or temperament) to be a therapist.
One employee came to me in tears because she’d snapped at a particularly obnoxious customer who then said she’d never come back. I told my employee that the customer in question had been a royal pain for three years and that I’d been trying to get rid of her almost from the beginning … “So THANK you,” I said “and don’t worry. Let’s hope she really never does come back.”
In that sort of hiring environment, specific knowledge is important but not defining, and I don’t really care how or where the applicant(s) got it. If anything I’m slightly biased towards the auto-didacts. What really matters is how well they work with us, how easily they learn new things on the fly, and how they treat the customers upon whom their jobs depend.
This debate may be off-target.
It has been argued on other blogs (half sigma?) that a degree from a prestigious school is not what is valued. Rather it is the prestigious schools’ very rigorous admission procedures that HR departments rely upon.
There is added value to having successfully competed with other people who passed the admission process, but it is passage of the process itself that matter.
Erc #16:
I’m afraid I was one of those not ready to go to work as an engineer right out of the box. I started out in a real nuts-and-bolts job (literally! Nuts and bolts could be a big problem!) and dug right in. I found “real” engineering far more interesting and a much better learning experience than formal education.
But on the other hand, I was also astonished by the nonsense that some non-degreed people had in their heads. They often could not figure whether to divide or multiply when trying to calculate something. On the other, other hand I have developed my writing skills and I am almost as surprised at some engineers’ inability to assemble a coherent sentence.
And on the other, other, other hand one of the young engineers I supervised at one time told me he had met a girl who wrote manuals for McDonnell Douglas. She was an English major, to which I replied “THAT explains it!” Most manuals are crap.
Josh #21:
If the Federal Government were around then they would have been frantically trying to save the dinosaurs from the horrible effects of Global Cooling. If you are big enough you are not just big, you are a constituency.
Newscaper 23:
Yep, that was the chant and rant of the 60’s and early 70’s: Relevancy! No one ever seemed to want to tell those students that if they knew what was relevant that they would not need to go to school.
This is kind of interesting. Off beat questions asked to job applicants.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204552304577112522982505222.html?google_editors_picks=true
What Bart said. There is a lot more then credentials in an employee. Employees are people first, employees second.
I always looked at their fingernails. While far from foolproof, you can usually get a rough idea of emotional stability from looking at their fingernails. Somebody whose nails are knawed to the quick has emotional issues. Hire them and you hire their issues.
Of course, most of my hiring was done for an automobile dealership.
A degree indicated that the prospective employee was capable of finishing a structured learning program. Sales is 75% OJT.
22.
Not on contract but as a temp, I was hired years ago by a small company, and was told that the person I was replacing had a mental disorder and was taking a break. Besides qualifications, they were looking for a “certain temperament” to manage the person’s transition out of and then back into the job. Things went well, better than expected, but it remains the most emotionally charged, out-of-bounds work situation I’ve ever had.
I used that in getting other jobs, because it was valuable experience and also because someone thought my “certain temperament” to be a major qualification, so others might too. (Some did.) That’s terrific to me, like a freebie. Or something earned though the school of divorced parents, or maybe by being the oldest in a pack of kids, or just a boring individual, who knows? Doesn’t matter. It’s on my human capital balance sheet and I’m proud.
My business grew from one (me) to 200 over a period of 20 years. Almost all the hires were people we met during the course of conducting our business. A good salesman here and a good mechanic working at our plant were seen in action. Many hires came from those who worked as a contractor at my home. My pay structure was
designed so they couldn’t afford to leave resulting in very low turnover.
No HR department and when we tried to artificially adjust the diversity ratios it usually led to disappointment.
A big problem today is the results of affirmative action. If I had to choose a brain surgeon (or nuclear physicist)
I am going to be very aware of the role of affirmative action.
In over 40 years experience in IT in positions from programmer to data processing manager (as they called it then), I observed that only a few people had a real aptitude for analyzing and solving business problems. And that this aptitude had almost zero correlation to their educational background. In the 60′s and 70′s there were (thankfully) no university credentials offered or required for computer related jobs. The best predictor I found for the needed aptitude was IBM’s programmer aptitude test. Anyone who scored an A on that could be trained and could acquire the necessary skills. After the 70′s using that test was no longer permitted. Over the years I worked with many people with “Computer Science” degrees, and very, very few of them had the necessary aptitudes and no recent graduates had the skills required for their work. And most were actually “corrupted” by their university experience. Almost all felt entitled to move right into management and felt an aversion to actually “writing code”. Of course we couldn’t hire “coders” who didn’t have degrees, so that was a difficulty. And their “education” certainly hadn’t opened their minds to broader perspectives or innovative thinking. As a result of all of this, in all the IT organizations that I worked in as an employee or as a contractor, the actual work was done by less than 10% of the people. The rest were either just sitting around or actually working to obstruct productive development.
All depends on the task. Sometimes you need personality plus. Sometimes it doesn’t matter. The late Steve Jobs was probably not a charmer, but he was successful by some measures.
If the task requires “go along to get along” then a George Patton would not fit well. He cherished independence and initiative.
If you keep a demanding schedule, then Herr Albert would not fit. “I want your complete relativity theory by May 31st, 1907, or else you’re fired!” Schedules don’t work well when no one knows how to perform the task.
The long and short of it is, don’t buy a high-strung race horse if you need it to pull a plow.
The problem then, is understanding the requirements to the task and identifying those capabilities in the applicants. Is the later really reducible to a database?
As a result of all of this, in all the IT organizations that I worked in as an employee or as a contractor, the actual work was done by less than 10% of the people. The rest were either just sitting around or actually working to obstruct productive development.
Heh. Sounds like my time at Microsoft.
Only I wouldn’t say the useless people were “sitting around.” They were working like crazy, busily involved in creating meta-data about whatever project was happening. Spreadsheets and Powerpoints that could fill a dumpster, all designed as a sort of bastard combination of CYA and an obsessive micro-management mentality. If only we perfect the plan, then the product will be perfect! A small group of people wrote and tested the code. The rest managed the process.
I got to Microsoft via the small company I worked for getting bought (my take on the sale: $0!, but that’s another story….) and our software delivery timelines went from about six months between major releases to more than two years between major releases. But oh we had the data to “prove” that the perfect product was always just around the corner.
I guess like most big companies, Microsoft has all the efficiencies of a government agency. It does have better incentives (and you can get fired) so things do get done, and just by dumb luck a lot of smart people work there and some can occasionally break through the miasma. But the waste there was monumental. Then again, that “waste” really equals thousands of extra people employed, so in that sense it’s a social good since Microsoft still makes a hefty profit and those employees are very well paid. But this inherent bloat I think also drove so much of the trend toward off-shoring technical labor. That is a subject on which I will not speak lest I explode in rage, other than to say Bill Gates was always full of crap when he said he just couldn’t find the talent in the U.S.
Product designers have the potential of being itinerant workers due to development cycles. Especially with smaller companies. A company might leverage much of its capital to develop products and there may be a year or to lag between new product roll outs and the need to upgrade to new products. Some products areas are in a constant churning of new design and I have tried unsuccessfully to get into laptop design and especially phones which was big in San Diego in the 90’s but it is highly specialized and you are not going to get hired to do it unless you are among the field of known designers in the field. The only way to get there is to work up through the ranks and at some point you are not gonna do it.
But there are a group of designers who follow projects through industry with specialties in moldings and castings, fixtures, and as you get older drawing and design checkers to keep the younger designers on the up and up. This itinerant class is known as job shoppers and all of my jobs have started as a six month contract. I am brought in because I know what needs to be done, work with industry standards, and can be sat down at a computer with the requisite software and become immediately productive. My current contract is for 6 months just as the contract terms for most of my direct hires were for 6 months. After 6 months they can let me go without the least concern but in most cases, they will negotiate with me to stay on.
I have worked on Video Surveillance equipment, geophysical instrumentation, elevators and smog test equipment, worked in a 115 year church converted into a design studio in Santa Barbara, designed solid state relays and mosfets, consumer lighting controls, multi-meters, and a number of large defense contractors. For me, the era of defense contracting is over. I am now working on RF devices for commercial satellites. I’ll ride that out until that goes bust.
All I need is a nominally healthy economy to function in and I will survive.
I have two brothers that have combined education with certification and experience to pull in big incomes.
Brother #1 makes between $250,000 and $300,000 per year. He has an 18 month associate degree in NDT. He then made the correct career steps by getting various post graduate certifications including being a Certified Welding Inspector. He always improves upon his skills and right now he is one of two people in the US with his certifications – which are tailored for the petroleum industry. His hourly rate is not that high, but companies hire him 2 or 3 months in advance to make sure he will be available so he is constantly being paid double – once by the company he is working for and a second check is from the company paying him to make sure he will be on their site when they need him. He also earned a general BA degree to make himself stand out on paper, but this was after his career was going well. His job does require travel.
Brother #2 did basically the same path but instead stays at a single location. His salary is in the $130,000 range.
If I wanted to be in their industry it would be easy –> Peer reputation can be easy to game.
A local computer game developer hires on the basis of portfolio only. High-school drop-outs? No problem if the person has a good portfolio.
Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers: The Story of Success” says it takes about 10 years, or 10,000 hours, of practice to attain true expertise. Achievement is talent plus preparation. It seems it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery. A game developer employee has spent a long time developing game development skills.
Maybe a four-year undergraduate degree is a kind of apprenticeship, providing some hours towards mastery in areas related to words, numbers, and arts. But the apprentice usually hasn’t developed skills in those areas. My understanding of the current higher education product is that the degree is supposed to have some value; that everyone knows that the the value of the degree is just about worthless; and that higher education is looking for (and trying hard not to look for at the same time) a new curriculum that provides a student with value. As far as I can tell, the b.a. degree is a credential that qualifies a graduate to slot into a rent-seeking job (“I want to make the world a better place!” or “I want to work in finance!”), or to go to graduate school, whereat one can get an advanced degree in rent-seeking.
If an undergraduate curriculum really did help students improve as apprentice writers and quantifiers and designers, I’d think that the tuition cost was justified. Some colleges do it better than others. And some seem to specialize in having students spend a minimal number of hours in developing skills, let alone in developing creativity in using those skills.
My last job interview was scheduled for around 30 minutes. I met with the operations manager and he asked me a series of tricky questions, one being, what would you do to keep last minute problems from holding up production. I said something to the effect that if you are having problems at the last minute that you failed somewhere in the beginning with your plan and that the best way to solve 11th hour problems is to avoid them to begin with. The manager is keeping his head down and scribbling notes on his form filled with similar questions. I am the first interviewee because I requested an early appointment so that I would not get stuck in traffic in the late afternoon. As I respond he keeps looking at his watch. Other interviewees are cuing up in the lobby. I am excused and leave feeling a little pissed that the interview was wham-bam-thank you mam. I see that the other applicant is wearing a suit and am glad that I decided to wear one myself though most California engineering firms ‘dress casual’. I don’t hear anything back but am called up 3 weeks later to report to work. It was one of the most peculiar interviews that I have had but I interview strong, at least strong enough. I had already visualized a mindset of sorts so the questions that I was asked put me on the frame work of those answers. You have been shrunk down to the size of a nickel, well too late now. The time to act was when you were normal sized.
My little girl is 3 now. I dread the day when I must put her into the grist mill that is public education (or even private eduation). I’d much rather home school her, but our financial situation is such that we can’t.
I have just completed the course of study (that I have mentioned here before) that will allow me to become a special education teacher, except for the student teaching, which I plan to complete next spring semester since I’ve had to temporarily take a leave of absence so I could build up more money to pay the outrageous school costs (and this at an online school).
My point is that it has become outrageously expensive just to be a parent, nevermind a parent of a special needs child. When I was a child, my folks (both law-abiding teachers and Democrats) had me ride laying down in the hatchback portion of our Plymouth Champ when we took trips that were only an hour or two. They would be arrested for that today. And yet here I am, safe and sound. The only child that ever died in my entire town, the whole 18 years that I was growing up, was a dipshit who went out on the river ice and fell through. None, I repeat NONE, died in car accidents. 4200 people.
The safety nazis need to be reined in…and so do the education nazis who throw up unreasonable barriers to home education. I know lots of home schoolers, and while some of them do it because of the biology part (evolution vs creationism) they are the most committed parents you’d ever want to meet. Teachers and their unions are hostile to this of course. I promise here and now that if I ever do actually teach (it would pay about half what I’m making now as a software developer, so it’s a tough decision) I will vote against any measure that makes things tougher for the people who have invested the most in their children…home schoolers.
John Work @ 37
this aptitude had almost zero correlation to their educational background
My college major was biology but most of my career had been coaching and PE because of my athletic ability and someone’s need for a PE teacher early in my teaching career.
However my favorite years were at small schools in Maine running their networks, laptop iniatives and online testing programs. I was just able to make things work.
I ended up with that task because of someone’s need for a tech guy after a last minute resignation
The schools were small but there were a lot of machines because Maine students 7 – 12 get a laptop to use and the lower grade students have hand-me-down machines.
Via Google U, I was able to figure out how to use MS, OS X, unix or linux to get the job done. Open source was a must due to budgetary contraints. I also thought the most flexible and successful techs at schools around me were the ones who had expanded their college backgrounds with open source experience.
The biggest issue for me were the school administrators who always seemed to come and go very frequently. The ones who knew what you were actually doing with the technology were a pleasure to work for. The others who felt that all you were doing was pushing some buttons and a computer was doing all the work not so much.
Aardvark@42: “A local computer game developer hires on the basis of portfolio only. High-school drop-outs? No problem if the person has a good portfolio.”
That’s the way it SHOULD be in software, IMO. And I say that as a software developer whose job could well be taken as some point by a wunderkind from Arkansas who developed some really incredible stuff.
Tech is still the closest thing to a real meritocracy that exists in the real world.
jw @ 37: As a result of all of this, in all the IT organizations that I worked in as an employee or as a contractor, the actual work was done by less than 10% of the people. The rest were either just sitting around or actually working to obstruct productive development.
True in most organizations, not just IT.
True in Congress.
Sturgeon’s Law.
When you happen to get into a situation where you get a higher percentage contributing it tends to be unexpected and things can really fly. I’ve seen it, once or twice, in thirty years. It is perhaps how championship sports teams work, too.
Begin by getting rid of ‘Human Resources’.
It is the ultimate job for the nanny-staters.
This about sums it up for this conservatarian:
Linked from Instapundit today. I must confess, that the attitude of even most BC commenters is that the Federal Reserve printing trillions and totally destroying the dollar just to buy a few more wretched years for our bankrupt EUropean friends and a bankrupt Washington is more or less a fait accompli…despite Wretchard posting frequently about it, and that resistance is largely futile. But as a certain Austin, Texas-based talk radio host I once thought totally insane likes to say, Resistance is Victory.
Even if the Continent remains occupied by the forces of money printing, Status Quo bankster Corporatism, there remain rays of hope, little paradrops here and there deep behind enemy lines, and hardy L3 types who are the OSS and the French Resistance of our time, preparing patiently for the day of Liberation.
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2011/12/they_really_do.html
Gold has broken through its uptrend line at 1600. imho that’s the first bow wave of changing worldwide energy dynamics. The USA is on the way to oil independence. Its early yet. Won’t come for 5-10 years. Maybe less but not more. net imports have been falling steadily in the last couple years.
All energy independent countries have strong currencies.
A strong US dollar will push down both the price of oil and the price of gold.
#44 Agoraphobic Plumber
Preach, brother, preach. I know exactly how you feel. Unfortunately my job pays about a quarter what yours probably does. Homeschool is, I fear, off the table right from the get-go.
#49 Mister X
If you’d run Gary Nolan you’d be in a hell of a lot better shape. Ron Paul is wacky, plain and simple, and I say that with no malice.
The B.A. awarded me by a certain New Haven university has never been particularly crucial to my career, but that’s because I started doing animation professionally during my undergrad years, and pursued it pretty single-mindedly after. Started my own studio five years after college, kept it going for a decade before I took the advice I’d been giving to younger kids seeking animation jobs: “Go to the places where the industry is well established.”
Swimming Upstream in the hinterlands has its rewards, chiefly in forcing you to use your whole mind. The early choice I made regularly placed me in planning meetings with scientists, business owners, government bureaucrats and technical advisors, military officers, physicians, engineers, and so on. Each project required me to understand what information they needed to communicate to a specific audience sufficiently to work out a script / storyboard, budget and schedule. Oh, yeah, and then deliver what I’d promised!
The situation rewarded a generalised mania for reading – history of science, physics, science, medicine, and astronomy for lay readers, copyright law, etc.
Interviewing a parade of artists for my own studio, I observed that very frequently that people I’d hired because they were cheerful, enthusiastic, and courteous, almost invariably performed far beyond the limits of the portfolios they’d brought. Contrariwise, the most impressive portfolios presented by conceited, smug, cocky types, proved to correlate at close to 100 percent to an employee who could NOT be depended upon to follow orders, meet deadlines, or show up on time.
As an undergraduate in 1971, I stumbled across the book “Why Johnnie Can’t Read.” Eventually I noticed that it had originally been published IN THE 1950′s! (Does anyone know how to get the html code for underscoring to work here?)
About a third of my adult life I’ve taught in colleges and universities, part-time and full-time, usually while working in animation /broadcast production / egames. Those experiences have made me fully aware of the joint tyranny of Progressivism and “CYA-corporatism” in these institutions. Sadly, those plagues are now endemic in the business community.
Anyone who worked in Silicon Valley in the 1990s will be acutely aware of the cognitive dissonance that arises in the workplace. The administrators regularly lay off 20 percent of the workforce just before those workers would otherwise become fully vested in their full benefits (401-K plans, etc.) The same administrators invariably follow some hapless idiot’s politically-insensitive email inadvertantly sent to “ALL” with an announcement that the idiot’s been sacked, emphasizing the company’s earnest desire to keep their offices a non-offensive workplace.
Ron Paul is a bigot and the case for being racist is certainly there. As far as the “Libertarian” utopia it’s the same as the Communist dream, simple look at those place that have many of the “Libertarian” goals that are already in play and you do not see paradise, the promise of lower crime because drugs are legalized just isn’t true and in fact nearly every example conditions have worsened, Drug addiction raises and society as the whole ends up paying just as much and more as they do now for the law enforcement to keep hard drugs illegal, Prostitution is another shining example and one need only look at AZ to see that illegal prostitution still thrives and STD infected whores still walk the streets, go to the more liberal countries and you find illegal alien prostitution of underage children rise’s considerably because of the open acceptance of Prostitution and the Governments new source of Money can’t be turned off, the dirty little truths are never spoken about by the Ron Paul’s and you can’t get consent as to what drugs are to be legal and if Meth or Crack will be dispensed like Coke and Pepsi, Ya that brings up the other dirty little secret the Libertarians won’t discuss, is we can’t keep Cigarettes, Liquor or illegal drugs from our children now how ya gonna do it when we’re in the Libertarian Utopia they are so anxious to push everyone into???. I am for a much smaller Federal Government with the best damn Military to keep us free but I am not for the chaos and eventual servitude that a weak and over powered Libertarian Utopia would bring in a very short time (Remember, nearly all those Liberal Countries today are able to be that way because a strong America has been present and willing to Stop aggression upon them by those who would enslave them as soon as We (America) stopped being there!) Ron Paul sales a pipe dream and he (Ron Paul) enjoys the money, fame and attention it generates for him!
“53. CharlesWhite Ron Paul sales a pipe dream…” If they’re gonna pay people to attack Ron Paul, they can at least afford to teach them some grammar first.
Gee “Mr. X” I wish I got paid to tell the truth like I did, question is are you on Ron’s payroll or his campaign staff??? Why don’t you simply address just the couple questions I referred too? is it because they are just that “THE TRUTH” about Ron Paul and the Libertarian Pipe Dream! Ya know they can’t when they have to attack the messenger and not the message! get a life or explain exactly which drugs ole Ron Paul will or won’t legalize, Will they be sold to anyone regardless of age? As a Libertarian why do you get to decide the age or drug or that matter what right will you have to take tax money from me to lockup Murders and Rapist! Address the issues Ron Paul (or you) won’t talk about instead of attacking my grammar.
If they have contributed to an open-source project, then that trumps everything.
I wouldn’t tell you if I did.
Why would you need to underscore anything? On the web, underscoring is conventionally used for marking hyperlinks, and since putting in a link causes that to happen automatically, you don’t need the html code for underlining links. The only other widespread uses of underlining are as a typewriter substitute for italics (since typewriters generally could not do that), and as an editing mark to show inserted material.
It’s doubly-inappropriate here since (a) we have real italics, and (b) it will make something that looks like a link but isn’t.
53. CharlesWhite
What Paul is trying to say is that you cannot legislate morality. Making Prostitution or drugs illegal won’t stop them. It just lowers the general level of respect for the LAW.
Law doesn’t go where enforcement cannot reach.
There are approx 850,000 cops in America. At any given moment maybe 200,000 of them are on duty. 1 out of 5 Americans take illegal drugs. So we have 200,000 cops chasing 60 MILLION druggies. I hope they don’r catch them. WHERE will we put them? stick 60 million people in Jail and the other 240 million will go ballistic. Literally.
The war on drugs was lost the day after it was declared.
Prostitution is called the oldest profession.
You will never stop it. Prostitution has been outlawed in EVERY civilization throughout history. That hasn’t made it go away.
I think Ron Paul is a nutter and would never vote for him but I base my opinion on his Foreign policy.
You accuse Mr. Paul of being a bigot so I will ask you sir if intolerance is any better?
Charles I apologize for accusing you of being one of the drones/sock puppets/bots that have swarmed PJM ever since Paul started doing well and Newt started imploding about two weeks ago. I’ve been hanging around BC for a while, so it’s safe to say no, I am not a Ron Paul campaign operative (there were though a few commenters back in August 08′ that had me wondering if they’d been unleashed by Misha the Tie Eater’s PR firms). As my name implies however, I do look at the late George Kennan as a model, considering he spent the rest of his life fighting with those who used his doctrine of Containment against Soviet Communism as an excuse for other agendas…such as the MIC Ike warned about in his farewell speech from the White House. Early in Senor Equis too he did some neocon fellow traveling in D.C., and it is a part of his life he now feels disgusted about, after seeing these people up close, and realizing how deranged they were.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/01/Todd-Purdum-on-National-Security
Thus far, I don’t see the kind of throwaway, bot-like comments on Wretchard’s threads to smear Paul in ‘drive by’ fashion, which have clogged up every single Ron Paul thread. This Ace of Spades post today for example, seems very very shady due to Ace quoting a single source about Paul’s alleged views on WWII and that source having not come forward back in 2008 the first time Paul was running for president (unlike TNR’s James Kirchuk, who’s well aware those newsletters do not match Paul’s writing style but seems to want to make a bigger issue of them than Newt lobbying for F&F). Seems like next thing we’ll hear is Paul shot JFK, he’s old enough to the Second Gunman on the Grassy Knoll after all. As the Samizdat blogger Reynolds linked to said, libertarians are so used to being called racist that the charge no longer phases them.
Like I said, I do not expect Paul to win but he has performed a valuable service in flushing out and/or exposing the desperation of the Big Government/Military Industrial Complex Firsters in ‘conservative’ circles, and to what depths they will stoop to discredit any of their critics within the Republican Party.
Stoch may not like it, but I’ll make it a mantra at BC — there is no stash, not for the Left, and not for endless wars.
Lastly, if believing that there are folks manipulating the banking system towards certain ends…i.e. that the EU was a dry run for world government disqualifies a person from serious politics, well I dare say we should disqualify a lot of people. Barry Goldwater certainly was friendly with the Birchers. So was Ronald Reagan, back in the day.
End of thread for me.
Richard ~~”The only restriction to enrollable “courses” would be that they are evaluable by others in the real world;”
see that I just successfully filtered this down the the most operative problem with the whole scenario.
universities are completely adverse to anything that smacks of the real world. so this is a non starter.
Richard here is a partial list of things you needed to include to even remotely get the attention of the ivory tower set,:
transgender equity studies and multi gender restroom etiquette
white transgressions within global warming acceleration
the destructive impact of borders and border enforcement on the latin reqonquista movement and its right to resurrect mythical azatlan
the impact of unicorns and glitter in progressive policy success
also vital words to incorporate:
innerwellness
self actualization
grants
free
endowment
fisting
now if you had managed to insert any of these valuable words and phrases into your argument in this post I should say you wouldnt be able to beat the academic world off your doorstep with a stick, they would be fighting to implement your wisdom post haste.
Automotive tech is a greatly interesting background. Automotive technology schools are the best choice to get in this business. Cars will always be around thus there tend to be jobs everywhere. I learned about automotive lifts, ppg automotive paint, automotive electrical supplies, and more in school. Now I’m utilizing it every day and I love exactly what I do.
“Stoch may not like it, but I’ll make it a mantra at BC — there is no stash, not for the Left, and not for endless wars.”
Actually, I agree about the stash. As for the endless wars, I doubt that we would agree on exactly what a war is. I would also point out that 90% of the Wars America has been involved in were defensive. Anyone that expects America to NOT defend itself when attacked is as nutty as Ron Paul.
Please note here that the west is under attack by ISLAM. ALL 1. something billion of them. Dividing Muslims by geography is a European thing that is both misleading and dangerous. Iraq, like Afghanistam is NOT a WAR but a campaign in a war.
Most liberals do not know the difference between a skirmish a battle a campaign and a war. So they call it all war. That is both wrong and dangerous.
America’s financial issues have nothing to do with the war against Islam.
Our financial problems are due to the Oligarchy that runs America and fiat money.
We need the voters to get mean long enough to replace Congress completely. That means 3 consecutive elections. 2 have already been run. ’12 will be the third.
Mr. X, (#59) Apology accepted. Still until libertarians can agree what is legal and what isn’t with Drugs, Prostitution, etc, etc. you have nothing but Chaos and the Libertarian Dream is exactly that Self Order Chaos (Jungle Rues or Might Makes Right), There is no society in Chaos, there is no country in chaos, no stability can be achieved in a Libertarian (Chaos) setting because we all can decide what is right and what is wrong and everyone else needs to do their own thing or your impeding on my liberties.
Stoicheion (#58) “What Paul is trying to say is that you cannot legislate morality.” Ok Ron Paul plans to set free all Murders, Pedophiles, Rapist, Thieves, etc… Great Money saving idea!!! Just again proves that Ron Paul wants Chaos, No laws because they infringe on each individuals freedom to do as they please. You Can Not Have A Society/Government/Country Without Laws And Most Every LAW Is A Form Of “Legislated” Morality…
I was going to vote for Ron Paul but after hearing senor equis moonbattery for the past weeks I have been roundly talked out of it. Listening to the Soviet exultations of Paul made me think twice. I have never seen such high handed, deceitful, political stumping on the BC even by a Russian troll. It cheapens the product, I will now return the favor and fight the Paul @$$holes to the end. Good riddance. Paulites are unstable morons.
libertarian. Libertarion. hmmm.
I believe Gary Johnson is the “Libertarion” candidate and Ron Paul is a republican being sold as a “libertarion” candidate, if ya know what I mean.
I’ll vote for Gary any day. I worked for him as a state employee and I repect him as an individual. To the eternal fury of his opposition he actually is a self actualized individual. Succesful businessman. Successful Governor. Successful athlete. He VETO’d almost every bit of legislation sent his way because the state couldn’t/shouldn’t be involved, and may hold some kind of record as the most vetoing governor in history.
He has the executive skills and the real libertarian view that people should make their own choices. This ammounts to Heresy of course in our current power sharing system where the state is the fountain of power.
Look him over.
And by the way, why is everyone looking to the legislative bodies for executive experience?
Are Senators the only ones rich/powerful enough to buy/command the attention? Are they the cool crowd now?
So what do you call a lawyer gone bad? (Senator!)
The first question you need to ask is are you looking for leaders or worker bees? Good companies will need lots of mid-level leaders, but someone needs to follow too. Followers are easy to find, so what do you look for in a leader?
Courage – Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities… because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
Winston Churchill
Learning – Not what one has been taught, but what one has learned. Learning is a self-directed skill that will serve for a lifetime. It often comes as a result of reading and reflection. If you can only act on what you have been taught, you will necessarily devolve into ever tighter and tighter circles. You will never be able to think “outside the box” (i.e. inductive reasoning ), you will only be capable of “inside the box” thinking (i.e. deductive thinking). A leader needs to take others where they have not been before, outside the box. So relying on diplomas (what one has been taught) is an indicator of followers, not leaders. They have their place, but will not lead to greatness.
A classic example of a follower is Barack Obama, the “Leader From Behind”, who wants to weigh all the options other have presented and choose amongst them. It is no wonder he has dissipated all the expectations of greatness his followers had for him, he is a follower too.
I believe in libertarian principles but like any pure ideology I think they are incapable of being incorporated by its adherents as a guiding principle alone instead of a manifestly fanatical dogma that must be realized in extreme. If a libertarian candidate believed merely that we should put the interests of the American people first rather than a wholesale diminution of US military might than they could win elections and effect outcomes.But fanatics are unable to work within existing systems they must demand revolution not evolution and frankly that scares the hell out of Americans, our allies, and even some of our enemies, Iran not withstanding.
Incidentally my father was a friend of former libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne for many years before he made it as a best selling author.
Wikipedia says -
“(Harry) Browne was the presidential nominee of the United States Libertarian Party in 1996 and 2000. He received 485,798 votes or 0.5% of the vote in 1996 and 384,516 votes or 0.4% of the vote in 2000. His campaign qualified for matching funds during each election but didn’t accept them. Browne’s refusal to accept matching funds won him expected praise from libertarians and those who are against the concept of federal matching funds, but also earned him somewhat greater exposure in the “mainstream” media, as very few American presidential candidates who qualified for matching funds refused them.”
The libertarian party may be gaining mainstream acceptance but until they start acting like rational players and work within the consensual interest of the American voter and quit grandstanding on ideological grounds they will only be a ’boutique’ party and a consensus killer within the Republican establishment.
Annoy #68:
I read a comment a few years ago, I believe in National Review, about the Libertarian Party.
A guy said he had actually attended some of the Libertarian Party National Conventions and found two things:
1. At the Conventions real, substansive, nationally important issues are openly discussed in a manner that simply does not occur within the Democrat and Republican Parties.
2. A large percentage, if not most, of the delegates to the Libertarian Party National Convention were insane. There were people saying that it was legal to refuse to pay your income taxes. There were people saying it did not matter if you paid your income taxes or not because the U.S. dollar has no intrinsic value. And so forth.
I say that a “Conservative” must be a Practical Libertarian. You may trend toward that end, be inspired by the philosophy, but realize that practically you can only go so far.
Well pretty much by definition the members of the Libertarian party are unwilling to work within a consensual framework and are more interested in making ideological statements than in influencing policy. That’s why they are members of a third party.
The two major parties both offer consensual frameworks, and it’s been about eight generations since it was possible to change political policy from outside either of them. Now, neither major party offers a perfect framework, and neither party current has a functional consensus at the moment. However…
Ron Paul is attempting to work within the Republican party. He’s running for the GOP nomination, not the Libertarian. Whatever flaws or deficiencies he may have, he is attempting to be practical about things. Gary Johnson won’t win the presidency as the Libertarian candidate. Ron Paul could possibly win at the GOP candidate. Perhaps Johnson has overall better credentials, but he has one huge strike against him – he’s either unable or unwilling to work within an existing framework to advance his ideas. Paul, for better or worse, is.
That is a significiant difference, because any President who’s going to fix things and get us off the train of ruin we’re on now is going to have to work within the existing US political structure to do that. He’s going to have to deal with Congressional corruption, public sector unions, ecofreaks, Federal Judges, etc. Anyone who’s looking for a President who will refuse to work within that structure isn’t looking for an election victory, they’re looking for a full-blown literal revolution. There are people who make pursuasive cases that that’s actually what we need. Perhaps they are right. But it’s a different question than who should win the election.
“Working within that structure” doesn’t have to mean accepting the status quo though. A forcefull, no-BS President could make massive changes simply by sticking to his guns and attacking the status quo from within the system. Veto idiotic budgets that don’t address the deficit. Send the AG after corrupt politicians (really, shouldn’t someone finally clean up Chicago politics?). Work out a strategy with the Senate to reform the Federal judiciary (the Senate has the power to impeach judges – but almost never uses it). Dismantle obnoxious agencies from within by, if nothing else, instructing the (newly appointed) heads of those agencies to shut them down. In short, be a leader of a movement big enough to corral the federal government. It’s hard, you have to figure out what motivates enough followers. Don’t know if Paul has what it takes, but he appears to be trying, which is Step 1, FWIW.
Of course, Ron Paul has attracted a lot of less-practical folks into the GOP primaries, the take-my-ball-and-go-home types. Yes, they can be annoying.
Ron Paul isn’t my first choice in the GOP field, but if he wins the nomination I’ll be voting for him in November.
The military requires a HS Diploma but does not prefer a GED. The quality of high schools varies so much that it iis only a certificate of Social Adaptability. If one can survive four years of high school routine one will probably finish their enlistment. They use aptitude tests to determine aptitude.
I think a residential collage degree as a general requirement has much the same value.
In a large company a traditional degree can be screen for employees who are likely to fit in, less so for a small company. A tradiotional aor non traditional diploma can be a screen for basic knowledge.
But neither will guarntee suitability for a specific position.
Hank’s Eclectic Meanderings