igk

> cough hello rust evangelism strike force cough

we also never sleep ;-)

thanks for the explanation...it will be interesting how netflix will handle it. The "reasonable thing" to do would be to either a) plonk all of those "superfluous" engineers into creative fun mode ala xerox park or b) set them onto formally verifying the stack and then sack them slowly/stop hiring, at least as far as can guess from the outside of the entertainment industry? Though handling 3D/VR+developing teldedildonics (does netflix do adult content?) might give the techies continued legitimacy

>..., rust never sleeps,...

I am not familiar with this phrase, what does it refer to? Or are you referring to my current favorite programming language and the need for it to go mainstream? ;-)

You can also have another perspective on this: with the lack of investments in moonshots and every less actual work to do, we are now entering the "entertainment industry" phase of our society.

You could argue that Netflix creates the on-demand-video equivalent of long form writing, youtube spans from that to shlock novels and comic books...so with vine gone (it's still gone right?), maybe snapchat or instagram will fill the video equivalent of tabloids spanning to facebook posts.

Intersting. Do you know what is required to take on apprentices? If I moved to switzerland and started a company there, could I just start training people?

The 25 % is the minimum required per semester, but you have double as long to finish. I.e., if during one semester you need to wind it down from the normal 50% due to life, it's still ok, and you can make it up next semester

How do you measure those results? Especially in fuzzy fields where they very much influenced by "political affection"

Seconding the other guy, what are you talking about? The only part I'd agree with is the "laxness" that is seeping in, but that is more because we are following our US brethren in dumbing things down so "no child will be left behind", while still sticking to a 9-13 year schedule in education - even though knowledge and complexity has increased A LOT since those times were set. Heck, we even tried shortening it to 12 years for gymnasium because the industry chamber wanted "more workers" and then noticed the kids are completely overloaded

>Yes its flawed but not to the extreme like you suggest. One of the biggest problems we have, and this I think is common to almost all countries, is that there is very little emphasis on applied knowledge and much more on theoretical knowledge. The duale Studium is a better way to attack the problem than anything else currently out there IMHO.

As I've argued in a differnet post, the problem isn't too little theoretical knowledge, it's that uni is just seen as "the highest" and people who just want practical knowledge go to a place which is supposed to give you deep insight into the theories and research in your field because it gives the status qualification.

>Another problem we have is that motivations are flawed for our Professors. Many Professors want to conduct research and don't care about teaching the material, on the other hand you have some Professors that don't want to research and would just enjoy teaching the material, yet everyone is incentivized to conduct research because its the only way to progress. I think this is fundamentally wrong. Its bad for the students and bad for the professors. If a professor just wants to teach he/she should be allowed to focus on that area and be judged by how well his students can actually apply the learning they acquired in the course. If a professor wants to research he should be judged by his research.

This follows from my point above. We mix "I just want a job students" with "give me moar theory" students and the profs who (anecdotally) love dealing with the second type (explaining things to interested newbs is stimulating for insight) have to dumb down things enough so the job hunters can get their employer mandated checkmark

>There are so many other problem areas as well, for instance, I think we should allow much more mobility between disciplines than is currently the case. I've studied computer science and although I'm quite familiar with computational finance I would probably not be allowed to get a Phd in Finance since I've never taken business/economics courses. Although if you tested me on any number of financial subjects I wouldn't have a problem describing how to model/analyze/forecast the data. So there are a lot of arbitrary hoops that keep people down and force you to not to change you field of study.

That I actually have to disagree with...I know loads of CS and EE majors in economics, the reverse less but also. Especially at the PhD level, as long as you did something relevant, you can get in.

> Its also very difficult for older people mid career to get a degree and increase their personal capital that way. These again are just some problems that we need to address but "flawed in the extreme" - I tend to disagree on that one.

This is indeed a problem, but for example my alma mater has started offering part time degrees, with 25% of the workload required per semester and twice the allowed maxmimum study time. So there is change

Fachhochschule gets a bad rep from snobs, but having worked with graduates, they often beat university grads in application fields. It's just a different focus

Yes and no. Best example I know:you can teach engineering as a very applied trade (basically, here's how to select a technique known to work and here is how to tune it), which is how they tend to do it at the Fachhochschulen, or you can teach it as "here's how previously we stole all the cool ideas from physics and maths and what new techniques we built, you'll hopefully be able to find out how to build on it", which is more common on universities.

Having worked with both, the difference is noticeable. The FH guys are actually usually much better engineers in "standard" problems, cleaner code etc, but if you have to drop down abstraction levels and make your own techniques, the university guys tend to fare better(already filtering out incompetent people). It's a different education, with different goals. One is more general and aims to deepen your general understanding, Hoping you'll be able to derive the techniques. The other focuses more on practical application that will get you a job now and hope you'll learn the deep understanding with time. But there is not as much connection between what is taught as one might think. Likewise, ask any professional trader what they think of academic finance.

My tl,dr is that I think university or something should have the explicit goal of teaching "useless" knowledge with the aim of giving deep understanding. Then everyone who just wants a job can avoid that, and we don't have to water down the curriculum

I 'm not sure if they are talking about "dualstudium", but I think this is a thing which needs to be advanced. There should be a separation between "skill education"(learning things for a job) and "human education" (learning things to become a better human/just for understanding). The latter we already enforce with 9 year Schulpflicht (which one could debate about prolonging) and then leave to the individual.

University education should not be or promise jobs, it should be about understanding certain fields on the deep level and being confronted with the bleeding edge of knowledge. Right now we are conflating the two, meaning we have a large number of students wasting their time in classrooms when for their goal they should either be getting deeper, tougher confrontation with the subject (if they want to do research/understand deeply) or practical "on the job" education (if they want to get a job). BWL is the worst culprit of this as far as my friends who studied it describe it.

I'm talking about the possibility of going to a party, somebody taking a picture (as is their right) and then uploading it and tagging me. That I would like to have the filter for. If they really care that much about connecting me to the party, sure, but as a "casual privacy protection" it's about the same level as keeping your facebook wall private