[analog31]

In my view, school does not admit to a singular purpose, even if a number of people seem to achieve similar results from it. Instead, different students can pursue different strategies through school, and get different things out of it. Even if signaling is a benefit of school, it doesn't need to be the only benefit.

School is a complex system. Take it apart. Figure out how it works. Adapt the pieces to make it do something useful for you. In short, hack school. It shocks me that a site devoted to "Hacker" news hasn't guessed that school is begging to be hacked, and makes me wonder how many true hackers there actually are.

Of course one possible hack is to follow a path of least resistance and emerge after 4 years with nothing but "signaling." But it's not the only hack. Signaling in the absence of real education could be viewed as a pitfall of school, not its purpose. A dark pattern, if you will.

In another age, this message would have been expressed by elders to their children in some sort of patronizing way, such as: "What you get out of college depends on what you put into it." I've certainly told this to my kids, along with the somewhat more detailed explanation about hacking.

The coding interview is a clue. At its core is a question: "How did you hack school to your advantage?"

Can school be hack-proofed? Experience with complex systems suggests this might not be a good idea, as it can kill the good hacks along with the bad, or make even worse hacks emerge.

[alexandercrohde]

Well part of why I upvoted this is because it would have been useful information to me 15 years ago.

Certainly school can be used for any purpose (perhaps that's a truism). But the author's point also includes the fact that the market (and society) is largely indifferent to what you learn at school.

In order to "Hack" school we need to be real with ourselves about what the world after school looks like.

- I've never been asked GPA once (one data point)

- Most technical questions I get asked are basic and solvable with a hash map

- I've never been asked to write a proof as part of an interview

- My degrees (business/psychology) have never been useful in my career.

- Many many people have asked my wear I went to college, and I can tell they care about the name of the school first and foremost.

- Regardless of intellect, positions at the level director and above seem to be assigned very unpredictably (luck/politics/privilege?)

[mcguire]

* I've rarely been asked about my GPA either, which is good because I sucked. On the other hand, A good GPA would have made some things I wanted to do easier.

* Most technical questions are basic because most "technical" jobs are very basic. However, there are people out there building operating systems kernels, secured software, and life-critical systems; I'm reasonably assured that you would have to demonstrate more than competence with a hash map.

* I too have never been asked to write a proof. But, thanks to my education, the techniques needed to write a proof are rather ingrained with how I understand writing code.

* I, too, ask people where they went to college, because if they went to the U. of Washington or Carnegie Mellon or someplace like that, I can't assume they'll know Kantian ethics but I can assume they'll have learned something; I can't make that assumption if they went to the U. of Phoenix, ITT Tech, or EPRI.

* Positions at the level of director do seem to be assigned by luck/politics/privilege. Positions at the level of internal medicine specialist, structural engineer, and the like tend not to be.